One of the feature stories I'm working on this week is the Ed Rosenthal re-trial on federal marijuana production and distribution charges, which ended yesterday with a split verdict. The trial was a complete waste of time since even if Rosenthal was found guilty, he could not be sentenced to anything more than the one day he had already served, but federal prosecutors were vindictively determined to get their man. Rosenthal's supporters were equally determined not to help the government, and that's where the new tactic emerged: A dozen people in the medical marijuana movement who had been subpoenaed to testify against Rosenthal simply refused. A civil contempt citation is the usual response to such refusals, but as the judge in the case noted, the contempt citation is designed to impel people to testify, not to punish the. When the judge asked if throwing them in jail for the weekend would change their minds, they all said no. Since they convinced the judge they were rock solid in their positions, he decided not to issue the citations and instead dismissed them. He also thanked them for the dignity they displayed in articulating their positions. We should all thank them for taking this courageous stand. Who knows? Maybe we can start a movement. Look for a feature story on the trial and the witness rebellion tomorrow.

For the last time, it doesn’t mean that. Unlike other drugs, marijuana remains detectable in urine for weeks after use. This well-known fact continues to elude reporters, resulting in alarming yet totally meaningless headlines such as this:

Sheriff: Driver in ATV fatality used marijuana

CARROLLTON – Carroll County Sheriff Dale Williams revealed Monday that Dennis Garrison, 37, of Alliance tested positive for marijuana on the day his 6-year-old nephew was killed while riding an ATV with his uncle. [Times-Reporter]

Again and again, we're told about people testing positive for marijuana after accidents with no evidence whatsoever that anyone was high at the time of the accident. In this case, there's even evidence to the contrary:

The deputy at the accident scene reported that Dennis showed no obvious signs of being under the influence.

Of course, this quite instructive fact is buried near the bottom of the story, while the completely meaningless urine test results are reported in the headline. It is simply bad reporting to link marijuana use to a horrible tragedy without noting that such use could likely have taken place weeks before the accident even occurred.

After all, you would never see this:

Sheriff: Driver in ATV fatality drank alcohol days before accident

CARROLLTON – Carroll County Sheriff Dale Williams revealed Monday that Dennis Garrison, 37, of Alliance drank beer 5 days before his 6-year-old nephew was killed while riding an ATV with him.

The fact here is that a young child was killed. To falsely attribute his death to irrelevant factors is not only shameful and dishonest, but also interferes with the important process of learning from the tragedy.

Many of the most passionate appeals against marijuana use emerge from scenarios such as this in which the drug's role is, in fact, dubious or non-existent. Imagine the good that could be accomplished if well-meaning people stopped grasping at straws and finally put marijuana in perspective.

(graph from WOLA/AIN memo, link below) This graph shows what about $10 billion in US taxpayer dollars has accomplished. Note that while coca production has shifted within the region, the 1992 levels and the 2005 levels are essentially identical. Why is our coca eradication policy not subjected to cost-benefit analysis? Is there anyone who will argue that it is working? If so, I'd like to hear it. To be fair, that $10 billion has accomplished some things. It has engendered massive social conflict in all three countries, it has led to tens of thousands of peasant farmers being arrested as drug traffickers, it has led to thousands of deaths (especially in Colombia, where the eradication policy is part of the US's broader military intervention in that country's festering civil war). Your tax dollars at work. $10 billion is a lot of money. Heck, we could finance the Iraq war for a few weeks with it! Or we could give $100,000 college scholarships to 10,000 students. Or build $100,000 homes for 10,000 families. Or numerous other programs that, unlike the coca eradication program, might actually accomplish something. By the way, I came across the graph above in a memo from the Andean Information Network and the Washington Office on Latin America. That memo was occasioned by the US government's release of coca cultivation estimates for Bolivia. The US government has for months been complaining that Bolivian President Evo Morales' pro-coca policies were going to lead to a boom in production there. Surprise! It didn't. Read the memo for some juicy analysis.

I am sad to report the passing of Dr. Tod Mikuriya, a leading and long-time advocate for medical marijuana, scientific and historical marijuana researcher, physician and drug policy reformer. Tod was a member of DRCNet's advisory board and a long-time friend. Phil has written a memorial to Tod for this week's Chronicle, and I am also posting it here. Click the "read full post" link below, if you don't already see it, or read it online here. Tod Mikuriya addressing a NORML conference Dr. Tod Hiro Mikuriya, MD, a psychiatrist, prominent researcher, and medical marijuana advocate, died Sunday night at his Berkeley, California, home. He was 73 years of age. Mikuriya, who was a member of DRCNet's Board of Advisors, earned a medical degree at Temple University, then completed a psychiatric residency at Southern Pacific General Hospital in San Francisco before joining the US Army Medical Corps. After military service and serving at state hospitals in California and Oregon, he directed marijuana research at the National Institutes of Mental Health in 1967, but quickly quit, citing political interference with research results. He turned to a private practice in psychiatry, but his clinical interest in marijuana never waned. In 1973, he published the pioneering "Medical Marijuana Papers," an anthology of journal articles on cannabis therapeutics, and he later founded the Society of Cannabis Clinicians. Mikuriya was deeply involved in the campaign for Proposition 215, the groundbreaking 1996 initiative that made California the first state to legalize the medicinal use of marijuana. After Prop 215 passed, Mikuriya served as Medical Coordinator of the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, the Hayward Hempery, and the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers' Club -- organizations established to provide access to medical marijuana for patients. In 2000, Mikuriya founded the California Cannabis Research Medical Group, a nonprofit organization "dedicated to conducting quality medical marijuana research, to ensuring the safety and confidentiality of all research subjects, and to maintaining the highest quality of standards and risk management." In 2003, Mikuriya was placed on probation by the Medical Board of California after an investigation into allegations of unprofessional conduct in 16 cases since 1998. Mikuriya and his supporters said he was being targeted for his medical marijuana advocacy. He appealed the board ruling, and continued to practice up until his death. Dr. Mikuriya remained an ardent and animated advocate of medical marijuana, and more broadly, social justice, up until the end. His vision, principles, and perseverance are to be emulated. They will certainly be missed. Mikuriya contributed a collection of papers that are available in DRCNet's Drug Library, Schaffer Library section, online here.

I never thought this day would come. But when greed and idiocy converge, the effects can be catastrophic.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Hershey Co. has sued a Lafayette man who admitted to making marijuana-laced candy and soft drinks, claiming his products violated the company's trademarks.

Kenneth Affolter, 40, was sentenced in March to more than five years in prison for manufacturing forbidden treats with names like Stoney Rancher, Rasta Reese's and Keef Kat. [MSNBC]

I'm not an expert in trademark law, but those don’t sound like Hershey products to me.

Hershey's suit, filed earlier this month in U.S. District Court in San Jose, accuses Affolter of trademark infringement, trademark dilution and unfair competition.

Unfair competition!? To whatever pathetic extent this man actually competed with Hershey, he's now been taken out of commission by the Drug Enforcement Administration. If there's anything unfair going on here, it's the incarceration of a man who provided marijuana edibles to sick people.

So I guess Hershey Co. has nothing better to do than piss off stoners around the world, which is foolish for reasons so obvious they need not be stated. And all they're asking for is $100,000 from a man who is now either destitute due to legal fees and forfeiture, or has buried his assets so deep that neither DEA nor Hershey's will ever see a dollar.

Suddenly those irresistible Hershey's Cookies & Cream™ bars don't sound so good. If Nestle™ has a decent white chocolate product, I can cost Hershey $50 a year on my own. Who's with me?

You wouldn’t think people who are prominent members of the psychedelic community would need a reminder about elementary decency, but, sadly, that appears to be the case. Psychedelic drugs, like mushrooms, peyote, and LSD, are not candy. They can be deeply disorienting and disturbing, even for veteran psychonauts, and for people with no experience with or knowledge of them, they can be absolutely terrifying. It would seem to be a fundamental of psychedelic ethics that you do not inflict the experience on people against their will or without their knowledge. To do so is not only disrespectful of the consciousness of the victim of such a stunt, it is also disrespectful of the psychedelic substance that inner consciousness explorers claim to hold in such reverence. But some people just don't get it. Last night, I received a call from an old friend who reported being dosed by someone who was part of the entourage of an elite clique who were putting on an event in a large Eastern city. Now, my friend was fortunate enough to have some experience with psychedelics, so the experience was not absolutely terrifying. But it was most unpleasant. And that's should be no surprise. For at least 40 years, people have been talking about the importance of "set and setting" in determining how a person will respond to psychedelics. Set refers to the person's mental state—what the person knows and expects of psychedelics, whether that person has underlying psychiatric problems, whether that person is prepared for the experience. Setting refers to the physical/notional location of the experience—is it a soothing place, does it take place within some ritual or another, is it loud and noisy and chaotic?—that, along with set, has an impact on the psychedelic experience. Dosing someone with psychedelics without his or her knowledge wreaks havoc with set. People need to prepare themselves for taking drugs like these; to have them inflicted on you even if you like them is unethical. Being dosed also prevents the victim from having any say in setting—here you are, your mind is melting, and that's that. Dosing people is thus double-plus ungood. No names are being named at this point. There are efforts afoot to see if the perpetrators will make proper amends. The most positive outcome is that the people involved will be educated about things they should already know and understand intuitively. For the rest of us who are inclined to dabble with such substances, let's try extra hard to be respectful of each other and these very special substances.

Allan Clear continues his reporting from the International Harm Reduction Association conference in Warsaw, this time covering days two and three. Click the "read full post" link below or here to read the whole thing. Day 2 On the morning plenary, Fabio Mesquita provided two case studies of the national responses to HIV among injectors in Brazil and Indonesia. Fabio was instrumental in altering the landscape for drug injectors in Sao Paolo and Brazil as whole. He now works in Indonesia. A couple of notable points were that 28% of the population of Brazil have taken an HIV test and the phenomenal scale up of syringe exchange in Indonesia, from 17 to 129 over two years. The INPUD drug user session was extremely well attended. Bijay Pandey talked about his organizing in Nepal. As NDRI's Sam Friedman pointed out it's hard enough to organize around user's lives in general. To do so during a civil war is particularly impressive. Like all specific user organizing the future of the work is in jeopardy but the effort has been put in. Perhaps there's no more supportive drug researcher than Sam Friedman. A tireless advocate for drug users, Sam provided a Marxist Leninist dialectical critique of global socio-economic substructural micro organized community ventures that help diffuse the totalitarian oppression we all live under in this post soviet imperialistic world. User dominated of course. Alexander Rumyanzev talked about the way drugs are used to affect social movements and oppress drug users. There has been a long line of very articulate drug user activists in the history of harm reduction - John Mordaunt, Matt Southwell, Annie Madden, Jude Byrne, Louis Jones, Bill Nelles, for example – and one of the most articulate drug user activists for the last decade has been the USA's Paul Cherashore so it was good to see him back on form. He urged drug users to strike back at the system. He wasn't clear on a strategy for doing so but made valid comparisons between gay rights and drug user rights using the San Francisco gay community's response to the murder of Harvey Milk and later talked about the Stonewall riots as flashpoints that eventually changed policy and society as a whole. more... I wandered from a fairly boring HCV session to a next-door session on law enforcement that turned out to be very good for me. I caught Prevention Point Philadelphia's Corey Davis's presentation. He talked about the importance of harm reduction training for the police. "Well duh" thinks I until Corey pointed out that it's the minority of programs in the US that actually meet with the police. I'm well aware of programs (in Los Angeles and New York for example) that do meet with the police over law enforcement issues because they're squeaky wheels. We all met with high up police officers in NYC a couple of years ago and have stayed on top of the NY State Department of Health and are now working with the NY City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to follow up. Was I being naïve to think that everyone else in the country was also meeting with the police? According to Corey yes, I've missed the boat completely. What the hell are we thinking? Apart from syringe exchange folks, the other professionals drug users interact with are the police. If we want to consolidate our programs, relationships with our local precincts no matter how antagonistic are vital. Another flashbulb that went off is that for programs in New York City, law enforcement training is now conducted by the State Health Department. Programs also need to maintain on-going relationships with local police. We can't cede this role to health departments. When there is a community problem involving drugs, the local needle exchange has to be a recognizable entity to resolve problems. Just for example when I worked at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center we brokered meetings between the police and sex workers to help catch a violent john. Hopefully Corey is wrong in his information but he convinced me he's not. So get on it folks. A fairly intriguing session on risk environments attracted me next. There was a nice sociological overview of drug dealing situations from Australia and a critique of the word 'chaotic' when attached the word 'drug use'. Yes ho hum very interesting. Ok let's be thoughtful about the narratives we buy into. If only we all could spend our time googling the word 'chaotic'. There was also a presentation on the safe injection site in Vancouver. However I must been in a blackout because I can't remember one thing about it. Barbara Tempalski from NDRI looked at factors influencing the development of syringe exchange in the United States. The primary influencing factors were the presence of a university and activism from the gay community. Another researcher rather unsubtly promoting the homosexual agenda. Take home message is if we want to get more programs throughout the States, recruit, recruit, recruit. Had a delicious plate of deep fried cheese in breadcrumbs over wonderbread on jam for dinner. Had a candy made from cocaine for dessert. It was supposed to be the equivalent of about 3 cups of coffee. Must admit that I noticed no psychoactive effect although I haven't been to sleep since and I seem to be talking really intelligently about the CIA. Hang on, someone's knocking on my door again. Let me hide…… Paul Cherashore Day 3 The hump is on and we're sliding towards the finish of the conference….. Today there was an ibogaine session that was unconnected to the main conference for which I had agreed to provide opening remarks. My interest in ibogaine goes back about 17 years to the Lower East Side in New York and really doesn't seem to move out of the neighborhood. There was a guy called Fred Gotbetter who participated in the Lower East Side Needle Exchange Program. He was a fixture - smart, good company and often annoying as he made demands that were either not realistic, totally doable but I didn't want to support or things we should be doing but had refused to do. He was frequently right and frequently wrong. However he did talk about ibogaine and how great it worked for eliminating withdrawal from drugs and he touted it as a cure. However he had taken it 6 times and was still a mess. However there was usually something to what Fred said. Others thought so too and so ICARE, the Lower East Side user group, invited Howard Lotsof to attend one of its meetings and let more people know about ibogaine. Howard is generally credited with the African alkaloid's discovery as an addiction interrupter and for bringing it back to the States. Howard explained that treatments were available but one had to travel to Holland and a treatment cost $20,000. Thus endeth that. A few years later, Dana Beal (see travel section of this blog) randomly added me to cc list on a ranting e-mail. Another cc was a guy called Patrick Kroupa who was another LESNEP participant and knew me back in the day. He lives in Miami and had used ibogaine and now worked on off shore trials of the drug. We got together and he explained his journey. Not long after, Dana showed up in HRC's office with Dimitri Mugianis in tow. Again I hadn't seen Dimitri for many years but if you check out HRC's heroin brochure, he's the guy chasing the dragon and I was the photographer. Again he'd used ibogaine and it had worked for him too. What intrigues me now is that underground ibogaine treatments are taking place in the USA now. Folks realized that to bring attention to the efficacy of ibogaine it needed a core of successful patients who had been treated locally. Which brings us pretty much up to date. I was the opening speaker and after my remarks I headed back to the main conference. Unfortunately the plenary presentation I was looking forward to "The History of Collaboration between Drug Users, PLWHAs, gay men and women around HIV/AIDS" by Gregg Gonsalves had already occurred. Gregg's a longtime AIDS activist who moved to South Africa and is now causing waves down there. He always has something sensible to say and as we talked in the corridor after his presentation it seems he'd laid into the conference organizers for failing to meet the needs of drug users. Always causing trouble is Gregg. The afternoon drug user involvement panel was disappointing. But HRC's Hilary McQuie proved herself to be an excellent host during a Living Room session as she talked about the federal ban on the funding of needle exchange. However there was only one thing on my mind at that moment. Luciano Colonna and myself were excited about visiting the urinetherapy center next door to the hotel. The "Source of Life" urinetherapy center is one of a set of centers located in this part of Warsaw known for its waters. Visitors are shown to a pretty solarium and a menu of "teas" is brought to each table. Admittedly we were not very brave and passed over the bull juice and the 10 year old fermented banker water and ultimately plumped to self-serve and after a visit to the bathroom to fill the teapot we returned to the solarium. Our teapots were infused with fine herbs and returned to us. Surprisingly invigorating and refreshing we prepared for the evening's party with a massage of a special butter made from the urine of former KGB officers. An excellent way to round off the afternoon. One thing the conference has always delivered on is an end of conference party. This year the event was held at an old factory somewhere on the edge of town. The main attraction was the Harm Reduction Allstars a band made up of er self-styled harm reduction all stars. And if one enjoys sixties soul and 12 bar blues, they were a lot of fun. Luciano Colonna Pablo Cymerman & Allan Clear at the party The Harm Reduction Allstars -- Patric O'Hare, Franz Trautmann & Jimmy Dorabchee Sangeeta Sran & Palani Nararayan at the party

According to the New Jersey Law Journal, via Law.com, the NJ Supreme Court has shifted away from a 20-year-old policy of suspending lawyers convicted of cocaine possession, instead merely censuring a Wayne-based workers compensation and personal injury attorney for it:

The court, in an order made public on Tuesday, took one step further a recommendation for lenience made by the Disciplinary Review Board, which suggested a "suspended" three-month suspension for the lawyer, Wayne, N.J., solo Anthony Filomeno, in view of his demonstrated remorse, rehabilitation and early release from a year-long pretrial intervention program.

Now maybe they'll go a little softer on the rest of the drug-using public...

Read about it courtesy Kerry Howley, at Reason. We reported on a previous flare-up back in '04.

The only thing more misguided and pointless than obsessing over pot potency is banning bongs:

As reports have surfaced that potent marijuana could be introduced into Australia, state lawmakers have talked about banning drug paraphernalia.

At a ministerial council on drugs strategy meeting in Adelaide, officials discussed the merits of banning instruments such as bongs and pipes that are used to smoke illegal cannabis. [AHN]

A report in The Herald-Sun prompted helpful comments from readers:

"The way the government is going, there wont be any water for bongs."

"I can't stand the smell of the stuff, leave alone stuffing it in a pipe and trying to smoke it. Rather have a good Aussie Beer instead of a dozzy intoduced Weed. Yuk Duck as they say."

I don’t speak Australian, but I think what they're saying is that trying to prevent marijuana use by banning bongs is like trying to prevent drinking by banning pint glasses.

There is no question that methamphetamine is a potentially dangerous drug. Communities that take steps to prevent people from starting to use it in the first place are to be lauded. But if such efforts are to be credible with their target audiences, they need to include accurate information, not scary, demonizing distortions. Unfortunately, Blaine County, Idaho, is not doing that. In a new brochure from the Blaine County Sheriff's Office and the Community Drug Coalition written by a sheriff's office employee, comes the following amazing claim:

"One of the biggest dangers of meth is how quickly people can become addicted to it," the brochure says. "The National Methamphetamine Awareness Campaign says that 99 percent of people are hooked on meth after using it the first time."

Oh, come on. Yes, people can become dependent on meth. Yes, it is a drug whose biopharmacological effects make people want to binge on it. But no, 99% of people who try meth once are not hooked on it. And spewing such garbage—at taxpayer expense, no less!—is counterproductive at best. Here's what the federal government's meth resources web page has to say about methamphetamine addiction: "Long-term methamphetamine abuse results in many damaging effects, including addiction." Note that the site says long-term use, not one-time use. Neither do other federal government statistics back up the 99% claim. The 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the most recent available, notes that 10.4 million people over the age of 12 reported using meth at least once in their lives, but only 512,000 reported current (last month) use. Even if we assume that everyone who reported using within the last month is an addict (and that's not a very reasonable assumption), we find that only about 5% of people who ever used meth are currently addicted. It is possible, I suppose, that the remaining 93% of all meth users ever got strung out on their first line, but have since managed to beat the addiction. If that's the case, which I doubt, they didn't get the monkey off their backs through drug treatment. In 1992, 21,000 were admitted for meth treatment; by 2004, that number was up to 150,000. But the number of people reporting using meth that year was 1.3 million. Of past year meth users, a little more than 10% got treatment in 2004, whether they sought it themselves or were forced into it. If you want to discourage people from using meth, you need to be believable. Unfortunately for Blaine County, Idaho, it has produced an anti-meth brochure that is more laughable than believable. Next they'll be telling me meth will make hair grow on the palms of my hands.

This issue has dragged on for too long -- I've been working on it since 1994, and that wasn't the beginning of it. Hopefully this new report from the US Sentencing Commission will help bring about some change, even if still woefully insufficient. Commentary I have seen online at the time of this writing:

Prof. Doug Berman on the Sentencing Law and Policy blog Alex Coolman on Drug Law Blog Jeralyn Merritt on TalkLeft Families Against Mandatory Minimums press release

Also our feature story on USSC's recommendations to Congress on the issue, effective unless Congress votes to block them, Drug War Chronicle issue before last. Talk amongst yourselves... :)