Personal Marijuana Use

These comments from Sarah Palin last week are continuing to generate discussion:

"If we're talking about pot, I'm not for the legalization of pot, because I think that would just encourage our young people to think that it was OK to go ahead and use it and I'm not an advocate for that.

However, I think we need to prioritize our law enforcement efforts. And if somebody is going to smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody else any harm, then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in and clean up some of the other problems we have in society that are appropriate for law enforcement to do and not concentrate on such a, relatively speaking, minimal problem that we have in the country."

Mike Huckabee responded with a bizarre joke about Palin doing cocaine on TV, and Ryan McNeely has a good piece addressing the absurdity of defending marijuana laws while simultaneously asking that they not be enforced. Unfortunately, The Economist departed from its typically superb drug policy coverage with a strange defense of Palin's remarks:

Basically, while Sarah Palin's position on this issue, as on many others, is semi-deliberately incoherent, it is in this case a semi-deliberate incoherence that has proven to be effective policy in many countries, and I'm not even sure it's the wrong stance on the issue.

The full argument is too rambling to quote (see for yourself), but the author's point is that marijuana isn't really even legal in the Netherlands, so maybe there's no need to legalize here either. It might make sense if we didn't have a massive blood-thirsty drug war army literally occupying our cities. Prohibition is a for-profit industry in America. It sustains itself through a vast campaign of propaganda and intimidation, and I doubt the solution is as simple as asking these guys to please calm down.

The warriors who invade private homes in bulletproof bodysuits and murder small dogs for having the audacity to bark at them are not responsive to pleas for a more measured enforcement model. That the law authorizes their actions is the go-to excuse when their machine guns go off prematurely, and until that changes, neither will anything else.
 
Nevertheless, the fact that Palin was able to create such a flurry of dialogue with a few casual comments is testament to her potency as an advocate for whatever half-measures she's willing to stand for. And the fact that FOX News is now employing people who will keep posing these questions to prominent political figures is pretty cool, too.

Via DrugWarRant, here's another concerned citizen who seems to think that marijuana was invented recently:

Al Martinez: Do we need one more drug to shield us from reality?

I predict that by the end of the year the sale of marijuana will become so common in L.A. that Mom will be able to say, "Timmy, run down to Vons and get me a quart of milk, a loaf of sourdough bread, a pound of tomatoes and two ounces of pot."

First of all, there has never been a point during the life of Al Martinez when there wasn't a phenomenal amount of marijuana available for purchase in Los Angeles. Also, no one is even advocating for marijuana to be sold in grocery stores, and that will never ever happen, not even if George Soros were put in charge of U.S. drug policy. No reform to marijuana policy can occur without significant public support, so please just spare yourself the anxiety of speculating about bizarre policy changes that aren't being considered by anyone anywhere.

This "do we need one more drug?" nonsense is embarrassingly stupid, yet manages somehow to gain popularity with the anti-pot crowd, due perhaps to the profound absence of more intelligent arguments such people might make.

Opponents of legalization routinely regurgitate an endless array of flawed logic, mindless speculation, and apocalyptic prophecy anytime they're confronted with the case for marijuana reform. But regardless of whatever head-spinning mouthful they deliver, it invariably rests upon the same grand assumption: that legal marijuana means many more people smoking much more pot.
 
Fortunately, we've made enough progress already to take that theory for a test-drive, and the results are delightfully underwhelming:

Marijuana use is not on the rise.

At least, that's the gist of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health done every year by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In 2008 — the most recent data available — 6.1 percent of Americans 12 and older admitted using marijuana in the previous month.
…
And yet, during those same years, marijuana has been edging toward legitimacy. States with medical marijuana laws have made it possible for thousands of people to buy pot over the counter, in actual stores. Some police departments have started de-emphasizing marijuana arrests. [NPR]

Imagine that. After decades of debate, the first stages of reform have taken hold and all the trains are still arriving on time. More than a decade after the first legal marijuana sales began taking place on American soil, the consequences we were told to expect can be found nowhere other than the imagination of our dwindling opposition.

If rates of marijuana use aren't rocked by reform, then everything bad that's ever been said about marijuana is perfectly irrelevant to the legalization debate. The morons who think we're trying to "add a new drug into the mix" are shown to be badly confused, and we can move fearlessly towards dismantling the vast spectrum of nightmarish prohibition problems that we've brought on ourselves for no reason whatsoever.

If our opponents have any integrity, if they truly want safer communities and just laws, then they'll someday be very pleased to learn that we've been right all along.

The closer we get to legalization, the more people are talking about it, and the more people are talking about it, the greater the likelihood of hearing bizarre and incoherent viewpoints:

Those in favor also contend that if you remove the black market by making pot consumption legal — much of the marijuana-related crime would automatically go down.

That is where I have to respectfully disagree.

Money is legal, but criminals still rob banks to get it.

The more marijuana there is out there being grown, the more of it there will be to be stolen.

Criminals gravitate to wherever there is anything of value they can steal. [Oakland Tribune]

Excuse me, but what the hell does that have to do with whether or not marijuana should be legal? Yeah, we're all familiar with the fact that people prefer to steal stuff that's worth money. What on earth is your point?

I think the author might actually be arguing that prohibition somehow devalues the marijuana supply, which would have to be the stupidest understanding of drug laws I've ever encountered. So let me respond in very simple terms: marijuana will not be worth as much money when it is legal. Marijuana sales will take place in secure facilities, and thugs will be put out of business, so you'll be less likely to see stories like this in the news:

Police said Arrington was selling marijuana to one of the victims in the back seat of a white Chevrolet Yukon when the two began arguing about the quality of the marijuana. Arrington allegedly pulled out a gun, shot the man with whom he was arguing, then shot two of the man's acquaintances, who were in the front seat. [Washington Post]

That shooting took place a week ago and only a mile from my home, so I take this very seriously. Marijuana laws are a matter of life and death, and anyone who walks around spouting off opinions without thinking is making the problem worse. If we don't want people getting shot over pot deals in the back of SUVs, then we need to put it somewhere safe. We put money in banks, and sometimes they get robbed, but no one ever argues that banks are a dangerous way to store and distribute money.

We don't need to prove that legalization is 100% perfect and invincible in every conceivable way in order to justify our position. We can easily show that it's the safest and best available option. If that's not enough for you, then you're either an obstructionist, an idiot, or both.

Well, you know what to expect from Ron Paul, but Sarah Palin's comments might surprise you (starts at 6:16):


Though unwilling to support legalization, Palin clearly has some sympathy for marijuana users on privacy grounds and sort of gets the fact that marijuana enforcement is a stupid distraction from important police work. But you can't have it both ways. As long as police and prosecutors hold the power to pursue and punish people for pot, they'll continue to do so, and they'll say they were just doing their job when some poor soul gets their dog shot over a dimebag. There exists a rather fundamental incompatibility between prohibition and politeness.

Still, Palin's comments are interesting in the context of the overall discussion. The whole point of the segment was to bring together representatives of the Tea Party movement and debate some sensitive issues. Listening to Ron Paul's opposition to marijuana laws and Palin's reluctance to defend them, you start to wonder if anyone in the right-wing activist movement still cares about fighting a war on marijuana.

Obama has been attacked viciously from the right for almost everything he's ever said or done, yet when his administration talks about scaling back the war on drugs, the backlash never comes.

Drug Raids: Las Vegas Narc Serving Marijuana Search Warrant Kills Father-to-Be In His Own Bathroom A 21-year-old father-to-be was killed last Friday night by a Las Vegas Police Department narcotics officer serving a search warrant for marijuana. Trevon Cole was shot once in the bathroom of his apartment after he made what police described as "a furtive movement." Police have said Cole was not armed. Police said Monday they recovered an unspecified amount of marijuana and a set of digital scales. A person identifying herself as Cole's fiancée, Sequoia Pearce, in the comments section in the article linked to above said no drugs were found. Pearce, who is nine months pregnant, shared the apartment with Cole and was present during the raid. "I was coming out, and they told me to get on the floor. I heard a gunshot and was trying to see what was happening and where they had shot him," Pearce told KTNV-TV. According to police, they arrived at about 9 p.m. Friday evening at the Mirabella Apartments on East Bonanza Road, and detectives knocked and announced their presence. Receiving no response, detectives knocked the door down and entered the apartment. They found Pearce hiding in a bedroom closet and took her into custody. They then tried to enter a bathroom where Cole was hiding. He made "a furtive movement" toward a detective, who fired a single shot, killing Cole. "It was during the course of a warrant and as you all know, narcotics warrants are all high-risk warrants," Capt. Patrick Neville of Metro's Robbery-Homicide Bureau said Friday night. But a person identifying himself as Pearce's brother, who said he had spoken with his sister, had a different version of events: "The police bust in the door, with guns drawn to my little sister and her now deceased boyfriend," he wrote. "My sister is 8 ½ months pregnant, two weeks until the due date. But they bust in the door, irritated they didn't find any weapons or drugs, drag this young man into the restroom to interrogate him and two minutes later my sister hears a shot. They shot him with a shotgun, no weapon. For what? My sister is a baby, this young man is a baby, now my sister is at his house telling his mom her son is dead, and he is barely 21." Pearce herself told the Las Vegas Review-Journal Monday that police forced her to kneel at gunpoint in the bedroom and that she could see Cole in the bathroom from the reflection of a mirror. According to Cole, police ordered Cole to get on the ground, he raised his hands and said "Alright, alright," and a shot rang out. According to Pearce and family members, Cole had no criminal record, had achieved an Associate of Arts degree, and was working as an insurance adjustor while working on a political science degree at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He was not a drug dealer, Pearce said. "Trevon was a recreational smoker. He smoked weed, marijuana. That’s what he did," she told KTNV-TV. "They didn't have to kill him. We were supposed to get married next year, plan a black and white affair,” she said. "He was all I ever knew, we were gonna make it." LVPD Monday identified the police shooter as narcotics detective Bryan Yant, a 10-year veteran of the force. This is the third time Yant has controversially used his police firearm. In 2002, he shot and killed a robbery suspect, claiming the suspect, who was on the ground, aimed a weapon at him. But although the suspect's gun was found 35 feet away, a jury took only half an hour to find the shooting justified. The following year, he shot and wounded a man armed with a knife and a baseball ball who had been hired to kill a dog that had killed another neighborhood dog. Yants claimed the man attacked him and that he mistook the bat for a shotgun, but the man said he was running away from Yants when Yants fired repeatedly, striking him once in the hip. Because there was no death in that case, no inquest was held, but the department's use of force board exonerated Yants. Yants is on paid administrative leave while the department investigates. The family has hired an attorney to pursue a civil action. And another American has apparently been killed for no good reason in the name of the war on drugs. "Narcotics warrants are high risk warrants," said Capt. Neville. The question is for whom, and the answer is obvious: The people on the receiving end of them. The police? Not so much, as we have shown in our annual surveys of police casualties in the drug war.

Canadian "Prince of Pot" Marc Emery hasn't even been formally sentenced yet, but he's already being punished for what he does best: opening his mouth for the cause of marijuana legalization. Emery's wife, Jodie, told Canada's CNews Saturday that Emery is now in solitary confinement for violating prison rules. According to Jodie Emery, she recorded his calls from prison and played them as a podcast on the couple's Cannabis Culture magazine web site. That violated a prison rule that phone calls can only be made between a prisoner and the intended recipient and cannot be directed to a third party. Jodie Emery said Marc had read the prison rules and did not think the podcast would be a violation. Now he will spend at least a week in solitary pending a hearing to determine the full extent of his punishment. Emery, Canada's most famous legalization activist, pleaded guilty May 24 to one count of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, the culmination of a five-year battle between Emery and Canadian and US authorities to extradite and prosecute him for selling pot seeds over the Internet. Two of Emery's employees arrested along with him, Greg Williams and Michelle Rainey, earlier copped pleas and received probationary sentences to be served in Canada. Emery plowed the profits from his business back into the legalization movement, earning the wrath of drug prohibition establishment in both countries. When Emery was busted in 2005, then DEA administrator Karen Tandy gloated in a press release that it was "a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the US and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement." Under federal prison rules, Emery is allowed 300 minutes of phone calls a month and he can communicate via email through a closed computer system called CorrLinks, under which he can log onto a computer and compose a message that is read by prison officials before they send it over the Internet. Emery had used CorrLinks to post numerous dispatches from the gulag, but now, he is denied those privileges and could lose them for up to two months. Emery will remain in the Seattle-area federal detention facility until his formal sentencing September 10. Then he will be transferred to the federal prison at El Reno, Oklahoma, where prison officials will decide where he will be sent to serve his time. Emery's campaign to avoid extradition has now shifted to a campaign to persuade Canadian authorities to allow him to serve his sentence there, as has typically been the case with Canadians convicted of offenses in the US. But the Conservative government has in recent years begun to refuse to accept Canadians imprisoned on drug charges in the US.

As November inches closer, California's ballot initiative to legalize marijuana is causing anxiety on all sides of the drug war battlefield. Unfortunately, law-enforcement interests and anti-drug activists aren't the only ones panicking over the possibility of legal pot in the Golden State. This piece from Marc Emery explains why some members of the cannabis community are speaking out against the effort, and why they're wrong to do so.

Marc breaks opposition to the initiative into 3 categories:

1. Police and prison industry profiteers who don't want to lose their jobs.
2. Successful marijuana growers and entrepreneurs who don't want new competition.
3. Old-school activists who feel alienated by the modern reform movement and can't see the forest for the trees.

Now, I'm not sure I agree with everything Marc says here, but the piece on the whole is very interesting. As for the 3rd group, I just don't know what to say, but the first two are basically opposite sides of the same coin. Both groups benefit from marijuana prohibition and fear the impact of its elimination on their livelihood. Both groups prefer to think of their opposition to the initiative as being driven by principle, rather than self-interest. And ultimately, both groups will have to be overcome in order for marijuana prohibition to end.

I don't think anyone really disputes the fact that the Tax and Regulate 2010 Initiative isn't perfect. It apparently increases penalties for distribution to people under 21, and it doesn't create the kind of freedom of cultivation and distribution that many would prefer.  But what it will do is completely slaughter the war on marijuana as we know it, and not just in California. If this initiative passes, it will protect multitudes of peaceful cannabis consumers from arrest in California, while sending a message to the nation that further marijuana reform is popular and inevitable.

I promise you, we will not destroy the drug war with one sudden fatal blow. It took more than a decade of legal medical marijuana to set a positive example, disprove negative stereotypes and propaganda, and ultimately help win popular support for further reform. We're headed in the right direction, and if this effort succeeds, we'll be a whole hell of a lot closer than we are today. That's true even if the new law creates some inconveniences that its authors felt were necessary in order to help get it passed.

The bottom line is that if this initiative wins, or merely comes close to winning, it will galvanize our movement behind a victory that's surely just over the horizon. It will show politicians and the press that the recently surging marijuana legalization debate is more than just a fad and that our support base penetrates deeply into mainstream society.

On the other hand, a decisive loss will send a message that the apparent march towards legalization in recent years was little more than a vocal minority exploiting the internet to create a false perception of political momentum. Can you even imagine how eager our opponents are to start saying things like that? Our losses are inevitably exaggerated and twisted by our opponents in a desperate defense of the status quo, and in that respect, the political impact of our victories must be considered in addition to the substance of the reforms themselves.

To put it much more simply, let me just suggest that anyone in California who'd like to end marijuana prohibition would probably want to vote differently than the cops who get paid to pull up plants in the woods.

Judge Napolitano's Freedom Watch program continues to impress me. Paul does a great job, and the whole segment provides a good overview of the madness and hypocrisy of Obama's marijuana policy:


The fact that FOX has created a platform for these sorts of discussions is significant. I wouldn't have thought it possible even a couple years ago.

This week, famous marijuana lobbyist Aaron Houston takes over as Executive Director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. Count me among the many who are pretty damn excited about it. Aaron is a cool dude and a warrior of justice who has the skills to give the right marching orders in the student movement to end the war on drugs. He even had the willpower to turn down Doritos from Steve Colbert:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Aaron Houston
www.colbertnation.com
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If you're a student who's reading this blog, but you haven't gotten involved in SSDP, you're missing out on all sorts of things. Your school needs a chapter, and if you're reading this, then you're the right person to get it started. It's easy to do, and you'll have twice as many Facebook friends within a year. If you think you won't have time, you're wrong, because SSDP will teach you to be better at everything you do. Your summer break is a great time to get a head start, so click here for step #1.