Personal Marijuana Use

If we thought the departure of drug czar John Walters would mean the end of wildly preposterous anti-pot propaganda, we were wrong as hell.

Abovetheinfluence.com is now claiming that marijuana makes you suck at video games and they're not even kidding at all. At the risk of giving them traffic, you have to see this to believe it. They've made an entire webpage, complete with videos and profiles of imaginary characters that got slaughtered because someone was high.

Of course, this is all sure to land far off target, mainly because everyone knows pot makes you incredible at video games. It's like steroids for high-school Halo champions. Claiming otherwise just makes you sound stupid, while simultaneously reminding your target demographic how much fun it is to get super-baked and massacre space aliens with a laser cannon.

You don't have to look very hard to find drug war zealots insisting vociferously that Dutch drug policy is a raging trainwreck. But the truth is that rates of marijuana use in the Netherlands are far lower than ours, despite the fact that they sell awesome pot over the counter seven days a week to anyone over 18.

That's why Dr. Fredrick Polak, a Dutch psychiatrist and drug policy reformer, has spent years trying to get U.N. Drug Czar Antonio Maria Costa to acknowledge and address the success of Dutch marijuana policy. He's asked Costa about this on 4 separate occasions so far and each time the U.N. drug czar changed the subject. Here's an awesome video of Dr. Polak causing Costa to go a little nuts (seriously watch it, it rocks).

Anyway, Dr. Polak has teamed up with the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union on a campaign to continue confronting Costa until he actually gives an intelligent response (or admits he doesn’t have one). They're asking for our help and they've made a cool new site where everyone can participate. Check it out.

I'm no expert on the stock market, but this doesn’t look good for Kellogg's:

Kellogg Co. Stock -- February 2009:

As the chart shows, the company's stock took an immediate dive following its decision to drop Michael Phelps over the infamous bong hit photo. What began as a coordinated boycott by drug reform organizations quickly escalated into a full-blown media frenzy as major news outlets picked up the story. Pot-friendly websites like Digg.com began directing massive traffic to news coverage that was critical of Kellogg's anti-marijuana posturing, thereby increasing the campaign's visibility among likely supporters.

The cumulative impact of all this negative publicity is helpfully illustrated by The Vanno Reputation Index, which monitors the public image of leading corporations:

Out of the 5,600 company reputations Vanno monitors, Kellogg ranked ninth before it booted Phelps. Now it's ranked 83. Not even an industry-wide peanut scare inflicted as much damage on the food company's reputation. [Business Insider]

In the current economic climate, it would be silly to think we're solely responsible for Kellogg's falling stock. Still, the Vanno data clearly shows that we've dealt a substantial blow to the company's reputation at the worst possible time. Whether or not we actually had a considerable impact on Kellogg's bottom line is beside the point. What matters is that we sent an unprecedented message to corporate America that reefer madness is bad for business.

For far too long now, the drug war has been sustained by a corporate culture that embraces anti-drug propaganda at every turn. Just as our press and politicians have struggled to come to terms with evolving public attitudes about drugs and drug policy, corporate America has remained enslaved by the tired mindset that a healthy public image is best secured through hardline anti-drug posturing.

The Phelps saga may soon be regarded as the moment when all of that changed, the unforeseeable, yet inevitable moment when the invisible hand of America's marijuana culture finally became a fist.

Update: Many have pointed out, and I agree, that Kellogg's falling stock is much better explained by the economy than the boycott. I thought I did a sufficient job of drawing this distinction in the post, but I can understand how the title and tone of the overall post might lead some to conclude otherwise. So for the record: the point of the post is not that the marijuana reform community crashed Kellogg's stock. I don't believe that to be true. The point is that our message gains much better traction at a moment like this. The last thing Kellogg's wants is a highly publicized boycott in the middle of an economic crisis.

I've been skeptical of previous boycott proposals that have circulated among reformers in the past, but this effort has been a massive success. In terms of media coverage and the subsequent slaughter of Kellogg's corporate reputation ranking, we couldn't have asked for a more visible impact than we've managed to achieve.

Just because Kellogg's hasn't formally surrendered to us somehow doesn't mean we didn't kick their ass. I'm sure they are utterly stunned by the backlash they received, and that's what matters.

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post observing the rapidly evolving political climate surrounding marijuana policy reform. He points to recent polling data and observes correctly that we're entering new territory in terms of public attitudes and political opportunities.

Of course, this is a Mark Kleiman post, so there's guaranteed to be something in there that I can't quite wrap my head around. Kleiman condemns the alcohol model, which he says "would provide a strong incentive for the marketing effort to aim at creating and maintaining addiction." He estimates that rates of marijuana addiction would double if it were sold like alcohol, so he proposes this instead:

So I continue to favor a "grow your own" policy, under which it would be legal to grow, possess, and use cannabis and to give it away, but illegal to sell it. Of course there would be sales, and law enforcement agencies would properly mostly ignore those sales. But there wouldn't be billboards.

That beautifully-crafted policy has only two major defects that I'm aware of: it wouldn't create tax revenue, and no one but me supports it…

Well, I'd favor this over our current policy without hesitation, but is Kleiman serious that he only sees two significant flaws in his plan? What about the fact that marijuana would still be sold by criminals? It's the biggest cash crop in America and its distribution (absent for medical use in some states) occurs exclusively on the black market. Even under a "grow your own" model, marijuana entrepreneurs will proliferate. And when their door gets smashed down in the middle of the night, they still won’t know if it's an armed robbery or the DEA. People will still get shot and killed over an otherwise completely non-lethal drug.

Can anything be done about that, Mark?

A bill to tax and regulate the production and sale of marijuana will go before the California legislature. At a press conference at his San Francisco offices -- going on right now -- California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano announced he was introducing legislation to do just that. The bill comes as the state is in the grip of a strong economic downturn and a severe fiscal crisis. Estimates of tax revenues that could be generating by regularizing the status of California's leading cash crop range from $1.5 billion to $4 billion a year. A poll by Zogby International, released last week, found majority support on the west coast for the proposed reform. I am currently at the press conference, and will post a more detailed report later today. Phil's report, including pictures from the press conference, is online here. Check back Friday morning at the same URL for a full-length Drug War Chronicle feature story.

A new study from Switzerland looked at substance use among people admitted to the hospital with injuries. Not surprisingly, people who'd been drinking alcohol were more likely to get hurt than those who had not. But what about marijuana use?

Conversely, cannabis use was associated with significantly lowered risk of injury. Whereas the risk for injuries associated with the use of less than a pipe or joint’s worth were not significantly different from the on associated with no use,  relative risks decreased with increasing levels of use… [BioMedCentral]

Not only were marijuana users less likely to be injured than non-users, but risk of injury actually decreased with larger doses. It's incredible. But my point here isn’t that the more pot you smoke the safer you'll be (although that is what the data suggests). It was a small sample and I kind of doubt that continued research would confirm a massive reduction in risk of injury among marijuana users.

What matters here is that marijuana clearly doesn't raise your risk of doing something stupid and busting your head open or whatever. What better indication of this could there be than the fact that people who show up all bloody at the emergency room are disproportionately not high on pot?

The researchers note that marijuana use may sometimes take place in safer environments than alcohol use and that marijuana users as a group might be more careful to avoid risks while under the influence. I'm sure both of these points are correct, but to really sum all this up: marijuana just doesn’t make you do dumb shit.

The widely-disseminated notion that marijuana leads to impaired judgment is simply false. Thus, I'm tempted to conclude that much of the propaganda aimed at associating marijuana with risk-taking behaviors has been motivated by cynicism on the part of our opposition, namely to the effect that they recognized -- and sought to preemptively obscure -- the relative safety of the drug.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me in the marijuana debate is the extent to which anti-pot propaganda is not only false, but is in fact often the precise opposite of the truth.

Calls for legalization in the aftermath of the Michael Phelps media frenzy haven’t met with much backlash, probably because the gold-medal winning bong-monger kinda breaks the mold as far as stoner stereotyping goes. So we should be grateful, if anything, for the few anti-drug zealots that are so unhinged, so consumed by reefer madness, that they feel compelled to speak even when doing so serves only to further expose and embarrass their crazy beliefs:

The recent incident involving Michael Phelps getting caught smoking pot has caused the age long debate to rear its head again on whether or not we should legalize or at least decriminalize our drug laws. The idea in attacking the drug laws is that people should be free to make their own decisions. The problem with that line of reasoning is that you would never be able to draw the line on establishing any law. Everything would have to be legal, including armed robbery, murder, assault, etc. In essence, it would be anarchy. [Shreveport Times]

Ok, I don’t think you understand. We want to legalize marijuana, but not murder. Does that make sense? Armed robbery, etc. would still be illegal. No one will ever try to legalize violent crime, so shut up and stop worrying about that.

It’s a shame what marijuana does to some people’s brains.

Duh…

Lott said his investigators couldn't find enough evidence to charge anyone — including Phelps — who attended the party with any crime. [The State]

Um yeah, it’s kind of hard to convict a guy of smoking a bong at a party 4 months ago. That’s just one of many reasons that literally everyone in the world thought this was a terrible idea. Lott’s press conference was supremely lame, as he played the role of a valiant public servant caught in an epic "damned if you do, damned if you don’t" conundrum. As if anybody was going to give him a hard time for failing to launch a massive investigation against a misdemeanor marijuana suspect who couldn’t even be legally extradited because the charge was so petty.

Anyhow, it’s probably safe to say the Michael Phelps mega-controversy will likely begin fizzling out from here, unless he gets caught free-basing bubble hash on YouTube.

Yesterday, we learned that eight people have been arrested in the aftermath of the Michael Phelps bong photo and the infamous bong itself has been captured and taken into custody. As new details emerge, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there really is a serious campaign underway to prosecute Michael Phelps:

The effort to prosecute Phelps on what would be at most a minor drug charge seem extreme compared to similar cases, lawyers said, and have led some to question whether the sheriff is being overzealous because he's dealing with a celebrity.
…
The investigators appear to be trying to build a case against Phelps from others — a tactic normally used to bring down drug dealers with a large amounts of cocaine or methamphetamine, not someone who smoked marijuana five months ago, said Chip Price, a Greenville attorney who has dealt with drug cases for 33 years. [AP]

There’s not much left to say about this that I haven’t said already, so I’ll say it again: Sheriff Leon Lott and his henchmen are unhinged drug war lunatics wielding their unchecked powers as arbitrarily and embarrassingly as humanly possible.

To my knowledge, next to no one on the planet supports this ridiculous crusade. So I can only hope that this very visible example of vindictive marijuana enforcement serves to focus public attention on the often pathetic behavior of our supposedly heroic drug war soldiers. Just look at them. Look at what they are doing. And remember that this episode is hardly the first or only time the drug warriors have allowed childish and obsessive pursuits to triumph over the public interest.

If they think destroying Michael Phelps is a good idea, imagine all the other wretched crap they’ve done that you don’t even know about.