Pubdate: Mon, 12 Sep 2005
Source: AlterNet (US Web)
Copyright: 2005 Independent Media Institute
Contact:  http://www.alternet.org/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1451
Author: Silja J.A. Talvi
Note: Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times. Her work
appears in the anthology, "Prison Nation"
Cited: Jeffrey Miron's Report http://www.prohibitioncosts.org
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?420 (Cannabis - Popular)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

SMOKED OUT

The 'war on drugs' has evolved into a war on weed. Billions of dollars
spent, tens of thousands incarcerated, and marijuana is still as
popular as ever.

In a November 2002 letter to the nation's prosecutors, the White
House's Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) didn't bother
beating around the proverbial bush. "No drug matches the threat posed
by marijuana," began the letter from Scott Burns, deputy director for
state and local affairs.

The truth of the matter, as reiterated throughout that letter in terse
language, was that marijuana was an addictive and dangerous drug
linked to violent behavior on the part of users. To make matters
worse, a subtle but powerful threat was identified as exacerbating the
problem: well-financed and deceptive campaigns to normalize and
ultimately legalize the use of marijuana.

Prosecutors were instructed to keep in mind the crucial importance of
their role in fighting this threat of normalization in going after
traffickers and dealers, and to tell the truth about marijuana to
their communities: "The truth is that marijuana legalization would be
a nightmare in America."

Yet these truths about marijuana hearken back to the absurdity of the
Reefer Madness era of the 1930s, when marijuana use was linked to
sexual promiscuity and violence, to say nothing of the imagined hordes
of Mexicans and Blacks waiting to lure white women into pot-induced
sinful acts.

Marijuana has been classified as a Schedule I drug since 1970, which
means that for 35 long years, pot has been viewed by the federal
government as a substance with no medicinal value and a high potential
for abuse, more so than cocaine, for instance, which is a Schedule II
drug. In many ways, modern-day government hysteria about the dangers
of marijuana is far more distorted and far-fetched than the scare
tactics that were employed under Harry J. Anslinger's reign at the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

That's because we know a great deal more about marijuana today than we
did in the '30s, particularly in the form of medical studies about the
very real existence of cannabinoid receptors in human brains and the
benefits of THC to chronic pain sufferers, as well as the fact that
urban decriminalization results in neither more common nor more
chronic use of marijuana.*

As far as we've been able to trace it back, cannabis has been used by humans
for at least 4,500 years. There has never been a single documented overdose
from any form of consumption of the plant. (It's actually not technically
possible for a human being to die from smoking marijuana, as Eric Schlosser
points out in his book, Reefer Madness: a user would have to smoke 100
pounds a minute for 15 minutes to take a fatal dose.) On the other hand,
people can and do die from drinking too much, smoking too much crack,
shooting up unexpectedly pure heroin, and snorting or popping too much
OxyContin.

With all of this knowledge available to the federal government, the
extremist position of the ONDCP isn't just nonsensical, it actually
sounds more and more like the product of truly paranoid, delusional
thinking.

Whatever the reasons behind this kind of thinking, we do know that the
ONDCP and successive presidential administrations since Nixon's reign
have been deadly serious about supporting this agenda, leaving no room
for debate, much less any form of dissent. The extreme extent to which
pot (and pot smokers) have been criminalized over the last few decades
has had the effect of skewing what marijuana really is and isn't
capable of doing to a person.

That's something that any of the roughly 30,000 prisoners doing time for
marijuana-related charges can surely attest to, as documented by the report,
Efficacy and Impact: The Criminal Justice Response to Marijuana Policy in
the U.S., released last week from the Justice Policy Institute. Thirty
thousand may not seem like a hell of a lot when we've got 2.1 million folks
behind bars from coast to coast, but that's 10,000 more people than the far
more pot-friendly Netherlands has in its entire prison system.

According to that report, the U.S. drug control budget grew from $65
million in 1969 to nearly $19.2 billion in 2003, and we are now
spending nearly 300 times more on drug control than just 35 years ago.
Much of that money has been poured into law enforcement and
incarceration, but a significant chunk of the ONDCP's funding has also
gone toward media advertising, to the tune of $4.2 billion since 1997.
According to research cited in the JPI report, most of those
advertising dollars went toward anti-marijuana advertisements.

Marijuana, it would seem, is simply one of the greatest threats facing
our nation.

Not so, says an increasingly vocal movement of marijuana and drug law
reformists hailing from all over the political spectrum. Although
there will always be the kinds of pot-worshipers who maintain that the
Green Goddess can do no wrong, the message of this movement isn't that
smoking cannabis is entirely without potential health risks. Moderate
to heavy smokers do, in fact, run the risk of lung cancer or
aggravating existing problems with depression or anxiety, among other
potential problems. And absolutely no one is saying that marijuana is
good for kids. Most parents would rather that their children stayed
free and clear of (legal and illegal) drugs in general.

The thing is that the marijuana war doesn't seem to be doing a thing
for keeping kids from smoking pot. In their Efficacy and Impact
report, the JPI cites the Monitoring the Future Survey, an annual
survey of 50,000 students from grades 8, 10 and 12. The recent survey
actually found a 90 percent increase in the number of 8th graders who
had tried pot, a 66 percent increase for 10th graders, and a 44
percent increase for seniors in high school. Thirteen years of
increased marijuana arrests actually correspond to increased pot
smoking by kids.

In other words, thousands of pot arrests and scare tactic messaging
isn't doing anything to keep these kids from trying marijuana. It can
be argued, on the contrary, that this drug war strategy is having an
entirely detrimental effect.

Several research studies published in recent months have highlighted
this and the many other highly flawed aspects of the war on marijuana.
One of these, released in May 2005 by The Sentencing Project, is about
the 1990s transformation of the drug war into a war on marijuana.

Pointing to the fact that marijuana-related arrests added up to nearly
half of 1.5 million drug-related arrests annually, the authors of this
report noted that marijuana arrests actually increased by 113 percent
between 1990 and 2002, while overall arrests in the nation decreased
by 3 percent.

By way of spin control, the ONDCP has gone out of its way to say that
the people being locked up are the real criminals: the money-making
dealers and traffickers who operate in one of the nation's biggest and
most lucrative underground economies.

The Sentencing Project's research refuted this easily. Of the
marijuana arrests in 2002, nearly 9 in 10 were for possession, not
dealing or trafficking. In addition, traffickers and dealers were
actually getting shorter prison terms than those sentenced on
possession charges: People sentenced for trafficking received a median
of 9 months in prison, while those sentenced for possession received a
median of 16 months in prison.

How's that for a head-scratcher?

From a fiscal standpoint, the bottom line has long since ceased making
sense, as highlighted in Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron's academic
paper in June 2005, Budgetary Implications of Marijuana
Prohibition.

Through his research, Miron concluded that the annual cost of
marijuana criminalization came in at a shocking $5.1 billion in 2000.
Replacing the current criminalization model with one of taxation and
regulation (not unlike that used for alcohol), he projected, would
produce combined savings and tax revenues of $10-14 billion per year.
The report, in turn, led more than 500 economists (led by Nobel prize
winner Milton Friedman) to sign their names to an open letter to
President Bush calling for "an open and honest debate about marijuana
prohibition that, would likely end up favoring a system where
marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods."

Studies like Miron's aren't romanticizing or glamorizing cannabis
consumption, and they're certainly not spurred on by
hemp-and-pot-loving hippies pushing for world peace through THC.

Miron, Friedman and the other 500 economists were not taking a stand
for pot, but rather against criminalization. This is a wholly
different and more informed kind of public opposition than we've seen
in recent decades. According to these studies, the War on Marijuana
amounts to nothing more than an escalation of the fiscally
irresponsible War on Drugs that bleeds state and federal coffers dry
while ruining the lives of individuals and families in the process.

But this isn't the kind of truth that the ONDCP is interested in
hearing -- it''s both inconvenient and embarrassing. Better just to
ignore it altogether, right?

Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police
constable, drug squad officer and chief British Columbia coroner who
witnessed the height of mid-1990s drug overdose deaths (from heroin in
particular), has himself become a proponent of both the
decriminalization and eventual legalization of marijuana. Campbell
resides across the border from one the U.S. counties that has seen the
greatest increase in pot-related arrests. (King County, which includes
the Greater Seattle Area, experienced a 418 percent growth rate in
marijuana arrests from 1990 to 2002.)

In an interview with Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Joel
Connelly, Mayor Campbell put it as matter-of-frankly as possible: Drug
czars are the most ill-informed people in government ... [John
Walters] is pushing an agenda that doesn't fit in the real world. He's
in denial."

He's right, and the U.S. war on marijuana (and on illicit substances
in general) is an abject failure. The emperor is wearing no clothes
whatsoever; we should be willing to call his bluff.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * In May 2004, the first rigorous study
comparing pot use in the Netherlands and the U.S. was published in the
American Journal of Public Health. The study, funded by the U.S.
National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Dutch Ministry of Health,
compared San Francisco and Amsterdam to find that about 75% of the
respective populations had used cannabis less than once per week or
not at all in the year before their interviews with researchers. The
study further revealed no indication that the decriminalization of
marijuana in the Netherlands led to earlier use or more consumption.
There was also no evidence in either city to back the common refrain
that marijuana serves as a gateway drug. Other Dutch studies have
shown that the percentage of people who regularly use either cannabis
or other drugs is actually lower in the Netherlands than in most other
EU countries. In Amsterdam alone, the Center for Drug Research found
that 55% of people who admitted to having tried marijuana ended up
only using it a few dozen times or less. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times. Her work
appears in the anthology, "Prison Nation" (Routledge, 2003).
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin