May 14, 2009
The drug war is over
Or at least the Obama Administration is "over" the drug war. The new "Drug Czar" says so.
May 11, 2009
Cheech and Chong mathematics
For a $50/ounce cannabis tax to produce $1.3 billion in annual revenue for California, each Californian who smokes pot at all would have to average more than 2 joints a day.
April 30, 2009
More polling on pot
The WaPo reports 46% support for the "legalization" of cannabis. But what the poll actually asked about was legalizing possession of small amounts for personal use. That's a different policy, usually called "decriminalization." But the number is still surprisingly high. The anti-drug crusade seems to have lost steam.
April 11, 2009
THC-and-glioma update
Yes, that study is real science. No, it's nowhere near showing clinical potential, let alone clinical efficacy.
April 08, 2009
April 03, 2009
Joe Klein on drug legalization: same old same old
No, marijuana does not account for 47.5% of all arrests in the United States.
March 31, 2009
Cannabis legalization as economic stimulus: a pipe dream
Robert Gibbs was right to blow the question off: as a policy idea, it's a complete non-starter.
March 29, 2009
March 26, 2009
More polling on cannabis
Latest CBS numbers show substantially less support for legalization than the same poll found two months ago.
March 25, 2009
Greely on cognitive enhancers
He asks the question about how to define safety, but not the question about how to control the arms race.
March 19, 2009
March 14, 2009
Getting it right
Newspapers would be more useful if reporters made fewer laughable technical errors. Such errors can be avoided (only?) by recruiting a network of experts to vet stories on the fly and spot the howlers. But that would require a re-thinking of current ideas about journalistic integrity and independence.
March 13, 2009
Legalization debate
Went about as expected, except that it wasn't on CNN after all, but on CNN International.
March 12, 2009
One more drug-legalization debate [UPDATED]
Noon eastern (9 am Pacific) Friday. Me v. someone from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
March 11, 2009
New ONDCP leadership
Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske will be the czar; Tom McClellan of treatment-research fame will be the deputy, though it's not clear whether McClellan's appointment will be annoucemed today.
February 22, 2009
Legalizing cannabis: is the ground shifting?
Polls from Rasmussen and CBS/NYT show support for cannabis legalization at 40%: still a minority view, but attitudes are clearly changing.
February 16, 2009
More advice on drug policy
Kevin Sabet has advice for the new drug czar; Judge Steven Alm wonders why California doesn't try a proven technique to reduce drug use and crime among probationers and parolees.
February 12, 2009
February 07, 2009
Medical cannabis and the culture wars
It's no longer the policy of the Federal government to beat up on the hippies.
December 14, 2008
What should the new Administration know about drugs?
A friend of mine asked me to imagine what facts about current drug problems and policies I'd want the new Administration to be aware of: not a set of plans, just a status report, and brief enough for busy people to read. That seemed like an interesting challenge, so I ran it past a few of the usual suspects in the drug-policy world, and here's what we came up with. Comments welcome.
December 08, 2008
The drug warriors are (also) stuck on stupid
Are John Walters and Ethan Nadelmann having a contest to see who can write the sillier op-ed?
Another "anti-prohibition" essay: s.s., d.d.
Like the Bourbons, the anti-prohibitionists have learned nothing and forgotten nothing in thirty years of making the same points in the same way and avoiding the same glaring facts.
September 19, 2008
Wanted: 20,000 tons of opium
The world need lots more morphine, which could be produced from Afghan opium.
September 15, 2008
Abolish the drinking age? Only if you raise alcohol taxes.
Just lowering the drinking age means more highway fatalities. We need a combination of policies.
September 08, 2008
“Know your body. Know your mind. Know your substance. Know your source."
Earth and Fire Erowid on the techniques of using drugs without getting hurt.
August 20, 2008
Of amethysts and fake ID's
Combining a lowered drinking age with higher alcohol taxes and a zero-alcohol policy for drivers under 21 would give us less false ID, less drunk driving, and more liberty than we have now. What's not to like?
August 10, 2008
A beacon to an oppressed world
One of the really great things about being American is knowing your country is exporting the best of its political and artistic culture to places that really need it. In the sixties and seventies, for example, Europeans watching US TV shows started asking pointed questions about stuff like habeas corpus and refusing to answer questions on 5th amendment grounds, and...
June 27, 2008
MDMA therapy for post-traumatic stress?
If there's evidence that it works, and that evidence seems to be accumulating, the VA medical system ought to pay attention.
March 29, 2008
March 07, 2008
It's not just fossil fuels
Let's play a kids' riddle game. My short-term benefits on first use are positive, and can be obtained at very low up-front cost. In your social circle, I indicate coolness and status. Once you use me, you find that the (again, short-term) benefits of using are increasingly greater than not using, even if you start to wish you had never...
February 16, 2008
February 02, 2008
Concerning spine and clean needles
Needle exchange for addicts is like driver's licenses for illegals. The merits point one way, the politics point the other way. Guess which of the two Democratic candidates is facing the right way?
January 25, 2008
Compassion
The Office of National Drug Control Policy is working hard to make sure that opiate addicts keep dying of overdoses.
December 03, 2007
October 08, 2007
Keeping our eye on the main chance
The drug czar's office, the State Department, and the White House want the Afghani government to spray weed-killer on the Afghani poppy crop. The Pentagon, the CIA, the British government, and Hamid Karzai disagree. Giving aid and comfort to the Taliban, in the name of a policy certain to fail in its goal of controlling drug abuse, is madness.
July 27, 2007
Exhale!
If pot caused schizophrenia, we'd see schizophrenia incidence go up and down with pot use. We don't. So it doesn't. Any questions?
July 13, 2007
Making old, poor smokers pay for children's health care
Elderly smokers damage their lungs. That's not a good reason to make them pay through the nose.
June 20, 2007
No, Giuliani didn't make a coke dealer his SC campaign chair
Thomas Ravenel was Giuliani's South Carolina campaign chair until he was indicted yesterday on federal cocaine charges. But reading between the lines, it's pretty clear he was buying the stuff and giving it away, not selling it.
May 29, 2007
Hubris
The Bush Administration continues to act internationally as if we had the sort of bargaining position we would have if we didn't have our army tied down trying desperately not to lose the war in Iraq until after Mr. Bush leaves office. We don't.
May 28, 2007
Nice try. Try again.
Reagan said in his diary that he thought Rudy Giuliani was crazy. Rudy's people are offering a letter from Reagan to Giuliani as evidence that they were friendly. That would be more convincing if the letter were signed instead of rubber-stamped. But wait! It gets better. The letter focuses on Giuliani's role in drug enforcement, which was a complete failure: while he was in charge, prices fell and volumes soared. Heckuva job, Rudy!
April 10, 2007
April 01, 2007
SACPA: a case study in mismanagement
Anyone looking for a case study in how the national drug control effort achieves much less than it might at much higher costs in money and suffering than it needs to can stop looking.
February 22, 2007
Is alcohol a "drug"? Why the question matters
If alcohol is a drug, then drinkers are drug users. But if drinkers are drug users, then drug users, as a category, aren't social enemies.
February 21, 2007
The new Bush drug budget
A long-time senior civil servant in the drug czar's office doesn't like what he sees.
January 29, 2007
Better drug policy in nineteen easy steps
I have a drug-policy essay in the latest American Interest. Here's a summary and a link to the full text.
January 28, 2007
Mushrooms and mystical experience
There's now good scientific support for the claim that psilocybin, the active agent in "magic" mushrooms, has a better-than-even chance of generating a full-blown mystical experience in properly selected and prepared subjects. Now what?
January 06, 2007
December 26, 2006
Afghan heroin in L.A. and the heroin price collapse
A dime a pure milligram? That means your first heroin experience is now available for less than the price of a candy bar.
December 12, 2006
The crack/powder disparity: a way out?
Require Main Justice approval for prosecutors to seek 5-year mandatory terms for small crack cases. Reserve that tactic for strategic attacks on violent individuals or groups or focused crackdowns on flagrant open markets.
October 25, 2006
Stupid pet tricks award ...
Having kids dress up in camouflage gear to "fight drugs." No, of course I'm not kidding. Even The Onion can't make this stuff up.
October 10, 2006
Let my dealers go!
The drug problem wouldn't get much bigger if the number of dealers in prison got much smaller.
September 29, 2006
Buy the Afghan poppy crop? I don't think so.
It's never worked before. It won't work now. Instead we should try to concentrate eradication and enforcement on Taliban-linked growers and dealers.
Why don't we just buy it?
According to the UN, opium produced in Afghanistan was worth about $600 million at the farm gate in the last two years, according to the news, more this year: let's say $700m allowing for more production at lower prices. This is most of the opium in the world, by far. Farmers grow it to make a living, on the whole...
September 28, 2006
September 26, 2006
The low-arrest drug crackdown
How do you break up a major street drug market with eight arrests? By concentrating enforcement pressure and communicating credible threats directly to the people you want to deter.
August 03, 2006
An epidemic of isolated events
Radley Balko (the Agitator) has published a disturbing study of "dynamic entry" drug raids carried out by heavily armed SWAT teams.
July 30, 2006
Social pressure to abuse drugs
Drinking rituals lead to binge drinking. That's a Bad Thing. It's worse when they invade the workplace, not least when that workplace is the U.S. Senate.
July 17, 2006
Keeping mandatory drug treatment voluntary
The authors of Proposition 36 want people convicted of drug possession to get treatment instead of being sent to prison. But they're fighting to the death a provision that would impose sanctions on those who take the deal but either duck the treatment entirely or drop out before it's finished, as two-thirds of Prop. 36 offenders do. (A third never show up, and half of the rest drop out.) So they're for mandatory treatment, as long as it isn't really mandatory.
June 25, 2006
"Immunotherapy" vs. "vaccination"
It's misleading to call an approach to treating a disease, as opposed to preventing it, "vaccination."
June 20, 2006
The O'Reilly Tactic
... consists of saying more false things than his guest can possibly refute. My after-action report on being O'Reilly's guest.
June 19, 2006
June 14, 2006
Even real drug problems get hyped
Meth is a real problem, even if some of the people who say so don't know much. Media criticism is no substitute for research, though Jack Shafer seems to think it is. And advocacy documents aren't research reports.
May 20, 2006
Undead ideas Dep't: Buying the opium crop
If we buy the Afghan opium crop, Afghan poppy farmers will grow two crops, one to sell to us and the other to sell to the refiners.
May 04, 2006
Mexican "decriminalization" as seen from Mexico
I asked a colleague, a criminologist law professor at CIDE in Mexico, about the new drug law the media won't allow Mark to enlighten them about, and he had some interesting insights from a local perspective. From Roberto Hernandez: The new legislation was passed with the purpose of directing enforcement efforts to retail distribution, and away from consumption. There seems...
May 03, 2006
More absurdity
When the media and the drug warriors mobilize to fight Mexican drug legalization, the fact that Mexico didn't actually plan to legalize any drugs isn't going to stand in their way. Under U.S. pressure, Vicente Fox has backed down.
May 02, 2006
Radio of the absurd
The question "Did Mexico just decriminalize drug possession?" ought to be logically prior to the question "Is it a good thing that Mexico just decriminalized drug possession?" But opinions are more fun than facts.
April 06, 2006
Is there a blue moon tonight?
Stop the presses! Nadelmann and Kleiman agree on something: the less said about drug policy in the political arena, the better.
April 05, 2006
Chipping away at my 15 minutes
I'll be on KPCC (FM 89.3 in Pasadena) Wednesday morning at 10:30 talking about the just-published evaluation of Prop. 36.
March 21, 2006
Merle Haggard and the drug war
The lyrics of "Okie from Muskogee" tell us all we need to know about the social psychology of the drug warriors and their political sponsors.
March 19, 2006
Deciding What The Law Should Be
Just below, Mark rightfully attacks the DEA for using its enforcement powers to attack an effort to change the laws. That, I think, is right. But his statement that, "DEA's job is enforcing the laws, not deciding what the laws should be" may or may not be right, but it is a large part of almost every agency's "job" to...
Politicized law enforcement
The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration shouldn't care about, or issue press releases about, the political activities of the people DEA arrests. Selling pot is illegal. Working to repeal that law isn't.
March 07, 2006
Such another victory ...
Once again, the Drug Czar's office announces that we're winning the War on Drugs.
February 27, 2006
February 08, 2006
Italy ramps up the drug war
The government rammed through a bill to restore criminal penalties for drug users.
January 30, 2006
The grow-your-own option
That's my proposed law on cannabis: You can grow it, smoke it, or give it away, but not sell it.
January 24, 2006
Child abuse dressed up as drug treatment
Maia Szalavaitz's "Help at any Cost" takes a good, tough look at the "tough love" child-drug-abuse-treatment industry.
January 22, 2006
Tradeoffs
Cheap, low-quality methamphetamine from environmentally toxic kitchen-table labs, or expensive, high-quality methamphetamine from Mexico? You pays your money, and you takes your choice.
December 14, 2005
Violence and street drug markets
The violent drug markets in New York City are now the markets for marijuana and untaxed cigarettes.
November 26, 2005
Paying meth users to stay clean: update
Should the rewards be constant, or intermittent? Good question.
November 14, 2005
August 28, 2005
The methamphetamine epidemic:
Even real problems get hyped
Reciting the mantra "moral panic" doesn't make real problems disappear.
August 19, 2005
Meth vs. pot as a drug policy target
ONDCP finally admits that marijuana isn't the be-all and end-all of drug abuse.
August 11, 2005
Query
How much have we spent, in public and private money, on convincing people that there's an undifferentiated category of bad things called "drugs"?
August 09, 2005
The addictive risks of cannabis
More kids are in treatment for cannabis dependence because more of them are getting busted.
Meth gets a coat of Tierney whitewash
"Never as dangerous as alcohol in the first place"? Meth??? On which planet?
August 08, 2005
Why shouldn't we say what killed Peter Jennings?
Jennings smoked. He died of a smoking-related disease. Isn't that worth mentioning?
August 05, 2005
The Cloaca Maxima project
Someone finally acts on one of John Newmeyer's bright ideas: analyzing municipal sewage to estimate drug consumption.
July 23, 2005
Tierney, OxyContin, and Limbaugh
(1) Persecuting doctors for treating pain patients, or pain patients for seeking adequate pain relief, is a bad thing. But (2) the diversion of potent opioids to the illicit markets is a real problem, with awful human and social consequences. John Tierney insists on (1), but wants to deny (2). Is Tierney (sub silentio) standing up for poor, persecuted Rush Limbaugh?
July 10, 2005
Meth, again
It's a nightmare, and there's not much we can do about it. But one useful step would be making it harder to buy Sudafed and similar cold remedies in bulk. The combined power of the drug companies and the drugstore chains is making even that simple step politically infeasible.
June 24, 2005
Homeopathy and drug diversion
No, diversion to treatment under California's Prop 36 doesn't work worth a damn. But that's no reason to start sending users to jail again.
June 08, 2005
Unblock medical marijuana research
Whether marijuana is medicine ought to be settled in the laboratory, not the courtroom. So why is the Federal government blocking the relevant research?
June 07, 2005
Prescription diversion and drug abuse
Would allowing patients to grow and use their own marijuana increase the supply of pot to the illicit market?
June 01, 2005
The Supreme Court meets illicit-market economics
Justice Stevens was probably right, though he didn't know it: removing patients' demand from the illicit cannabis market would tend, other things equal, to make illicit pot more expensive rather than less.
May 29, 2005
Cold remedies and meth labs
The latest fashion in the War on Drugs is pulling pseudoephedrine products (Sudafed and its imitators) off the open over-the-counter pharmacy shelves to prevent the pseudoephedrine from being used as a precurse in illicit methamphetamine manufacturing. John Cole thinks this is daft, and points to my writings as support for the idea that supply control is never the answer to...
May 23, 2005
The (yawn) Afghan poppy eradication program
No, it doesn't matter a damn, one way or the other. We need the Karzai government to succeed, and if it can succeed better by letting the poppy-growers alone than by cracking down on them, that's what we should want it to do.
April 23, 2005
Methamphetamine wreckage in Montana
What's the lesson of a case in which a long series of "victimless" crimes somehow resulted in a lot of victims?
April 22, 2005
News on the medical-marijuana front
Canada approves whole-cannabis extract for medical use. How will the drug warriors and anti-prohibitionists in this country react?
April 19, 2005
Supreme Court to hear UDV case
Does the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protect the ritual use of ayahuasca? The Supreme Court has agreed to decide.
March 16, 2005
Feds appeal ayahuasca ruling
The government asks the Supreme Court to stop the ritual use of ayahuasca.
March 04, 2005
Drug policy news
A new star drug reporter, and what looks like an important contribution from two veterans.
January 18, 2005
Hallucinogens and delusions
The New York Times finds a reporter who doesn't know the difference beween a stoned party and a mystical initiation.
December 10, 2004
Supreme Court lifts stay; UdV may worship now
The Supreme Court has now dissolved the emergency stay issued last week suspending an injunction forbidding the government to interfere with the rituals of the UdV, the American branch of a Brazilian church that uses a DMT-containing potion called hoasca or ayahuasca as its sacramental drink. Yes, I know that sentence is hard to parse, but what it means is...
December 05, 2004
December 02, 2004
UDV case headed to the Supreme Court?
SG files an appeal; Justice Breyer stays preliminary injunction.
November 30, 2004
Medical marijuana on NPR at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight
Continuing my campaign to make as many enemies in possible, I curse both sides in the "medical marijuana" dispute. NPR tonight at 8pm Eastern.
November 15, 2004
Needle exchange in New Jersey
Yes, needle exchange prevents HIV transmission. More surprisingly, it actually reduces drug abuse.
November 13, 2004
10th Circuit affirms UDV ruling:
ayahuasca-using church may resume services
The 10th Circuit affirmed the award of a preliminary injunction telling the DEA to keep its hands off the UDV's worship.
November 09, 2004
Is test-doping cheating?
Yes. It reduces the validity of the test, and puts test-takers at risk of developing substance abuse.
September 30, 2004
Cannabinoids and memory
Cannabinoids interfere with short term, ummmm...., now what was that word ... whatever. Sometimes that's good. Especially if you're a birdbrain.
September 19, 2004
Drug enforcement, drug prices, and drug abuse
The current rules for determining sentences in drug cases serve the wrong goal.
August 10, 2004
July 26, 2004
Vaccines against drug abuse (NOT!)
A really bad idea about how to use a really promising technology.
June 07, 2004
Against J.S. Mill
Is there a defensible principle of autonomy that ought to rule out paternalistic legislation regardless of the facts? I doubt it.
May 17, 2004
Who killed ADAM? (redux)
Thanks to all who provided editorial comments on my essay on the demise of the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program. Here's the revised version. What killed Adam? May 17 draft...
May 11, 2004
What killed ADAM?
Why the most cost-effective element of the national drug data collection effort was the one we just stopped doing.
April 09, 2004
Preventing drinking by problem drinkers
Phil Leitzel on ankle bracelets to restrain dangerous drinkers.
April 07, 2004
Drugs and Violence in El Salvador
Report on my field trip to El Salvador, with a speech and a paper on reducing drug-related violence.
April 06, 2004
Is Rush being railroaded?
Don't weep for Rush; in Florida, real pain patients who forge scripts do hard time.
April 02, 2004
Peter Jennings says "Yes" to MDMA
The Peter Jennings MDMA special was, without a doubt, the most favorable story about an illegal drug ever to appear on network television. Most of it was right, but some of it wasn't. MDMA is no longer spreading like wildfire -- use rates have actually been dropping rather quickly for two years now -- and there were heroes as well as villains at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
March 25, 2004
Peter Jennings on ecstasy
This coming Thursday, April 1, at 10pm, ABC will air a Peter Jennings special called "Ecstasy Rising," which looks at both the actual drug problem around MDMA (the chemical people think they're buying when they buy a pill called "ecstasy") and the scandal around MDMA research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. I'm told that the program will...
March 24, 2004
The promised crackdown on the pills
I've had some calls from reporters on the White House plan to make the abuse of diverted pharmaceuticals a major target for drug enforcement. The general tone of the reporters' questions has been: "Why don't they focus on something more important?" Actually, this looks like a good move to me. The surge in the abuse of prescription medications, and especiall...
March 20, 2004
Taking the bottle away from dangerous drunks
When someone gets caught drinking and driving, the first response is to take away his license: his driving license, that is. Why not revoke his drinking license instead?
March 04, 2004
Get your red-hot medical marijuana here!
A friend driving through Ukiah, CA (a couple of hours north of SF on Highway 101) reports hearing an ad on a local radio station. She wasn't taking notes, but this is the gist of ad as she recalls it: Marijuana is a useful medicine for many conditions. At the Medical Offices of Cheech, Chong, and Tokem, our physicians know...
March 03, 2004
MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress?
A physician in South Carolina has received permission to conduct a clinical experiment using MDMA as a pschotherapeutic adjunct in the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A reader sent an article (copied below) from yesterday's Washington Post with the query: "Is this a good idea?" Quick answer: No one knows whether using MDMA to treat PTSD is a good...
February 24, 2004
The Ecstasy research scandal
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a thorough review of the MDMA ("ecstasy") research done, under funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, by George Ricraurte and his collaborators at Hopkins. The story doesn't quite make it clear just how outrageous some of the research misconduct involved actually was, party because the author seems not to understand the details....
February 23, 2004
Victory through redefinition:
hoking the drug budget
John Walsh reports in the latest Drug Policy Analysis Bulletin that the Bush Administration has satisfied the long-expressed desire to rebalance the drug budget between supply-control spending (enforcement) and demand-control spending (prevention and treatment) the old-fashioned way: by lying about it. Suddenly the costs of prosecuting and incarcerating drug dealers have disappeared from the budget, bring prevention and treatment into...
February 03, 2004
The weird politics of medical marijuana
I offer some thoughts on The American Street, following up on this earlier post about Sativex....
February 01, 2004
At last, some real progress on medical cannabis
A British company called GW Pharmaceuticals has developed a sublingual spray called Sativex which contains all the psychoactive chemicals in natural cannabis, and that medicine is likely to be approved in Britain for the treatment of MS within months. The rest of Europe and Canada will probably follow quickly, and it’s quite possible that the US won’t be too far...
January 28, 2004
Obituary for a useful data series
Fox Butterfield has the details on the cancellation of the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program in today's New York Times. Other than paying entirely too much attention to the views of a well-known loudmouth from UCLA, it seems to be a very competent story. This is bad news for those of us who think about drugs and crime, but...
January 21, 2004
Opting for ignorance:
ADAM program killed
As the National Academy of Sciences pointed out a couple of years ago, one fundamental problem with our approach to drug abuse is that we don't know nearly as much as we need to know about what's going on. And Peter Reuter has put his finger on one of the causes of that ignorance: While the overwhelming bulk of the...
December 16, 2003
The Dallas police fake-drug scandal
If I hadn't lent my car to someone who switch from the CD player to the radio and left it tuned to NPR, I probably never would have heard about the Dallas police fake-drug scandal. Googling it, I find no mention in any of the national media, except for one column by Ruben Navarrette carried by the WaPo syndicate. As...
December 02, 2003
MDMA neurotoxicity:
"An ouchie for George"
Today's New York Times has a devastating article on the research methods of George Ricaurte, whose studies purporting to show the neurotoxic effects of MDMA ("ecstasy") were used to support the original prohibition of the drug and have since been used to support stiffer penalties, ancillary laws such as the RAVE Act, and suppression of human research into the drug's...
Drug free school zones
After a long hiatus that was almost entirely my fault, the Drug Policy Analysis Bulletin is back in operation, due almost entirely to the efforts of our new managing editor, Douglas Ross. The latest issue features a study by Will Brownsberger and Susan Aromaa of Join Together, which shows how the Massachusetts "drug-free school zone" law has turned into a...
November 26, 2003
Why make "structuring" a crime?
Jane Galt thinks (1) that the drug laws are a bad ided and that (2) the money laundering laws are an even worse idea, and show how much too far the drug war has gone. Neither of those propositions is transparently false. The money laundering laws certainly demonstrate the Hayekian point Jane makes: the more ambitious a law is, in...
November 24, 2003
Bad news for Rush Limbaugh
It's often hard to tell whether Rush Limbaugh is just deceiving his audience or whether he's also deceiving himself. But his on-the-air defense against the money-laundering changes he may face simply missed the point, in legal terms. Even if the Florida authorities decide to give him a break, he could be in very big trouble -- about three years' in...
November 17, 2003
New wisdom (?) from Washington
Some Native American peoples traditionally used hallucinogens, notably the mescaline-bearing peyote cactus, for ritual purposes. Staring in the 1880s, a specific version of ritual peyote use has spread widely among Native Americans, including many from tribes without hallucinogen traditions of their own. While peyote use long predates the introduction of Christianity to the New World, today's peyote rituals are essentially...
November 09, 2003
Prison time for drug users?
I don't really want to see Rush Limbaugh spend the next twenty-five years of his life in prison, which is what would happen if the laws of the State of Florida were enforced. But I really do want to see the politicians and pundits who support both Limbaugh and the drug war explain why that particular law shouldn't be enforced...
Advice to Lawyers
If you're going to send a threatening letter in an attempt to suppress the communication of truthful information damaging to your client, don't do it to another bunch of lawyers. You'll just make their day....
October 14, 2003
Oooo, is that awful, nasty left
being mean to poor widdle Rushie?
Kevin Drum [*] catches Jonah Goldberg trolling for examples of people on the left making fun of Rush Limbaugh's narcotics addiction. I don't think he'll find much; our side, with a few exceptions, has been remarkably well-behaved. (Due not at all, I have to assume, to my earlier plea for compassion. [*]) Rush and his defenders, by contrast, have been...
The limits of drug law enforcement
One idea about drug law enforcement is that by making the illicit traffic more expensive and dangerous for the people who sell drugs, enforcement can push up the prices of drugs and therefore reduce consumption. The old criticism of this approach, based on the notion that demand for illicit drugs was highly inelastic, turns out to be incorrect; cocaine...
October 09, 2003
Zero tolerance, Zero intelligence
Two new stories of the damage done by dimwitted "zero-tolerance" policies: one about "weapons" [*](in this case a butter knife packed in a middle school girl's lunch) and "drugs" [*] (asthma medication given by one student to another in a potentially life-threatening situation). Zero tolerance is the bastard child of dim-wittedness out of litigiousness. It sounds good to concerned...
September 08, 2003
Ritual use of controlled substances
The three-judge panel of Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has, by a 2-to-1 vote, reinstated a preliminary injunction issued by Judge James Parker of the U.S. District Court for New Mexico, but stayed pending appeal, in favor of the American branch of Uniao do Vegetal. The UDV is a Brazilian syncretic church that uses ayahuasca, a mixture including the hallucinogen...
July 10, 2003
More Legalization
John Quiggan asks a sensible question: If there's a good case for prohibiting cocaine, why not alcohol? He concludes that consistency would call for banning neither, or both: In summary, Prohibition produced greater benefits than the War on Drugs, at a lower cost in terms of crime and social dislocation. The idea that it is impossible to change the...
March 31, 2003
What to do about drugs (abridged)
A fellow blogger asked for a quick summary of my substantive views on drug policy. Okay, here's the standing-on-one-leg version. Believing everything below will be certain to make people look at you funny, no matter which side of the issue they're on. I'm leaving out the hallucinogens and MDMA, which pose their own peculiar issues (including especially tricky ones...
February 27, 2003
The competence of the post office
and the compassion of the IRS,
brought to you
by your friendly local health insurance company
About twenty percent of hospital admissions involve people with drinking problems, which is somewhat more than twice the proportion of problem drinkers in the adult population. For emergency rooms and trauma centers, the proportion is almost certainly higher; some say as much as 50%. Brief intervention by a physician -- roughly, saying "You're drinking too much and need to cut...
February 04, 2003
More on cannabis:
autonomy, medical use, and the supremacy clause
Matthew Yglesias doubts that keeping someone from damaging himself through coercive means counts as a benefit. Well, turn it around: does inducing/allowing someone to damage himself by setting up a dumb choice for him to make count as a harm? If what Matthew proposes is a counting rule, I don't see its justification. The principle of autonomy leads me...
February 03, 2003
Cannabis policy and the "grow your own" option
Matthew Yglesias makes a true statement but draws what I think are two false inferences from it: It's true that "the new public service ads the government has out to denounce the weed all make reference to things (the risk of jail time, the associated violence, etc.) that are caused by criminalization rather than marijuana use itself." But that...
November 27, 2002
Turnover at DEA
Asa Hutchinson will be leaving his post as Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration to take a third-level job with the new Homeland Defense Agency. Hard to figure what this means. I met Hutchinson last year. Good-looking, smooth, articulate, friendly, inquisitive, and ambitious. An excellent explainer -- potentially in the Clinton class -- though without Clinton's impulse to actually...
