Increased Drug Potency

Drug Prohibition's Cocaine Traffickers Have Proven Both Vicious and Resilient

from The Irish Times (Ireland), January 27, 2011

Location:

Since the beginning of the drug prohibition war, the drug trade has ballooned, spreading violence and corruption across large parts of the globe. Despite billions spent on combating them drug traffickers have for decades outwitted the authorities, keeping consumers in North America and Europe supplied at a price and purity that remains remarkably consistent despite law enforcement officials around the world frequently heralding the dismantling of trafficking networks.

Publication/Source:

The Irish Times (Ireland)

URL:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0127/1224288397713.html

Random Drug Testing Won’t Save the Children From Heroin

by Scott Morgan, December 02, 2008, 09:09pm

Here’s drug czar John Walters shamelessly using a young woman’s death as an opportunity to plug student drug testing:

Heroin killed 19-year-old Alicia Lannes, and her parents say she got the drug from a boyfriend. Experts say that's how most young kids get introduced to drugs: by friends or relatives.
…
While teen drug use is declining, Walters says a Fairfax County heroin ring busted in connection with Lannes' death proves it's still a problem. He supports a federal program used in more than 4,000 schools to randomly drug test students.

"There's no question in my mind had this young woman been in a school, middle school or high school with random testing," said Walters, "She would not be dead today." [FOX DC]

Walters sounds supremely confident, as usual, yet the reality is that random drug testing is often impotent when it comes to discovering heroin use. Student drug testing programs typically rely on urine tests, which can only detect heroin for 3-4 days after use. Only marijuana -- which stays in your system for up to a month – can be effectively detected this way. Thus, random testing actually incentivizes students to experiment with more dangerous drugs like heroin that increase your chances of passing a drug test.

And thanks to the complete failure of the drug war, heroin is stronger today than ever before:

The drug enforcement agency says the purity of heroin found in Virginia is typically higher than usual—making it more deadly.

"They tend not to know how to gauge the strength and they usually take more than they need to," said Patrick McConnel, who oversees Treatment for Youth Services Administration Alcohol and Drug Services.

There are no easy answers here, to be sure, and I don’t claim any monopoly on the solutions to youth drug abuse. But I guarantee you that the problem isn’t our failure to collect more urine from young people. As long as the most dangerous substances continue to be manufactured, distributed, and controlled by criminals, the face of our drug problem will remain the same.

Marijuana Evolves Faster Than Human Beings

by Scott Morgan, November 14, 2007, 12:31am

Explaining the failure of marijuana prohibition is easy. Sociology, economics, history, and psychology can all help to explain why a safe and popular drug cannot be removed from the market by force. Still, there is another important reason why marijuana is here to stay: it evolves at an incredibly rapid pace, becoming stronger and more profitable every day.

The vigorous growth and adaptability of the marijuana plant has long frustrated efforts by law-enforcement to thwart its production. Specific strains are easily cross-bred, producing offspring that emphasize certain qualities, thus growers in Oregon can develop a strain that grows well in Oregon's climate with minimal effort. Hybridization not only improves potency, but can also shorten flowering time and increase yield, thereby enabling growers to produce more in less time.

We're witnessing a situation in which the biological vigor of the plant itself has far outpaced law-enforcement efforts that were never effective to begin with. Indoor-grown strains can advance through 3-4 generations in a year's time, with the best specimens from each batch selected for cloning or crossbreeding. Each successive generation carries on the best traits of the former, which explains why growers can now accomplish in a basement what used to require an acre or more in the woods.

The great irony of all this is that drug warriors still think increased marijuana potency is an argument for their side. In reality, nothing could better illustrate the failure of their efforts to reduce the drug's production. Harsh marijuana laws have incentivized growers to produce a stronger product, which carries the same penalties by weight, while commanding higher prices on the street.

As the bitter debate over marijuana legalization rages on, the plants will grow ever faster, bigger, and stronger. Marijuana is one of nature's most remarkable creations, and it is unbelievable that so many people still haven't figured out that this plant is here to help us. From healthy foods to a promising cancer cure, we should be grateful that cannabis sativa grows and evolves as vigorously as it does.

With every forward step in marijuana's evolution, the war against this resilient plant becomes less and less effective.

Note: Thanks to court-qualified cannabis expert Chris Conrad for answering growing questions, and to pot-paparazzi Steve Bloom for turning me on to the government's awesome 2008 cultivation assessment, which got me thinking about this.

Location:

United States

See map: Google Maps

This is Not Your Parents' Cocaine

by Scott Morgan, May 09, 2007, 07:37pm

From The Baltimore Sun:

The United States and its Latin American allies are losing a major battle in the war on drugs, according to indicators showing that cocaine prices dipped for most of 2006 and American users were getting more bang for their buck.

We've already covered this story, but it's beginning to generate broader coverage. Of course, no amount of negative publicity will silence our brave drug warriors even momentarily. Here's Karen Tandy just yesterday:

"Plan Colombia is working. The amount of land used for the cultivation of coca is at an historic low in Colombia," the head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Karen Tandy, told a drug law enforcement conference in Madrid. [AFP]

So why does Washington cover up increased cocaine potency, while aggressively trumpeting increased marijuana potency? The answer is simple, although if you asked the drug czar, he'd turn purple and pretend not to understand what you mean.

In the case of cocaine, the federal government has long identified reducing purity and increasing price as the primary goals of our ridiculously expensive and ongoing South American drug war investments. Increased cocaine potency in 2007 raises serious doubts about the efficacy of the brutal jungle wars we've been bankrolling for 10 years.

In the case of marijuana, however, the government's primary interest is in convincing an experienced public that this isn’t the same drug that has so consistently failed to hurt anyone. Jacob Sullum puts it best:

These warnings have to be understood mainly as a rationalization for the hypocrisy of parents (and politicians) who smoked pot in their youth and thought it was no big deal then but feel a need to explain why it is a big deal now.

Of course, while drug war demagogues are fond of comparing today's more potent marijuana to cocaine, there's really nothing to which they can compare today's stronger cocaine. I dunno, anthrax maybe? When I start hearing reports about weaponized nose-candy, I'm totally moving to Jupiter.

Location:

United States

See map: Google Maps