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Drug War Violence is Destroying Mexico's Economy

According to a new expert analysis, Mexico's brutal drug war is costing the country a whole hell of a lot of money:

Tobias estimates the economic cost of Mexico’s violence is 2 percent to 3 percent of GDP, and the total cost is $120 billion, or about 12 percent of Mexico’s $1.085 trillion GDP in 2008. The estimate by Bulltick, a Miami-based brokerage with offices in four Latin American countries, includes prevention measures, prison costs, lost foreign direct investment and expenses to victims and businesses. [Bloomberg]

What I just can't understand, no matter how hard I try, is why on earth anyone ever expected a different outcome than this. It is literally the goal of Mexico's chief drug war strategists to reduce violence and save their nation's reputation. That is what they thought would happen if they cracked down on the drug trade. Instead, every single problem they sought to address has gotten worse.

And as bad as things have gotten, you can bet that the leaders of the Mexican drug war will look at this data and say that it shows the need for more aggressive strategies to finally defeat the cartels.
In The Trenches

Press Release: 33 U.S. Clinical Studies Show Marijuana's Medical Use, New Journal Article Says

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE   
SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

33 U.S. Clinical Studies Show Marijuana's Medical Use, Journal of Opioid Management Article Says
Contrary to Opponents' Claims, Controlled Studies Have Repeatedly Demonstrated Safety, Efficacy


CONTACT: Bruce Mirken, MPP director of communications ............... 415-585-6404 or 202-215-4205


SEATTLE, WASHINGTON -- In a landmark article in the Journal of Opioid Management, University of Washington researcher Sunil Aggarwal and colleagues document 33 U.S. controlled clinical trials published from 1971 to 2009 confirming that marijuana is a safe, effective medicine for specific medical conditions.    


     Under federal law, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug, defining it as having high potential for abuse, unsafe for use even under medical supervision, and lacking currently accepted medical uses in the U.S. "In fact," Aggarwal and colleagues write, "nearly all of the 33 published controlled clinical trials conducted in the United States have shown significant and measurable benefits in subjects receiving the treatment."  Additionally, the paper documents the growing acceptance of the therapeutic use of marijuana among organized medicine groups and estimates that "in 2008, approximately 7,000 American physicians have made such authorizations for a total of approximately 400,000 patients."


     Regarding abuse and safety issues, Aggarwal et al. write that withdrawal symptoms -- a classic symptom of drug dependence -- are notably absent from the published trials, while "the vast majority of reported adverse events were not serious ... It is clear that as an analgesic, cannabis is extremely safe with minimal toxicity."


     Unfortunately, the article continues, ignorance regarding marijuana remains widespread in the medical community. "There remains a near complete absence of education about cannabinoid medicine in any level of medical training," Aggarwal writes.


     "This is arguably the most thorough review of the literature on medical marijuana since the Institute of Medicine report over a decade ago, with a trove of data that wasn't available to the IOM," said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. "It is simply incomprehensible that a medicine that is so clearly safe and effective remains banned from medical use by federal law and the laws of 37 states."


     The article, "Medicinal Use of Cannabis in the United States: Historical Perspectives, Current Trends, and Future Directions," is available at http://tinyurl.com/m9oo44. A complete list of the 33 U.S. clinical trials is available from Sunil Aggarwal at [email protected] or 206-375-3785.


     With more than 27,000 members and 100,000 e-mail subscribers nationwide, the Marijuana Policy Project is the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the United States. MPP believes that the best way to minimize the harm associated with marijuana is to regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol. For more information, please visit http://MarijuanaPolicy.org.

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In The Trenches

Press Release: New FBI numbers show failure of prohibition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 14, 2009 CONTACT: Tom Angell - (202) 557-4979 or [email protected] ONE DRUG ARREST EVERY 18 SECONDS IN THE U.S. NEW FBI NUMBERS SHOW FAILURE OF "WAR ON DRUGS" WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A group of police and judges who want to legalize drugs pointed to new FBI numbers released today as evidence that the "war on drugs" is a failure that can never be won. The data, from the FBI's "Crime in the United States" report, shows that in 2008 there were 1,702,537 arrests for drug law violations, or one drug arrest every 18 seconds. "In our current economic climate, we simply cannot afford to keep arresting more than three people every minute in the failed 'war on drugs,'" said Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics detective who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). "Plus, if we legalized and taxed drug sales, we could actually create new revenue in addition to the money we'd save from ending the cruel policy of arresting users." Last December, LEAP commissioned a report by a Harvard University economist which found that legalizing and regulating drugs would inject $77 billion a year into the struggling U.S. economy. Today's FBI report, which can be found at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/arrests/index.html, shows that 82.3 percent of all drug arrests in 2008 were for possession only, and 44.3 percent of drug arrests were for possession of marijuana. Pointing to the collateral consequences that often follow drug arrests, LEAP's Cole continued, "You can get get over an addiction, but you will never get over a conviction." Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is a 13,000-member organization representing cops, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens and others who now want to legalize and regulate all drugs after witnessing horrors and injustices fighting on the front lines of the "war on drugs." More info online at http://www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com. # # #
In The Trenches

Press Release: Marijuana Arrests Drop for First Time Since 2002

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE   
SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Marijuana Arrests Drop for First Time Since 2002
Five Years of Record Arrests Had No Effect on Rate of Marijuana Use


CONTACT: Bruce Mirken, MPP director of communications ............... 415-585-6404 or 202-215-4205

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. marijuana arrests declined in 2008 - the first such drop since 2002 -- according to figures released by the FBI today. According to the just-released Uniform Crime Reports, U.S. law enforcement made 847,863 arrests on marijuana charges, 89 percent of which were for possession, not sale or manufacture -- more arrests for marijuana possession than for all violent crimes combined. An American was arrested on marijuana charges every 37 seconds.


     Marijuana arrests peaked in 2007 at over 872,000.


     The new report comes on the heels of the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released Sept. 10, which showed an increase in both the number and percentage of Americans who admit having used marijuana. In  2003, when marijuana arrests set what was then an all-time record of 755,186, 40.6 percent of Americans aged 12 and over said they had used marijuana. In 2008, that figure was 41 percent, or 102,404,000 Americans willing to tell government survey-takers that they had used marijuana.


     "This slight dip in the number of marijuana arrests provides a small amount of relief to the tens of millions of American marijuana consumers who have been under attack by their own government for decades," said Marijuana Policy Project executive director Rob Kampia. "It's time to stop wasting billions of tax dollars criminalizing responsible Americans for using a substance that's safer than alcohol, and to put an end to policies that simply hand this massive consumer market to unregulated criminals."


     With more than 27,000 members and 100,000 e-mail subscribers nationwide, the Marijuana Policy Project is the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the United States. MPP believes that the best way to minimize the harm associated with marijuana is to regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol. For more information, please visit http://MarijuanaPolicy.org.

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In The Trenches

Press Release: Revelations of DEA Participation in San Diego Medical Marijuana Raids Raises Questions about White House Policy toward State Law

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 10, 2009 Contact: Margaret Dooley-Sammuli at (213) 291-4190 or Tommy McDonald at (510) 229 5215 Revelations of DEA Participation in San Diego Medical Marijuana Raids Raises Questions about White House Policy toward State Law Advocates Criticize Feds for Supporting Local Political Agenda, Not the Law SAN DIEGO – At a press conference today, San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis described how a number of San Diego medical marijuana dispensaries were raided by local and federal agents yesterday. Advocates condemned the raids and arrests of patients, and criticized federal involvement in a local political effort to restrict legal access to medical marijuana. “We’re extremely disappointed that the feds participated in this attack on patients. The priority of the White House should be protecting patients, not helping local officials enforce oppressive restrictions,” said Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, deputy state director for the Drug Policy Alliance. “Any concerns that the District Attorney may have will not be resolved through SWAT-style tactics like pulling people from their wheelchairs, as we saw yesterday.” Medical marijuana was legalized in California in 1996, when voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act. San Diego County filed suit to try to overturn the state law in 2004; that effort came to an end in May when the US Supreme Court refused to hear the county’s final appeal. In August, the county enacted a 45-day moratorium on medical marijuana dispensaries in unincorporated areas to so the county could develop land-use regulations. On Tuesday, the San Diego City Council voted 6-1 to establish a citizen’s taskforce to create regulations governing the supply of medical marijuana. According to San Diego’s Channel 10, the taskforce will devise “guidelines for medical marijuana patients and caregivers, the operation of dispensaries and growing cooperatives and the ground rules for police enforcement.” “The federal government has no business enforcing state and local medical marijuana laws. It’s our local governments’ job to regulate medical marijuana and enforce those rules – not with armed raids, but with civil actions,” said Ms. Dooley-Sammuli. “The Obama administration has allowed Ms. Dumanis to use federal resources to further obstruct implementation of Prop 215 as she prepares to run for re-election in 2010. The people of San Diego deserve better.” The involvement of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration in yesterday’s raids came as a surprise to some, because of statements by both President Obama and US Attorney General Eric Holder that suggested that the federal government would reduce its involvement in such enforcement actions in states where medical marijuana is legal. ###
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Drugs the Most Numerous Arrest Type in '08, Though Down Slightly from '07, FBI Reports

The FBI has released its preliminary 2008 drug arrest numbers, collected as part of the Uniform Crime Reports program. The report verifies that the nation's police forces -- federal, state, county and local -- continued to pour vast amounts of limited police resources into the ineffective anti-drug effort. Arrested for drug abuse violations (as they call them) numbered 1,702,537 in 2008, out of a total of 14,005,615 non-traffic arrests -- 12.2%, more than one out of eight. This is a slight drop from 2007, when there were about 1.8 million, according to UCR, about 13%. 82% of drug arrests were for possession, and more than half of those were for marijuana. That slight percentage drop in the number of drug arrests means nearly 100,000 people who were spared the drug war shaft, so this is a good thing. The fact that it would drop at all provides some encouragement -- hopefully warranted, though only time will tell about that. Whichever way you look at it, it is a vast number of arrests affecting a vast number of people, and a whole lot of police time that could have been spent more usefully doing almost anything else. The reports points out that drug arrests were more numerous than any other category of offense that UCR tracks. Perhaps because of that, the front page of the arrest section has a useful table categorizing what the arrest types were, for which drugs, and where they took place. I've copied the table below; but you can see the original, and then explore UCR for '08 and many years past, at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/arrests/. Expect a more detailed analysis from Phil, if not in this week's Chronicle then in the next one.
Drug abuse violations United States total Northeast Midwest South West
Total1 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
Sale/
Manufacturing:		 Total 17.7 22.1 19.3 16.4 16.1
Heroin or cocaine and their derivatives 7.7 13.4 5.6 7.5 5.8
Marijuana 5.5 5.9 8.2 4.3 5.4
Synthetic or manufactured drugs 1.5 1.2 1.2 2.6 0.6
Other dangerous nonnarcotic drugs 3.0 1.5 4.4 1.9 4.3
Possession: Total 82.3 77.9 80.7 83.6 83.9
Heroin or cocaine and their derivatives 20.1 20.7 12.5 21.0 22.3
Marijuana 44.3 46.5 51.9 50.2 33.2
Synthetic or manufactured drugs 3.3 2.7 3.8 4.2 2.5
Other dangerous nonnarcotic drugs 14.6 8.0 12.5 8.2 25.9
 
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Room for Debate on Mexico's Drug Decriminalization Law

The New York Times "Room for Debate" blog has a series of comments on Mexico's new decriminalization law. Will it reduce violence, or police corruption? Will increase drug use? Is it really a decriminalization law? Former foreign minister of Mexico Jorge Castaneda is among the participants. Check it out . Also of interest today, Mary O'Grady in the Wall Street Journal on "Mexico's Hopeless Drug War." O'Grady points out that "[p]rohibition and demand make otherwise worthless weeds valuable," arguing that neither the decrim law nor Calderon's ongoing drug war will reduce the violence. Via Tony Newman...
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Exit Strategies for the War on Drugs, Part I: Framing the Discussion

(Glen Stark has provided the first installment in a multi-part discussion about the challenges we'll have when crafting a post-prohibition system. We thought it was interesting enough to post to our home page. - Dave) I am gradually of the opinion that drug-policy reform is now a sure thing, and the discussion will need to shift to alternative policies. This is the first in a multi-part series, in which I prattle on about what comes next after the war on drugs. This post attempts to formulate a useful basis for the discussion of the subject.

The following is available in full, in correct formatting, here.

The Guardian has an excellent article: Prohibition's failed. Time for a new drugs policy. The first line sums it up perfectly "http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/06/editorial-drugs-policy-latin-america". It's clear that the debate now needs to be about what comes next. We've created a stupid war against the citizenry our own country. It's completely fucking up our civil liberties, and in fact the entire premise is completely unconstitutional. Argentina's government has realized this, and if we lived in a healthier democracy, we would have figured out the same thing by now. The good news is we seem to be getting there, so the time for figuring out an exit strategy would seem to be now. The issues aren't simple. We have a monstrous police-state machinery in place. We have to pull out the troops and integrate them back into society, and provide them with counselling to reintegrate them into normal society. While this should be an easy sell, as there is a peace-dividend (reduced spending on law-enforcement and prisons, improved civil liberties, reduced crime...) the drug-warriors don't want to give up sucking at the government teat, and form a powerful lobby. The most difficult question of course is "okay, prohibition doesn't work, what now?". Unfortunately, the people who should be working on this are still too afraid to admit prohibition has failed. While they get up to speed, the most productive discussions in this arena are taking place online, in in the periphery of other discussions. I'd like to discuss the issue more directly.

Goals:

So, let's identify some (hopefully) uncontroversial goals, by which we can judge whether a drug policy is working or not.
  • minimize addiction rates.
  • minimize overdose deaths.
  • protect children and uninformed consumers.
  • minimize crime (e.g. junkies stealing to get their 'fix')
There are other effects which are more difficult to quantify, such as health impacts (cancer and such) and effects on productivity. While these are worth considering, I think it's a reasonable approach to consider them second-order effects. Once we have a policy which optimizes the easily measured first-order effects, we can worry about the second order ones. The key thing to keep in mind here is prohibition is a nightmarish failure, regardless of which effects you consider. It doesn't accomplish any of the desired effects. The results of prohibition are so disastrously bad, that complete deregulation might end up working just as well, without the enormous cost (socially and economically) of funding the war. An error the drug warriors make is framing the discussion in terms of "zero-tolerance". They want to completely eliminate all drug use. What the last 100 years has shown is that that won't happen. You can keep spending more money, you can keep use the constitution as toilet paper after shitting on people's civil rights, you can get more and more violent and intolerant, you can impose increasingly draconian laws, and people will still use drugs. The figures are there. It takes enormous cognitive dissonance to deny them, so let's stop doing There remains of course the question of how much we are willing to pay to achieve those goals. I suspect that the people who are so willing to spend billions on the drug war, will be less willing to spend the same billions on counselling, care, rehabilitation, education, and maintenance programs. Fortunately, the drug war has been so damned expensive, anything we come up with likely be much more effective at a greatly reduced financial cost. This will allow us to frame all such harm reduction spending in terms of savings over the prohibitionist approach. Having identified a set of goals which I hope we can all agree on, let us consider what will be needed to implement a sane drug policy. It's my conviction that a good drug policy will involve the following components.
  1. Rational evaluation of drug harm.
  2. Honest drug education.
  3. Honest drug scheduling (a rational classification system).
  4. A sane handling of the respective classes of drugs.
  5. Reality based assessment of policy effects.
  6. More power to states and communities for deciding drug policies.
Each of these points is non-trivial, and will require some discussion. Thus they will be the subject of future posts. Some might disagree with necessity of a drug scheduling system at all, and would advocate regulating all drugs like we do alcohol. While I see some merits to such an extremely libratarian approach, I would argue against pursuing such a goal for the following reasons: It's unrealistic in today's political climate, it's too rapid and extreme a change, and I suspect such a policy might be nearly as harmful as the current policy. If it's not clear to me, it's going to be extremely unpalatable for the average citizen. Keeping the classification system allows to handle the approach in a more reasonable and rationed manner. We can agree to pursue a policy that accomplished the stated goals, and analyse each drug case by case, based on a rational assessment of its relative harm, made by qualified medical researchers. It also allows us to separate the questions "do we need drug policy reform", and "what is a good drug policy for drug X". The answer to the former question is simple, the answer to the latter is, in some cases, rather difficult. For example, I am torn on what constitutes a good policy for Heroin or Crack (I do know that current American policies are the wrong answer, but I'm not sure heroin and crack bars are the right answer).

Conclusion and caveats:

To successfully advocate for drug policy reform, I think keeping the above goals in mind is extremely useful. It provides a concrete, uncontroversial framework for evaluating the failure of current policy, and provides some useful indications for steps in a positive direction. There may be additional goals which are useful to bring into the discussion, but in the terrible situation we currently find ourselves in, we should strive to work toward unifying, uncontroversial goals. Once these are acheived, we can open up more controversial, difficult discussions, such as "what right does the government have telling me what I can put in my body anyway", or the ethical merits of a drug-free lifestyle versus the spiritual benefits of psychotropic drugs.
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The Manhattan DA’s Race: The Princess of Darkness vs. Two Former Coke-Snorting Assistant DAs

Former Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder has made her career as a “tough on crime” prosecutor and “hang ‘em high” judge, reveling in the moniker "The Princess of Darkness." For years on the bench, she routinely sentenced low-level drug offenders to harsh Rockefeller drug law sentences without batting an eye. Now, in a tight race for Manhattan District Attorney against former Assistant DAs and self-admitted former cocaine users (more on that below) Richard Aborn and Cyrus Vance, Jr., in next Tuesday’s election, Snyder seems to be changing her tune. Citing her “progressive” vision, Snyder says : "For more than 20 years on the bench, I have supported alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent, first-time offenders by promoting programs that provide drug treatment, education, and job training. The most important work I did as a judge was finding young people who were not yet locked into the cycle of incarceration and violent crime, and working with all parties to find effective and appropriate sentencing that avoided incarceration and led to rehabilitation." Some Rockefeller law victims, though, aren’t buying what Snyder is peddling. Writing in the Huffington Post, former Rockefeller law prisoner Tony Papa blasted Snyder for sentencing countless low-level drug offenders as "kingpins," including Jose Garcia, who died in a prison cell at age 69, serving a life sentence under the Rockefeller laws. "Nowadays there is a new and improved Leslie Crocker Snyder," wrote Papa. "She is running for New York City District Attorney and, remarkably, now supports Rockefeller Drug Law reform. I almost fell off my chair when I heard this. She sounded nothing like the old "Princess of Darkness." Do I think Snyder really supports drug law reform? No, I don't. She knows that she needs the black and Latino vote. And she knows that public opinion has shifted, as the wastefulness and ineffectiveness of harsh sentences for drug law violations has been brought to light over the past decade. I guess running for a political office has a way of changing a person's thinking." Here’s another Rockefeller law victim who isn’t buying either: In a debate last week, Snyder admitted smoking pot, but both Aborn and Vance trumped that by admitting they had snorted cocaine as young men. Of course, both men did the mandatory ritual negation of their acts, with Aborn calling his coke-snorting “an error” and Vance saying his message to young people was that “drug use is something to be avoided.” Aborn sounds pretty progressive on drug policy reform: "It's time to stop ruining young people's lives because of a single mistake," he says on his web site. "It's time to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws and replace them with a sensible policy grounded in public health and common sense. Drug kingpins deserve prison. First and second-time non-violent offenders deserve an opportunity to rebuild their lives. And the families of offenders unfairly caught up in the draconian Rockefeller laws deserve to be reunited." And so does Cy Vance: "In April, Governor Paterson signed into law significant reforms to New York State’s draconian Rockefeller Drug laws,” he says on his web site. “As a prosecutor, a defense attorney, and member of the New York State Commission on Sentencing Reform which provided the blueprint for these overdue changes, I welcome the progress that has been made on this important issue. During the more than two decades I have been involved in sentencing issues, I have always been an advocate for moving toward a treatment model that protects public safety through rehabilitation where possible as opposed to a punitive model based on incarceration….As District Attorney, I will continue to work with the Governor and State Legislature to ensure that our drug laws include statewide treatment options and re-entry programs that break the cycle of crime by changing behavior and strengthening families." But neither Alford nor Vance will come out and say that people should not be prosecuted for drug use or simple possession, like what they did in their youths. Maybe they don’t believe that. Maybe they think they should have been caught and punished for snorting a line or two. Maybe they think they should have been sent to drug treatment. But somehow, I doubt that. I think it’s more likely that just don’t think it would be politically expedient to say that absent harm to others, drug use should not be the state’s business. And that’s too bad. I don’t live in Manhattan, so I don’t get to vote on Tuesday. I wouldn’t presume to tell New Yorkers how to vote, and I’m not sure which candidate I would vote for. But I know which one I wouldn’t vote for. Got that, Princess? (This article was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)
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