Decriminalization

President-elect Obama’s Change.gov website has opened a new round of questions, providing us yet another opportunity to push drug policy reform into the political mainstream. We won the last round of voting, making a marijuana legalization question the top vote-getter on the entire site.

Simply click here and create an account. Scroll through to find drug policy-related questions and vote them up. You can also submit your own. This time, the questions are broken into categories, so I assume the top question in each will get a response. Currently, there’s a drug war question in 2nd place in the "national security" section, so please start by voting for that (it’s our best chance). The "additional issues" section has several good ones as well and I'm sure there are questions in other categories that I've missed.

Keep in mind that you can vote against questions as well, so feel free to use the down-vote in a way that reflects your personal political priorities. Finally, please send your friends the link and encourage them to participate as well. Seeing consistent support for drug policy reform on his own site might give Obama exactly the cover he needs to maybe actually do something.

Here’s a fun article interviewing college students in Massachusetts about their opinions on the new marijuana decriminalization policy. Unsurprisingly, most of them are all for it, but check out this remarkably candid response from an opponent:

Ed Finch, a 20-year-old sophomore from Franklin, voted against decriminalization for a couple of reasons. One was "purely financial," he said. His father is a Boston police officer who gets a lot of overtime when he has to go to court after a marijuana arrest, Finch said.

Yeah, I guess that’s pretty cool if the drug war is paying your tuition, bro. Imagine my surprise that none of the police officers who campaigned bitterly against decrim ever mentioned how much overtime the new law would cost them. It took a college student to concede the rank selfishness that drives police to defend marijuana prohibition.

Of course, it’s not just about money. It’s also about spite:

But his other reason is based on his own experience.

"I was frustrated with my stoner friends. They’re obnoxious, but I put up with them," Finch said.

Well, maybe we should pass a law that says Ed Finch’s friends watch too much Family Guy and never introduce him to any cute chicks.

Voters in Massachusetts have overwhelmingly voted to stop small-time marijuana arrests, but the law-enforcement community doesn’t understand what that means:

BOSTON - Amid confusion among police and prosecutors, a voter-approved law to decriminalize the possession of marijuana goes into effect on Jan. 2, according to a spokeswoman for the state attorney general.
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Agawam Police Chief Robert D. Campbell said there is a tremendous amount of confusion about the law.
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"Somebody has to come up with a mechanism," the chief said.

Geline W. Williams, executive director of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, said there are some "very, very significant" problems with putting the law into effect. [The Republican]

Fortunately, an apparent super-genius named Terence J. Franklin has come up with a theory:

Amherst Town Meeting member Terence J. Franklin, who supports Question 2, said the new law should be easy to put in place.

"Why not just leave people alone?" Franklin added. "What's the big deal? That will solve all the worries."

Now that’s what I’m talking about. Maybe we should let this guy write the ballot language from now on.

Seriously though, it’s understandable that police are entering into some new territory here. Still, there’s no question what the voters have in mind. Most people don’t think possessing marijuana should get you arrested and charged with a crime. There may be some details to iron out, but it’s really pretty silly to act like this is gonna turn the criminal justice system upside down. To even argue that is basically to admit that marijuana enforcement rules your world.

Opponents of Question 2 campaigned tirelessly to convince voters that marijuana enforcement was a low priority and that penalties were lenient. If there was even a shred of truth to any of that, then implementing decrim should be simple.

We covered this in The Drug War Chronicle, but I think it needs more discussion:

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican President Felipe Calderon, locked in a bloody battle with drug cartels, wants to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of street drugs in a plan likely to irk Washington.

Calderon, a conservative in power nearly two years, sent a proposal to Congress on Thursday that would scrap the penalties for drugs including cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, opium and marijuana.
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Under Calderon's plan, people carrying up to 2 grams (0.07 ounces) of marijuana or opium, half a gram of cocaine, 50 milligrams of heroin or 40 milligrams of methamphetamine would face no criminal charges.

Where shall I begin?

1. President Calderon himself has endorsed this. He is the golden boy of the U.S.-subsidized Mexican drug war and after accepting our financial support, he now does something certain to enrage the American Drug Czar.

2. Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox, tried the same thing and backed down due to pressure from Washington, D.C. Now that Calderon has established his drug war credentials, he’s picking up where Fox left off. Obviously, Mexico intends to decriminalize simple possession and won’t stop until it is done.

3. The timing of this move appears designed to circumvent negative attention from Washington, D.C., which is horribly distracted right now for obvious reasons. I’ve been unable to find a response from the Drug Czar or anyone else. Amazing.

Mexico is plagued by drug trade violence, the likes of which we’ve never seen within our borders, and its political leadership is calling for an end to petty drug arrests. It won’t end the bloodshed – not even close – but it is a dramatic shift away from the U.S. drug war mentality that we must continuously pursue and arrest drug users in order to "win" the war on drugs. This is remarkable to say the least.

Pot smokers and drug reformers weren't the only people interested in Barney Frank's news conference yesterday about his decriminalization bill. The law enforcement web site Police 1 noted it as well and posted a short piece asking its readership what they thought. The piece, Are Small Pot Busts Taking Cops Away From Important Work? What Do You Think?, was a calm, unbiased look at the decrim bill and what it would (and wouldn't) do. I wish I could say the same about the responses. Now, before I get into the meat of the matter, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the responses are not necessarily reflective of police officers' views in general, but are only the responses of a self-selected set of anonymous posters who have registered with Police 1 and who Police 1 says are verifiably law enforcement personnel. That caveat notwithstanding, the posters offer a pretty depressing look into the mind-set of at least some cops. Here are some of them:

Raymundo: I think we all know that pot heads just want to be able to do what they want. Marijuana kills brain cells and they don't come back, hello we need those. Marijuana should stay illegal and I hope congress continues to see that it should be illegal.

SPD853: I think we waste time on plenty of crimes. It is our job. Those cops who think it is a waste of time just "wind test" it anyway (if they do anything at all).

I hadn't heard the phrase "wind test" before. I think that means when they just steal your property, open up the baggie and let the goodies blow away in the wind. That's pretty rude, but preferable to getting arrested, I guess.

Chr1s11: How many of those "small" pot busts have been turned over for info leading to a much larger bust for a much worse controlled substance. The pot heads tend to give up the crack dealer to save the misdemeanor record. Besides, it's still an illegal substance that causes serious dificulty for someone to be a productive individual. Pot heads are the loosers that turn into coke/crack/meth heads. Then comes the violent crime they have to commit to support the habbit.

Well, of course. We all know that pot smokers are crack heads who inevitably turn to violent crime to support their habits. The only other comment I have on this poster is that anyone who can't spell loser correctly probably shouldn't be calling other people losers. He would be better off going back to school and actually passing eighth grade this time.

Baltoblue: I'd rather lock people up for Marijuana all day long then taking 6 reports a day because people can't resolve small problems on their own. The fact is that people can't resolve small problems on their own. The fact is that Marijuana is great PC for searching vehicles (on smell), and also leads to larger cases. I for one, have never locked up a nuerosurgeon for pot, and most that I lock up for pot are involved in larger crimes.

A couple of things on this one: I know I shouldn't pick on people for misspellings, but when you're trying to call pot smokers dumb, you should probably spell "neurosurgeon" correctly. Secondly, Baltoblue's point that pot is great for providing PC (probable cause) for searching cars is a common theme on this board.

Mac25: It is already hard enough to get a conviction when they wont emit it is their property but now they will say it is for personal use and I am not selling. When you compare the drugs (marijuana/alcohol) they both have their down falls but seem to be the lesser evil of all the drugs out there. With that said, the battle on drugs including marijuana has gone on too long to turn around and try to make it legal. I would say most, at least 75, of the people that use marijuana are dirt bags and are involved in other crimes or some how connected to those that commit the crimes. The marijuana arrests are and can be used to assist us (police) in catching those criminals. If it is legalized it will be thrown in our faces day in and day out by these criminals.

This guy's reasoning skills are right up there with his spelling and composition skills. So, 75 (percent, I assume, unless he's personally counting up the dirt bags) of pot smokers are "dirt bags" and are involved in other crimes or know somebody involved in other crimes or live in the same country as people committing other crimes or something. But at least there was one poster who was sympathetic:

In 14 years of active road service as a cop, I have never responded to a call involving anyone who had smoked a joint and was ready to fight with their wife or anyone else for that matter. Yes, I think to much time is spent on arrests involving small amounts of pot. Alcohol, on the other hand, has cost our country Billions of dollars and a tremendous loss of life. While I don't think pot should be legal, I think we need to re-think this issue.

There are more comments on the web site. Check 'em out if you have the stomach for seeing what those people who are supposed to serve and protect you think about you. As for me, I always try to treat police officers with the same respect they show me.

The Los Angeles Times is publishing a series of debate pieces this week between Saying Yes author Jacob Sullum and Charles Stimson, a former prosecutor and senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Here's the first question:

What's the difference between drug legalization and decriminalization? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Jacob Sullum's answer is terrific. Charles Stimson's answer begins this way:

Two points: First, there is no difference between decriminalization and legalization. Second, whichever term you want to use, it's a bad idea.

I suppose there is nothing more predictable in the world than the tendency of drug warriors to open their arguments with sweeping and false generalizations. Still, this is just so dumb and wrong that it barely qualifies as an opinion.

We could debate the exact meaning of decriminalization, but it is typically used to describe situations in which penalties are simply reduced, i.e. a fine instead of possible jail time. You can still be taken into custody and subjected to various escalating sanctions. For example, 33,000 people were arrested for possessing small quantities of marijuana in New York City in 2006, despite a decrim policy that's been in effect since 1977. Legalization ends possession arrests and presumably regulates commerce.

It shouldn't be necessary to define commonly used legal terms for a senior legal fellow at a prestigious thinktank, but this is the drug war, and as usual, its supporters can be found creating their own reality in which to debate us.

After getting the opening question wrong, Stimson launches into a series of preposterous claims. He observes that daily wine consumption improves health, while daily marijuana use destroys the mind. He accuses drug-addicted navy sailors of threatening national security. He suggests that some states don't charge people for committing rape. He insists that drug users have too many children out of wedlock.

I can't frickin' wait to hear what he'll say in tomorrow's installment.

[thanks, Scott]

Your itinerant Drug War Chronicle has been bouncing around North America for the last few years, spending significant amounts of time in Washington state, British Columbia, Mexico, Northern California, and my home state, South Dakota. The traveling is nice, but I’ve felt politically homeless, as if my presence anywhere were too fleeting for me to be able to do local or state-level politics, and that’s a frustration. So, as much as I would rather be elsewhere, I’m thinking I need to hunker down here in Dakotaland and try to get something done. It is not friendly territory. South Dakota is the only state where voters rejected an initiative to allow the medicinal use of marijuana. Although it was a close vote, 52% to 48%, it was still a loss. Medical marijuana bills (introduced by an acquaintance of mine) early in the decade went nowhere. The state has one of the fastest growing prison populations right now, thanks largely to its approach to methamphetamine use. Marijuana possession is routinely punished by $500 fines, and there is a good chance of jail time, too. (In fact, you may be better off being convicted of drunk driving, if my local court records are any indication.) And, most hideously of all, South Dakota is the only state I know of that has an “internal possession” law. That means when the police arrest you with a joint, they make you submit to a urine test, then charge you with an additional offense if you test positive. South Dakota judges also routinely sign drug search warrants that include forced drug tests. I know one gentleman currently serving a five-year prison sentence for “internal possession” of methamphetamine metabolites, and no, it wasn’t a plea bargain. That was the only charge they had. South Dakota’s drug reform community (which can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand) seems beaten down, but I think I’m going to reach out and see if I can’t get anyone interested in a four-pronged drug reform legislative package: Hemp. Our neighbors in North Dakota have passed a bill allowing farmers to grow hemp and are currently suing the DEA to force it out of the way. South Dakota farmers would like to make profits, too. Medical marijuana. Yeah, we lost a close one last year, and it’s never been able to get any traction in the legislature. But I think we should make them deal with it again. Our neighbors in Montana seem to be surviving medical marijuana. Marijuana decriminalization. Does South Dakota really think pot possession is more serious than drunk driving? Does the legislature understand the lifelong impact of pot conviction on its constituents? Our neighbors in Nebraska decriminalized pot back in the 1970s, and the cornfields are still standing. Repeal of the internal possession laws. Criminalizing someone for the content of his blood or urine is just wrong. Winning any of these will be an uphill battle, and perhaps even linking hemp to broader drug reform issues would spell its doom here. But I think it’s every good activist’s responsibility to do what he can to slow down the drug war juggernaut, so I’m going to give it a shot. What are you doing in your state?

As Phil notes below, there's a new wave of reefer madness taking hold in England. The Independent's reporting is hysterical in both senses of the word, so much so that the ONDCP blog wasted no time in picking up the story.

We're told that marijuana addiction among teenagers has skyrocketed, that marijuana is 25 times stronger than it was generation ago, and that marijuana just might cause schizophrenia. And the underlying implication of all this is that the effort to legalize marijuana, culminating in the UK's 2004 reclassification decriminalizing simple possession, has somehow caused all of these horrible problems.

Interestingly, The Independent's multiple articles yesterday reached their conclusions without mentioning usage rates. Here's why: marijuana use in the UK is going down. From The Observer in October, 2006:

According to a report by the Central Narcotics Office, after more than a decade of rapid growth, seizures of cannabis resin in Europe dropped by a fifth last year, to 831 tonnes.
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The apparent trend is reinforced by British figures which show that the popularity of cannabis in the UK has plummeted, with 600,000 fewer people smoking or eating marijuana than three years ago.

The failure to address this relevant, yet contradictory fact is a hallmark of alarmist pseudo-scientific drug war reporting. Instead we get this:

Today record numbers of young people are in treatment programmes for skunk [high-grade marijuana] abuse and hospital admissions due to the drug are at their highest ever.

We know that rumors of more potent pot are both wildly exaggerated and largely irrelevant since users adjust their doses to achieve the desired effect regardless of potency. We also know that potency has increased notably (3-4 times, not 25) and that increased potency has much to do with prohibition, which creates a financial incentive for growers to maximize their risk/reward ratio since punishment is determined by weight rather than THC content.

So if it isn't the potency, then what's driving the spike in marijuana treatment in the UK? I think the answer is that reduced stigma and a new policy of not arresting casual users have resulted in more people seeking help. It makes vastly more sense than arguing that marijuana suddenly turned into crack laced with heroin the moment they decriminalized it.

I can't prove my theory anymore than addiction "experts" can prove that marijuana had almost no THC in the '60's. But it makes intuitive sense. Wouldn't you expect more people to seek treatment once the risk of arrest is removed?

After decriminalizing marijuana, the British are seeing lower usage rates and more people seeking treatment. Let's talk about that.

A decade ago, the British newspaper the Independent on Sunday made headlines itself when it came out strongly for the decriminalization of marijuana. Now, sad to say, it appears that the venerable newspaper has succumbed to Reefer Madness. In a front page editorial and series of related articles yesterday, the Independent reversed course:

Yes, our front page today is calculated to grab your attention. We do not really believe that The Independent on Sunday was wrong at the time, 10 years ago, when we called for cannabis to be decriminalized. As Rosie Boycott, who was the editor who ran the campaign, argues, the drug that she sought to decriminalize then was rather different from that which is available on the streets now. Indeed, this newspaper's campaign was less avant-garde than it seemed. Only four years later, The Daily Telegraph went farther, calling for cannabis to be legalized for a trial period. We were leading a consensus, which even this Government - often guilty of gesture-authoritarianism - could not resist, downgrading cannabis from class B to class C. At the same time, however, two things were happening. One was the shift towards more powerful forms of the drug, known as skunk. The other was the emerging evidence of the psychological harm caused to a minority of users, especially teenage boys and particularly associated with skunk. We report today that the number of cannabis users on drug treatment programs has risen 13-fold since our campaign was launched, and that nearly half of the 22,000 currently on such programs are under the age of 18. Of course, part of the explanation for this increase is that the provision of treatment is better than it was 10 years ago. But there is no question, as Robin Murray, one of the leading experts in this field, argues on these pages, that cannabis use is associated with growing mental health problems.

Ouch. This is really a shame, and it's even more shameful because the Independent on Sunday appears to have fallen prey to propaganda that could have come straight from the mouth of the American drug czar. This is not your father's marijuana, the newspaper argues with a straight face, this is the KILLER SKUNK! As one of the related articles puts it, "skunk - a form of cannabis so powerful that experts are warning it can be 25 times more powerful than the cannabis used by previous generations." What!? As far as I know, the most high-powered strains of marijuana are capable of THC yields of around 25% to 30%, with what is commonly known as "kind bud" having a yield of 10% to 15%. (These figures may be a bit off, but not much). Marijuana with 1% THC is about the equivalent of ditch weed. For the Independent's claims to be accurate, all those people smoking pot in Swinging London in the 1960s must have been smoking ditch weed and deceived into thinking they were getting high, while everyone in London now must be smoking the most exclusive buds in the world. This "25 times" figure is just plain bogus, and I don’t understand how the Independent fell for it. We've already debunked the American drug czar's version of this. Now are we going to have to do remedial work across the pond? Besides, skunk is but one variety of high-potency weed. What about AK-47 and White Widow? Singling out skunk as the culprit seems to be to be based on ignorance more than anything. I am also struck by the increasingly shrill claims of links between marijuana and madness. These seem to be especially prevalent in the United Kingdom and Australia. (While the UK frets about skunk, the Australians have their own idiosyncratic and equally scientifically indefensible bogeyman: HYDROPONIC! As if the growing medium used to produce marijuana were the determinant of its nature.) I'm not prepared to debunk the Independent on these claims today, but I do wonder about at least two things: Why isn’t this stuff driving us crazy over here, or, at least, why isn’t John Walters raising holy hell about the link between marijuana and madness? And if marijuana use has increased dramatically in the UK in past decades and if potency has indeed increased (which I don't doubt), then where is the accompanying spike in reported schizophrenia cases? I think I'm going to have to do a feature article on this important and disappointing turn of events. I'll use that to look more closely at the claims about marijuana and mental illness. I am starting to get worried, though; I've been smoking that stuff for 35 years, and now madness could be right around the corner. Who knew?

In our list of drug policy-related ballot issues last Friday, we neglected to mention Massachusetts. Voters in one district there will be voting on whether to instruct their representative to favor marijuana decriminalization, while voters in two other districts will be voting on whether to instruct their representatives to support medical marijuana. These local questions continue a process that began with the 2000 elections and have so far resulted in more than 420,000 Bay State residents voting to support marijuana law reform. Here is the info on the Massachusetts races: