Richard Cowen wrote about it back in 1986 in National Review:
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-narcs-created-crack-richard-cowan.html
It was discussed before Congress in 1988:
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/scenario-for-enlightened-drug-policy.html
I wrote about in my articles published by the DPF back in 1990-1992:
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/02/ever-changing-ever-confused-popular.html
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/02/cocaine-prohibition-water-or-gasoline.html
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/02/cocaine-conversion-back-to-coca.html
It was even acknowledged by a US Congress office of Technology Assessment report in 1993 which, though set up to stop coca, instead recommended legalizing coca products (and was shelved by the corrupt, led by the nose by Jesuit Georgetown University Clinton Administration):
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/alternative-coca-reduction-expansion.html
Nadelmann can make a great deal of sense, but needs to go further into how prohibition makes things worse by its iron law of promoting more concentrated and hence more abuse prone substances as concentrated forms of cocaine over coca.
Along with market protection for carcinogenic Virginia Bright Leaf cigarettes.
We do know that the issues are connected, as per the 'drug war's basis as agricultural (and pharmaceutical) criminal mercantilism, and that the history and the relevance of the coca issue has been greatly downplayed under the 'leadership' of those connected with the cigarette industry.
Hence it's long overdue for attacking this 'drug war' as a market protectionist scam, illegal under the US constitution, which is why amendments were needed for enacting and then repealing alcohol prohibition, and really get serious about this power abuse occurring again.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
A Postulate
COCA LEAF/
COFFEE;
COCAINE/
CAFFEINE
SNIFFING, SMOKING OR INJECTING A
CONCENTRATED WHITE POWDER;
OR
DRINKING A NATURAL HERBAL
INFUSION
WHAT DRUG POLICIES GAVE US WHAT?
ARE WE FIGHTING DRUG ABUSE OR
INSTITUTIONALIZING IT?
Douglas A. Willinger pamphlet 1993 NIDA conference
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
It is criminal mercantilism to protect Tobacco cigarettes and pharmaceuticals
The early 1900s William Randolph Hearst- Samuel Adams Hopkins - Harvey Wiley USDA-AMA/APhA conspiracy to ban coca
(What Ira Glasser is apparently OK with not addressing)
The drug war is criminal agricultural mercantilism.
It was initiated by the nation with a high political regard for Tobacco, through the USDA – established in 1862 by then U.S. President Lincoln to promote domestic agriculture -- and the private AMA-APhA, with stated concerns about coca’s use as a tobacco habit cure, and that in general of various herbs as essentially alternatives to synthetics (the real ‘patent’ drugs later known as pharmaceuticals). This was a long time political alliance marked, amongst other things, by the numerous cigarette advertisements in medical journals expressing the conventional medical establishment’s endorsement of cigarette smoking as healthy.
It came about just after the time that the U.S. took control of what became the Panama Canal Zone, to complete the canal essentially connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, tremendously shortening shipping supply lines of harvested Coca leaves from Peruvian ports to north Atlantic markets, by 1914- the year the U.S. enacted the prohibitive Harrison ‘Narcotics’ Tax Act.That act, signed by US President Woodrow Wilson on December 17, 1914 and taking effect March 1, 1915 prohibited any food or dug products containing any amount of cocaine.
It would be the outgrowth of this anti-coca Hearst-Wiley collaboration that emerged in 1904, following years of expressing no such interest in banning coca- notably Wiley had been head of the USDA Chemistry Bureau since 1883, yet apparently never said anything even negative about coca until 1904. This collaboration included that directly between Hearst and his ‘muckraking’ writer Samuel Adams Hopkins, and Hopkins and Wiley for a series of articles seeking a ban on coca based upon confusing it in people’s minds with cocaine in highly concentrated doses. Since decades of Vin Mariani use had shown coca to be rather safe safe and effective, such interests had to resort to innuendos designed to confuse the acute toxicity of concentrated cocaine dosing to create a doubt in the many unfamiliar with coca the intellectually slippery slope of the false idea that coca was somehow chronically toxic. This campaign’s political deceitfulness with those unfamiliar with coca versus those already familiar was evident with the US State Department’s acknowledgment that the so called Opium conventions should for the time being respect those areas were coca was legally differentiated from concentrated cocaine versus, say, the emperor of China by defining cocaine as a singularity as a drug that is injected- infinitely its most deleterious mode of administration!
This deceitful, slippery slope nature of the anti cocaine in any amount campaigners – or crusaders – had its initial legislative expression at the U.S. Federal-National level with the 1906 U.S. Pure Foods and Drugs Act. Such didn’t ban coca, but instead provided the means to effectively do so by empowering the USDA Bureau of Chemistry – aka Wiley – to arbitrarily declare a substance deleterious to health and ban in from food products as “adulterated”. Since Wiley in collaboration with the Hearst publishing empire had ‘determined’ that cocaine was simply a bad drug regardless of any actual pharmacological matters between dilute and concentrated dosing- say as between drinking coffee and snorting smoking or injecting pulverized No Doz or Vivarin caffeine pills, many coca- dilute cocaine manufactures failed to list cocaine as an ingredient to avoid stigma- though not necessarily deceive as many of these products were conspicuously labeled as coca, hence bringing into question why coffee or tea products were not required to list caffeine as an ingredient. Sure, coca products naturally containing cocaine could remain in substances sold as drugs, which were coming increasingly at this same time under non refillable prescription requirements by the various U.S. State legislature (as a result of the same Hearst-Wiley-AMA-APhA campaign/crusade). In 1907, Vin Mariani for U.S. markets was sold de-cocainated, a move only furthering the erroneous idea that dilute cocaine was somehow bad).
The 1906 act also established a list of drugs, including cocaine, that had to be listed in the product’s labeling list of ingredients, including the amount per product fluid ounce, but with caffeine and nicotine unfairly excluded: despite Wiley’s later incessant crusading against Coca-Cola for containing isolated caffeine- in contrast to coffee and teas naturally containing caffeine- a distinction he would altogether neglect concerning coca versus isolated (yet dilute) cocaine, let alone isolated cocaine in concentrated doses. This act neither mentioned coca nor coffee. Yet its double standard on labeling would further portend a clear agricultural market protection based bias already expressed by its clever definition of its jurisdiction over substances contained within the U.S. Pharmacopeia – an official encyclopedia listing of all commonly accepted medicines – from which Tobacco had been deleted in 1905. The continuing campaign-crusade against cocaine irregardless of whether dilute or concentrated, expressing itself as the state legislative banning from foods and non-refillable prescription requirements, and such various things as the 1908 U.S. Homes Commission, and the USDA’s infamous Farmer’s Bulletin article ; "Habit Forming Agents: Their indiscriminate sale and use a menace”, would lead to the 1914 Harrison Act.
The 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, by its establishment of a dictatorial USDA to protect agricultural markets with no requirement of scientific basis, with its market intervention regarding coca and tobacco, ultimately cemented by the 1914 Harrison Act, had clear sales effects.
Yet it has been an unmitigated health disaster that was foreseeable.
... there are tens of thousands of people in the United States who die every year from the excessive use of cigarettes; and yet I find Senators still pulling away at the cigarette as though t were a perfectly harmless thing. I believe the Senator will agree with me that there are many thousands of people who die from what is called tobacco cancer, a cancerous growth affecting the throat from overuse of cigars; and we find perhaps 60 percent of the Senators pulling away at the cigar as unconcerned as though no one were dying as a result of these cigars...They knew.
U.S. Congress, Senator Porter James McCumber (R) North Dakota, August 15, 1914
In light of this disaster of criminal agricultural mercantilism, criminal as a violation of the U.S. Constitution, and agricultural as the USDA protecting a well established domestic agricultural commodity from a foreign competitor that they studied just prior to 1904, and would have found to be more impractical-expensive to grow in most of the U.S. as it would require hothouses at a time of the foreseeable competition of the Panama Canal shortening coca supply lines to north Atlantic markets, I can only ask why the DPF’s Arnold Trebach would write, in his book The Heroin Solution, that the Harrison Act was somehow progressive:
Despite its bad reputation, however, I am, on balance, prepared to ascribe “a good motive”, in Senator Lane’s words, to the HNA itself. Although I have long considered it a repressive piece of legislation, a fresh reading of the historical record now leads me to believe that it was, on the whole, a rather intelligent, rational and progressive one.
The Heroin Solution, Arnold Trebach, at p 122
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
PETER LEWIS: IRA GLASSER is a waste of $$$
Don't Spend Funds on Organizations Headed by the likes of Ira Glasser
This is a letter to Lewis, from a long time activist since the latter 1980s, about the mismanagement of the DPF-DPA
Illustration: Douglas Willinger and Ethan Nadelmann at the 1992 DPF conference,
published in the Washington City Paper, December 18, 1992
It was at that 1993 “Latin America’ panel at the 1993 DPF conference, held at the L’Enfant center in Washington, D.C. where I first met Ira Glasser, together with a British medical journalist, Anita Bennett, suggesting coca tea as a birth aid to women, relaxing the vagina to speed childbirth and reduce the instances of brain damage from prolonged labor. He was personable and interested in this and the coca issue more generally- encouraging me to issue my proposal for the next year’s DPF conference; that conference was “The Crucial Next Stage: Health Care and Human Rights”, and my proposal was for a panel “Coca- Turning Over a New Leaf in Reducing Health Care Costs.”
Coca with its market threat to tobacco cannot be discussed.
Notably the occasional DPF conference ‘History Panel' (held at their 1999 and 2003 conferences) entirely excluded the history of cocaine prohibition.
This was despite the latter panel having only 2 speakers- and my availability to give such a presentation from my year’s long work “Coca- Forgotten Medicine” that I have made largely available here at my blog “Freedom of Medicine and Diet”.
Neither can the broader issue of prohibition’s iron law of pushing concentrated forms of drugs, marked by their rejection of anything remotely like my 1997 DPF conference proposal for a panel “Tinctures of Opium, Wines of Coca, etc: Popular, Pre-prohibition Uses of Natural Plants Perverted by Drug Prohibition into today’s “Hard” Drug Plague":
Indeed, as stressed by “Coca- Forgotten Medicine”, the selective drug prohibition statues arose out of a campaign coordinated through William Randolph Hearst’s publishing empire and high up officials within both the private AMA-APhA alliance and the public USDA Bureau of Chemistry Bureau Chief Harvey Washington Wiley- all taken together as an agenda of what was to be banned and what was to be protected.
- Coca, and other popular herbs, including Opium were not patentable- and hence came under attack by the AMA-APhA’s ‘Council on Pharmacy’ for reasons unrelated to any concern about health effects, while the USDA would target Coca as dangerous under a theory confusing the acute toxicity of large amounts of concentrated cocaine as a basis for believing that regular coca consumption thus had to be likewise toxic. As a stimulant, Coca presented a market threat to anything containing caffeine, and Tobacco.
- Cannabis was attacked by some, but would be the focus of yet another one of William Randolph Hearst’s screeds against a plant- whether directly as with MJ, or indirectly with Coca via demonifying “cocaine”.
- Tobacco, which had been commonly breed as ‘Virginia Bright Leaf’ variety, a larger leaf with relatively little psycho activity providing a ‘smoother’ smoking capable of being drawn deeply into the lungs, had in the 1880s become more marketable via the development of industrial cigarette rolling machines greatly lowing costs of production. Although such cigarettes or at least their sale, would be banned in some U.S. states, the landmark 1906 U.S. Pure Foods and Drugs Act allowing the USDA to effectively ban Coca in food products via its empowerment to ban the interstate shipment of so-called ‘adulterated’ substances for containing ingredients that the USDA was so empowered to declare ‘deleterious to human health’; yet this law would effectively exempt Tobacco and nicotine via its expressed limitation to substances contained within the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, from which Tobacco was traditionally listed yet so deleted the previous year in 1905!
Nonetheless, standard historical accounts have defined this as essentially the result of racism- focusing upon the 'reason' presented and pounded into the public via the William Randolph Hearst style ‘journalism’ (then becoming rapidly more deceitful as they became more centrally controlled via consolidation of ownership along with controlling the owners through their various Romish-Masonic network of fraternal orders) – altogether ignoring the economic realities, for the sake of distracting from questioning the very nature of the ruling political reality.
Within the nation set up to lead this 20th century crusade against certain drugs – aka certain plants and their most active alkaloid ingredients – the United States of America, the initial crusade for this emerged in the months after the 2nd Papal Medal award as a benefactor to Vin Mariani creator Angelo Francois Mariani, the U.S. re-start of the project to construct the Panama Canal (potentially shortening Coca supply lines to North Atlantic markets), and the U.S.D.A.'s own exploration of the feasibility to grow Coca within the U.S.
Within that world, behind the mainstream media conceptualization of fear of cocaine via fear of Blacks via such nonsense reporting about Blacks taking cocaine and supposedly becoming impervious to bullets, is the story of a USDA true to its mission established at its founding by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in 1962- to promote U.S. agriculture.
This mission and motivation is reflected by the USDA’s own writings cir 1908-1912: expressing a specific fear against Coca Leaf's sales growth in the U.S. south-east, particularly as sold and advocated as a ‘tobacco habit cure’- hmm, and it is in the southeastern U.S. where Tobacco is a particularly dominant agricultural commodity. After all, Tobacco is sufficiently established to be represented in stone atop the columns of the U.S Capitol building alongside Cornstalks.
According to the 1910 U.S.D.A. Farmer's Journal Habit-Forming Agents: Their Indiscriminate Sale and Use A Menace to the Public Welfare:
While reflecting the USDA’s convenient yet utterly nonsensical declaration that the alkaloid cocaine was a dangerous and or deleterious drug detrimental to health regardless of the form and mode of admistration, a January 1, 1910 article appearing by E.F. Ladd, a chemist at the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, at pages 63-64 of Volume LIV, Number 1 of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), under the heading Pharmacology, titled “Coca Bola and Oxy-Tonic: Two Nostrums Exposed by the Chemists of the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station”, would state regarding “Coca-Bola’ a coca extract chewing gum
Tobacco is perhaps the most dangerous, extracting 400,000 plus reduced lives in the US annually, 6 million annually in both India and China. Their respective pharmacological properties, and thus the fact that this simultaneous market suppression of the safer alternative, Coca, and market promotion of the more dangerous alternative, Tobacco, made this an expensive mistake.
Of these two agricultural commodities with long histories of human use, owing to botanical-weather requirements and volatility, Tobacco is a U.S. agriculture commodity – marked in granite along with cornstalks at the top of the columns of the U.S. Capitol – prominent in its southeast; Coca is the foreign crop, requiring tropical climates, preferably with high elevations absent with the southernmost regions of the U.S.
UNCLE SAM”S POISON FARM: “Government Conducts a Novel industry on the Potomac flats- Plants which yield the Most Powerful and Valuable Drugs Known to Science – Will Start Opium Growing Too In Texas”
And again from the 1910 U.S.D.A. Farmer's Journal "Habit-Forming Agents: Their Indiscriminate Sale and Use A Menace to the Public Welfare"
From Licit & Illicit Drugs, by Edward M. Brecher and Consumers Reports at page 230 showing upturns in cigarette use following the times of the 1906, 1914 and 1937 U.S. 'drug control laws'
As this graph from the book "Licit and Illicit Drugs" shows, sales of Tobacco cigarettes drastically increased following the enactment of the 1906 'Pure' Food and Drugs Act and the criminal policies of Harvey Wiley/USDA, each drug control law comes with a spike in cigarette sales growth.
1906-1946 anniversary- 40 years of criminal mercantilism for cigarettes
Such would be the results of Harvey Washington Wiley described critically as:
Secret Documents Reveal A.C.L.U. Tobacco Industry Ties
The ACLU's Tobacco Addiction (American Civil Liberties Union receives donations from tobacco industry)
And the DPF itself?
According to its 1988-1989 DPF Biennial Report’s March 1990 letter by DPF co-founders Dr Arnold S. Trebach and Kevin Zeese, stating that they began receiving the counsel of the leading Washington, D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling in 1988, receiving ‘valuable advice’ from Marialuisa Gallozzi, “the Covington and Burling associate assigned primary responsibility for advising the [Drug Policy] Foundation”. That firm is a leading firm for the cigarette and pharmaceutical industries founded in 1919 in the post WW1 regulatory era; and that attorney, is a leading food, drug, pharmaceutical, dietary substance and insurance industry specialist, according to the law firms’ web site.
This juxtaposition of legal specialties- all relevant to how the drug prohibition statutes are criminal mercantilism that creates its own problems to fight (the public ‘justification’), for the sake of (the hidden agenda of) protecting markets in other alas intrinsically more dangerous competitors such as Tobacco versus Coca, is a theme I stress in my proposal for 2009, "Agricultural Politics of Drug Policy"
Agricultural policies gave forth the existing drug control regimen; this dates back to its milestone of the 1906 U.S. Pure Foods and Drugs Act granting the Bureau of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) the power to ban a substance from interstate commerce via declaring an ingredient as deleterious to health, and of limiting its jurisdiction to substances within the U.S. Pharmacopoeia from which Tobacco was conveniently dropped 1 year earlier in 1905.
Since the U.S.D.A. was established to promote agricultural commodities, its empowerment would have severely unappreciated detriments regarding the market protection of the most intrinsically toxic yet domestic agricultural commodity of Tobacco from the foreign 'menace' of least toxic Coca.
With the public health thus beneath mercantilism, the consequences have been thus severe for numerous people, entities and interests.
And I think they can figure that out. U.S. Congress 1914 a Disaster!
Alternative Coca Reduction Strategies in the Andean Region, adopted from a contractor report prepared for the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment in July, 1991, ended up presenting findings that contradict this dogma of official policy:
I do not fault NORML or MPP for this because they are obviously devoted to Marijuana.
But the DPF-DPA has no such excuse.
That firm, Covington & Burling, and its certain attorney "assigned primary responsibility to advise the [drug policy] foundation" would definitely be valuable resources for good, especially with spotlighting the status quo's extremely perverse counter-reformationist nature.
And I frankly think that Ira Glasser should retire.
The sooner, the better.
What Needs to Be Done- Coca Come Back
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2009/02/coca-come-back.html
Douglas Willinger Coca Activism 1987 -
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2012/06/douglas-andrew-willinger-angelo.html
This is a letter to Lewis, from a long time activist since the latter 1980s, about the mismanagement of the DPF-DPA
Reportedly, Peter Lewis, longtime funder of the Marijuana Policy Project is shifting his money elsewhere within the field of drug policy reform.
According to multiple sources, Lewis has already assembled a panel including former Executive Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser, Americans for Safe Access Executive Director Steph Shere and former Nebraska Governor Bob Kerry, and tasked them with advising him on moving forward as a supporter of marijuana law reform.
Alas, such efforts are doomed to failure* (a controlled paced agenda taking way more time then necessary in order to protect those markets that the 'drug war' protects), with the inclusion of Ira Glasser, long time Executive Director of the ACLU, member of the Board of Directors of the Drug Policy Foundation and currently the President of the Board of Directors of the DPF’s successor organization, the Drug Policy Alliance.
I base this assessment of Glasser upon my experiences of over 20 years with the DPF-DPA.
The DPF was set up in response to the growing excesses of the ‘drug war’.
Nonetheless it remained comparatively silent on the drug this was in reaction to, cocaine, and how the drug war actually made cocaine into a dangerous drug via what Dick Cowen described as prohibitions iron rule, the shift towards more potent substances. Although we already had a NORML for Marijuana, the DPF acted more as a second Marijuana organization rather than one devoted to any of the other popular ‘controlled substances’, nor the broader human rights issues.
To its credit, the DPF during its early years provided a highly useful platform for different ideas in its conference paper compendiums from 1989 to 1992, with the latter three years including the articles I wrote about coca and cocaine defining how the prohibition breeds its own problems to fight for economic purposes that I would best term as criminal mercantilism.
I base this assessment of Glasser upon my experiences of over 20 years with the DPF-DPA.
The DPF was set up in response to the growing excesses of the ‘drug war’.
Nonetheless it remained comparatively silent on the drug this was in reaction to, cocaine, and how the drug war actually made cocaine into a dangerous drug via what Dick Cowen described as prohibitions iron rule, the shift towards more potent substances. Although we already had a NORML for Marijuana, the DPF acted more as a second Marijuana organization rather than one devoted to any of the other popular ‘controlled substances’, nor the broader human rights issues.
To its credit, the DPF during its early years provided a highly useful platform for different ideas in its conference paper compendiums from 1989 to 1992, with the latter three years including the articles I wrote about coca and cocaine defining how the prohibition breeds its own problems to fight for economic purposes that I would best term as criminal mercantilism.
November 1990; “The Great Issues of Drug Policy”Alas, after the 1992 conference, the DPF cancelled their regularly held cocaine panel where I was a formal participant in 1991 and 1992- leaving the entire coca-cocaine issue within the since regularly held ‘Latin America’ panel.
“The Ever-Changing, Ever-Confused Popular Conception of Cocaine”, by Douglas A. Willinger
November 1991; “New Frontiers in Drug Policy”
“Cocaine Prohibition, Water or Gasoline…?” by Douglas A. Willinger
November 1992; “Strategies for Change”,
“Cocaine Conversion: Onwards to Coca” by Douglas A. Willinger
Illustration: Douglas Willinger and Ethan Nadelmann at the 1992 DPF conference,published in the Washington City Paper, December 18, 1992
It was at that 1993 “Latin America’ panel at the 1993 DPF conference, held at the L’Enfant center in Washington, D.C. where I first met Ira Glasser, together with a British medical journalist, Anita Bennett, suggesting coca tea as a birth aid to women, relaxing the vagina to speed childbirth and reduce the instances of brain damage from prolonged labor. He was personable and interested in this and the coca issue more generally- encouraging me to issue my proposal for the next year’s DPF conference; that conference was “The Crucial Next Stage: Health Care and Human Rights”, and my proposal was for a panel “Coca- Turning Over a New Leaf in Reducing Health Care Costs.”
- Coca: powder cocaine and crack substitute: making their abuse obsolete.
- Medical Coca: a multitude of valuable therapeutic applications.
- Coca: the safer alternative to licit stimulants, particularly Tobacco.
Presenting Coca in this context is a potent antidote to popular misconceptions that drug prohibition somehow serves the general welfare. People support prohibition, generally viewing it favorably in inverse proportion to the degree they see illegal drugs as "bad." The story of Coca though is a powerful indictment of prohibition.
Here is something clearly good, useful for a variety of medical uses, and as a daily stimulant. Indeed, to a greater extent than medical Marijuana, drug war proponents acknowledge such medical uses of Coca as a remedy for high altitude sickness, other forms of nausea, and stomach aches; indeed recommendations for these uses of Coca are found in virtually any Andean tourist guide book. People in most parts of the world though are generally oblivious to this, focusing instead the situation with concentrated cocaine that prohibition created and sustains. As people have had the drug issue defined in such a convoluted way to misperceive the illicit market in powder cocaine and crack -- cocaine hydrochloride and sulfate -- as the natural situation that would exist without prohibition, ignorance of Coca is crucial towards maintaining popular support for the drug war!
The social importance of this panel is undeniably high. Let the following serve as but one example. The leaf's reported utility to the newly born --- as Coca is valuable to CNS stimulation and improves the blood count of oxygen, giving it to women in labor has immense potential towards reducing the instances of brain damage amongst new borns (see the Saturday newsletter from the 1993 DPF conference) -- alone could save millions of dollars in medical bills and lost productivity, to say nothing of the prevalence of these heart-breaking tragedies sustained by widespread ignorance of Coca's therapeutic benefits.
Given the President's concerns over reducing health care costs and Coca leaf's potential with this, is extremely valuable to the general welfare. Indeed, perhaps this is the drug policy reformists' most powerful approach towards dispelling the false utopic vision now clouding a clear perspective of the drug war, for nobody can dismiss (or ignore) it without appearing down right callous.
The Clintons ought to find this irresistible.
Alas our positive meeting at the 1993 DPF conference was the first and last time we ever had a conversation. Not even an acknowledgement as simple as ‘Hello Doug’ at any of the subsequent DPF conferences, of which I have attended faithfully since 1989, with any of my attempt to make contact being met with his eyes shifting elsewhere if not looking directly through me. This, all despite the interest in the coca issue he expressed to me in 1993. Such was alas a telling indicator of the DPF’s rejection of “Coca- Turning Over a New Leaf in Reducing Health Care Costs” despite its support by Dr. Lester Grinspoon, who was to be the moderator.
So was the one direct following encounter I had with Glasser at the 1997 DPF conference, then held in New Orleans, at a “Cocaine RoundTable” , where I walked in to hearing him ask some very good, relevant questions about cocaine and drug policy reform, stating that the public was scared about cocaine, so we needed some new ways to address the issue. I took that as my opportunity to bring up Coca – after all how much caffeine and nicotine use is really that of dilute caffeine containing beverages and Tobacco products – and how the drug statutes promote drug abuse by shifting markets and profits to highly concentrated form of drugs all encouraged by such statutes basing penalties upon total weight. His response was to sit like a statute and dare not look at me or acknowledge my presence or anything I said.
For a great many drug policy activists Ira Glasser can only look right through us, acting incapable of acknowledging us as human beings- with us not just being us, but the many in general concerning markets worth billions and trillions of dollars, considering the relative safety of cannabis and coca to concentrated forms of cocaine and alcohol and cigarettes.
The dynamics are as if the man, effectively the political capstone of the drug policy reform movement set up in the wake of the 1986 Len Bias cocaine overdose generated hysteria, is directed by those looking out for the established interests protected by the drug war in order to minimize any damage to these interests.
So was the one direct following encounter I had with Glasser at the 1997 DPF conference, then held in New Orleans, at a “Cocaine RoundTable” , where I walked in to hearing him ask some very good, relevant questions about cocaine and drug policy reform, stating that the public was scared about cocaine, so we needed some new ways to address the issue. I took that as my opportunity to bring up Coca – after all how much caffeine and nicotine use is really that of dilute caffeine containing beverages and Tobacco products – and how the drug statutes promote drug abuse by shifting markets and profits to highly concentrated form of drugs all encouraged by such statutes basing penalties upon total weight. His response was to sit like a statute and dare not look at me or acknowledge my presence or anything I said.
For a great many drug policy activists Ira Glasser can only look right through us, acting incapable of acknowledging us as human beings- with us not just being us, but the many in general concerning markets worth billions and trillions of dollars, considering the relative safety of cannabis and coca to concentrated forms of cocaine and alcohol and cigarettes.
The dynamics are as if the man, effectively the political capstone of the drug policy reform movement set up in the wake of the 1986 Len Bias cocaine overdose generated hysteria, is directed by those looking out for the established interests protected by the drug war in order to minimize any damage to these interests.
Coca with its market threat to tobacco cannot be discussed.
Notably the occasional DPF conference ‘History Panel' (held at their 1999 and 2003 conferences) entirely excluded the history of cocaine prohibition.
This was despite the latter panel having only 2 speakers- and my availability to give such a presentation from my year’s long work “Coca- Forgotten Medicine” that I have made largely available here at my blog “Freedom of Medicine and Diet”.
"Hard" drugs - e.g. "heroin" and "cocaine" -- have evoked great fears, leading people to advocate or acquiesce to more repressive and expensive drug laws and drug law enforcement, as if these molecules were necessarily pernicious.None of that can be discussed, as it threatens the size of the market in Tobacco products, and that in patent medicines- aka pharmaceuticals which are artificially created molecules that can be patented.
Yet prior to prohibition, opiates and cocaine were widely used as safely as aspirin and caffeine are now. Because we are so conditioned to react to the powder forms of these drugs, we forget that these more direct modes of ingestion -- sniffing, smoking and injecting -- were formerly a relatively rare phenomenon.
Prior to the twentieth century's "war on drugs," most people using these drugs took them in dilute form, whether as raw plant material, or plant preparation of comparable potency. Such plants and their popular preparations, were widely recognized medicinal agents, worldwide.
These substances have long and positive histories predating their criminalization by U.S. federal statute via the 1914 Harrison "Tax" Act and successive laws, and were used throughout the medical community as effective, cheap, and safe treatments for a variety of ailments.
Opium poppies have been taken medicinally for thousands of years, taken topically, smoked and even brewed as a tea, as suggested in Hogshire's "Opium for the Masses.""Cocaine" -- or more accurately, Coca just had many uses. The Extra Pharmacopoeia (the British counterpart to the U.S. Pharmacopoeia) cited Coca as a "nervine andmuscular tonic, preventing waste of tissue, appeasing hunger and thirst, relieving fatigue, and aiding free respiration ... useful in various diseases of the digestive and respiratory organs.... "
Meanwhile, the Wine of Coca, became the most widely praised plant preparation of the time. ’s creator, Angelo Francois Mariani was hailed by Pope Leo XIII as a "benefactor of humanity" for making Coca available around the world- after 40 years of Coca wine distribution."
All of this of course, prior to prohibition. Any honest program of harm reduction in drug use must go beyond the narrow-minded discussion of today's "hard drug problems": heroin and cocaine HCI, to look at Opium and Coca, to reveal the drug war's most intense effects upon drug abuse -- shifting markets to the infinitely more dangerous concentrated substances, while the natural forms are virtually forgotten.
Indeed, as stressed by “Coca- Forgotten Medicine”, the selective drug prohibition statues arose out of a campaign coordinated through William Randolph Hearst’s publishing empire and high up officials within both the private AMA-APhA alliance and the public USDA Bureau of Chemistry Bureau Chief Harvey Washington Wiley- all taken together as an agenda of what was to be banned and what was to be protected.
What is a drug habit? .... The habit-forming drugs which are most extensively used are alcohol, nicotine and caffeine. If we class as drug addicts those who have acquired the habit for one or more of these drugs the number of them in the United States would be very close to half or two-thirds of the population. When we speak of drug addicts, however, we usually have in mind a more restricted sense and refer rather to those who are slaves to opium or the coca leaf and their derivatives. ... I would not favor of any restrictive legislation respecting tobacco and tea and coffee, except in so far as children are concerned. [Wiley letter, Wiley papers, box 201; National Archives II]Some key points:
- Coca, and other popular herbs, including Opium were not patentable- and hence came under attack by the AMA-APhA’s ‘Council on Pharmacy’ for reasons unrelated to any concern about health effects, while the USDA would target Coca as dangerous under a theory confusing the acute toxicity of large amounts of concentrated cocaine as a basis for believing that regular coca consumption thus had to be likewise toxic. As a stimulant, Coca presented a market threat to anything containing caffeine, and Tobacco.
- Cannabis was attacked by some, but would be the focus of yet another one of William Randolph Hearst’s screeds against a plant- whether directly as with MJ, or indirectly with Coca via demonifying “cocaine”.
- Tobacco, which had been commonly breed as ‘Virginia Bright Leaf’ variety, a larger leaf with relatively little psycho activity providing a ‘smoother’ smoking capable of being drawn deeply into the lungs, had in the 1880s become more marketable via the development of industrial cigarette rolling machines greatly lowing costs of production. Although such cigarettes or at least their sale, would be banned in some U.S. states, the landmark 1906 U.S. Pure Foods and Drugs Act allowing the USDA to effectively ban Coca in food products via its empowerment to ban the interstate shipment of so-called ‘adulterated’ substances for containing ingredients that the USDA was so empowered to declare ‘deleterious to human health’; yet this law would effectively exempt Tobacco and nicotine via its expressed limitation to substances contained within the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, from which Tobacco was traditionally listed yet so deleted the previous year in 1905!
Nonetheless, standard historical accounts have defined this as essentially the result of racism- focusing upon the 'reason' presented and pounded into the public via the William Randolph Hearst style ‘journalism’ (then becoming rapidly more deceitful as they became more centrally controlled via consolidation of ownership along with controlling the owners through their various Romish-Masonic network of fraternal orders) – altogether ignoring the economic realities, for the sake of distracting from questioning the very nature of the ruling political reality.
Within the nation set up to lead this 20th century crusade against certain drugs – aka certain plants and their most active alkaloid ingredients – the United States of America, the initial crusade for this emerged in the months after the 2nd Papal Medal award as a benefactor to Vin Mariani creator Angelo Francois Mariani, the U.S. re-start of the project to construct the Panama Canal (potentially shortening Coca supply lines to North Atlantic markets), and the U.S.D.A.'s own exploration of the feasibility to grow Coca within the U.S.
Within that world, behind the mainstream media conceptualization of fear of cocaine via fear of Blacks via such nonsense reporting about Blacks taking cocaine and supposedly becoming impervious to bullets, is the story of a USDA true to its mission established at its founding by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in 1962- to promote U.S. agriculture.
This mission and motivation is reflected by the USDA’s own writings cir 1908-1912: expressing a specific fear against Coca Leaf's sales growth in the U.S. south-east, particularly as sold and advocated as a ‘tobacco habit cure’- hmm, and it is in the southeastern U.S. where Tobacco is a particularly dominant agricultural commodity. After all, Tobacco is sufficiently established to be represented in stone atop the columns of the U.S Capitol building alongside Cornstalks.
According to the 1910 U.S.D.A. Farmer's Journal Habit-Forming Agents: Their Indiscriminate Sale and Use A Menace to the Public Welfare:
There are quite a number of so-called tobacco habit cures on the market. All of them are ineffective, and some contain cocain in one form or another, which at once indicates the purpose of the promoter of the remedy. Instead of eradicating what is commonly believed to be a comparatively harmless habit, there is grave danger of fastening a pernicious drug habit upon the user. Examples of preparations of this character recently examined and found to contain cocain and caffein derivatives are Coca-Bola, Tobacco Bullets, and Wonder Workers. The Coca Bola is marketed by Dr. Charles L. Mitchell, of "Philadelphia, and the Tobacco Bullets by the Victor Remedy Company, now the Blackburn Remedy Company, of Dayton, Ohio, while the Wonder Workers were produced by George S. Beck, of Springfield,Ohio.This charge that Coca was an ‘ineffective” Tobacco substitute was nonetheless contradicted by the admission that it was an effective Tobacco substitute- by others within and connected with the USDA-AMA/APhA cigarette-pharmaceutical alliance.
While reflecting the USDA’s convenient yet utterly nonsensical declaration that the alkaloid cocaine was a dangerous and or deleterious drug detrimental to health regardless of the form and mode of admistration, a January 1, 1910 article appearing by E.F. Ladd, a chemist at the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, at pages 63-64 of Volume LIV, Number 1 of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), under the heading Pharmacology, titled “Coca Bola and Oxy-Tonic: Two Nostrums Exposed by the Chemists of the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station”, would state regarding “Coca-Bola’ a coca extract chewing gum
This product, put in the form of a gum, would easily take the place – for one who had formed the habit for cocain – of tobacco; and it might be made to take the place of chewing gum with young people who would be entirely innocent of the intentional use of any such preparation, not knowing the evil effects that would come from its continued use. In the judgment of the writer, no man who will allow his name to be connected with a scheme of this kind should be permitted to disgrace the profession of medicine by using the title M.D.E.F. Ladd’s above closing words are perversely ironic given the actual contempt for the public’s health this mercantilist pro-Tobacco, anti-Coca agenda presented- given these substance’s relative safeties. Contrary to any assumption the government would ban the more dangerous substance while tolerating or promoting the safer one, the U.S. government ended up doing just the opposite, with Coca and Tobacco at the opposite ends of the spectrum.
Tobacco is perhaps the most dangerous, extracting 400,000 plus reduced lives in the US annually, 6 million annually in both India and China. Their respective pharmacological properties, and thus the fact that this simultaneous market suppression of the safer alternative, Coca, and market promotion of the more dangerous alternative, Tobacco, made this an expensive mistake.
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/usas-criminal-mercantilism-protecting.htmlIndeed in January 10, 1904 the Boston Globe reported that the USDA had been experimenting with various ‘poison’ drug crops to ascertain their feasibility as domestic crops.
It is doubtful if it would grow in any portion of the United States. Requiring an average temperature of at least 70o, the only districts at all suited would be Florida and Southern Texas [this was written before the 1898 U.S. acquisition of the Kingdom of Hawaii]; and it is highly probable that proximity to the sea-coast at so low an altitude would prove fatal. Nor would irrigation prove adequate in those countries possessing a long dry season. The plants must not only have an abundant supply of water at the roots; they must be bathed in a humid atmosphere for the greater portion of the year. But from what I have read of some of the countries above named, I am confident that the plant would there find a congenial home. Jamaica offers especially hopeful conditions.
UNCLE SAM”S POISON FARM: “Government Conducts a Novel industry on the Potomac flats- Plants which yield the Most Powerful and Valuable Drugs Known to Science – Will Start Opium Growing Too In Texas”
“Uncle Sam has started in to grow poisons. He has set up a hashish factory on a small scale, and is about to try the commercial production and manufacture of opium. Deadly nightshade, monkshood, henbane, foxgrove, jimsonweed and wormwood are among the plants which being cultivated in an experiment garden patch, about two acres in extent, on the Potomac flats close by the city of Washington...This experiment included Coca plants.
Note the deceptive media spin "poison" when Cannabis, Coca and Opium are infinity less toxic than the USDA's protected Virginia Bright Leaf Tobacco
And again from the 1910 U.S.D.A. Farmer's Journal "Habit-Forming Agents: Their Indiscriminate Sale and Use A Menace to the Public Welfare"
During the last twenty years a large number of soft drinks containing caffein and smaller or greater quantities of coca leaf and kola nut products have been placed upon the market. Preparations of this class, on account of insufficient information, were formally looked upon as harmless, but they are now known to be an impending evil. Centuries before cocain was introduced as a remedial agent, wonderful accounts of the energy-creating properties of coca leaves were chronicled. The phenomenal endurance attributed to the Peruvians and others was often ascribed to the stimulating effects produced by the chewing of coca leaves, and this idea has been widely exploited. It is believed to some extent at present that the use of cocain taken internally produces a sense of exhilaration, and the amount of muscular and mental power appears to be temporarily increased. Impetus was given to this belief by the enthusiastic reports of this drug, published not only in medical literature but in the secular press as well. Cocain is one of the most insidious and dangerous habit-forming drugs at present known. Many lives have been wrecked and many crimes have been committed as a result of its use, and strenuous efforts are being made to curtail its employment. The amount present in certain soft drinks is small, to be sure, but such an insidious, habit-forming drug certainly has no place whatsoever in these products. The presence of tropococain, an ally of cocain, has also been established. Not only is it pernicious to add cocain to soft drinks in any quantity (usually in the form of coca leaf extract), but even the use of coca leaf extract so manipulated as to reduce the amount of cocain, or eliminate it altogether, must be looked upon as a questionable practice, because any product or name which would suggest the presence of cocain or its allies, by taste or otherwise, must have a baneful influence. It is known that the very small amounts of morphine or cocain, or even the suggestion of their presence, will tend to destroy the equilibrium of reformed addicts and bring back the former craving. The virtues of coca leaves and kola nuts have been exploited together, and it is only natural that they should be combined in preparations which would represent the purported virtues of both. Such combinations were made with the result that quite a number of so-called soft drinks now on the market contain both of the habit-forming agents, cocaine and caffeine. It was not uncommon to find persons addicted to the use of medicated soft-drinks. It is well-known fact that many factory employees, stenographers, typewriters, and others subjected to mental or nervous strain spend a large part of their earnings for drinks of this character. In passing, it may be of interest to note that life insurance companies are considering the status of soft-drink habitués as future risks. Various arguments have been advanced in justification of the use of caffeine and the extract of coca leaves, treated or otherwise, in soft drinks. It is a well known that parents, as a rule, withhold tea and coffee from their children, but having no knowledge of the presence of cocain, caffeine or other deleterious agents in soft drinks, they unwittingly permit their children to be harmed by their use. Manufacturers of drinks of this class, containing cocain, have been successfully prosecuted, for example, Koca Nola, Celery Cola, Wiseola, Pillsbury's Koke, Kola-Ade, Kos-Kola, Cafe-Coca, and Koke.It was clearly the USDA hoodwinking the general public, agricultural mercantilism, cigarette protectionism, passed off as ‘progressive’ legislation to safeguard the public’s health- via distracting from any actual matters of health of consumers via gross lies draped in cunning terminology designed to more stir reaction then thought.
From Licit & Illicit Drugs, by Edward M. Brecher and Consumers Reports at page 230 showing upturns in cigarette use following the times of the 1906, 1914 and 1937 U.S. 'drug control laws'As this graph from the book "Licit and Illicit Drugs" shows, sales of Tobacco cigarettes drastically increased following the enactment of the 1906 'Pure' Food and Drugs Act and the criminal policies of Harvey Wiley/USDA, each drug control law comes with a spike in cigarette sales growth.
1906-1946 anniversary- 40 years of criminal mercantilism for cigarettesSuch would be the results of Harvey Washington Wiley described critically as:
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/knights-of-new-dark-age-usda-apha-ama.htmlDiscussing how this scheme works would threaten the size of the market in patent medicines- aka pharmaceuticals which are artificially created molecules that can be patented: hence, Ira Glasser, already noted for shaping the ACLU’s policies to conform with his cigarette industry donors, is simply acting in conformity. So how surprising then that Ira Glasser, already noted for shaping the ACLU’s policies to conform with his cigarette industry donors, would exclude the history of Coca?
The story of the Pure Food and Drug Act, as told by Coppin and High, reveals one of the “chief dangers” of regulation in a democratic society, namely, that “personal opinion and special interest can masquerade as objective science and public good, thereby corrupting even potentially useful law."
Secret Documents Reveal A.C.L.U. Tobacco Industry Ties
The ACLU's Tobacco Addiction (American Civil Liberties Union receives donations from tobacco industry)
(excerpt)National Radio Project Transcript
In 1987, the ACLU's executive director, Ira Glasser, began to solicit Philip Morris for annual grants without first consulting his board of directors, he admitted to me in an October 1992 interview. By that time, the leading cigarette manufacturer had given the tax-exempt ACLU Foundation $500,000. Second-ranking R.J. Reynolds also contributed, but Glasser refused to tell me how much.
(excerpt)Allies: The ACLU And The Tobacco Industry
For more than seventy-five years now, the American Civil Liberties Union has had a very important role in defending the Bill of Rights in the United States. But recently, some longtime supporters of the organization have been raising questions about the ACLU positions on issues involving large corporate interests. One of those interests is the tobacco companies. Now, new information has surfaced about ties between cigarette firms and the American Civil Liberties Union. We invited the Executive Director of the ACLU, Ira Glasser, to be on this program, but he declined. A few days ago, we invited the national ACLU to provide two spokespersons of its choosing to appear on this program, in studio and/or by telephone. The ACLU declined that invitation as well.
(excerpt)The ACLU and the Tobacco Companies by Morton Mintz (PDF) (HTML)
"At the same time that it takes money from the tobacco industry, it allies itself with the tobacco industry to fight legislation intended to ban or restrict tobacco advertising and promotion--but it does not inform its approximately 300,000 members of either activity."
And the DPF itself?
According to its 1988-1989 DPF Biennial Report’s March 1990 letter by DPF co-founders Dr Arnold S. Trebach and Kevin Zeese, stating that they began receiving the counsel of the leading Washington, D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling in 1988, receiving ‘valuable advice’ from Marialuisa Gallozzi, “the Covington and Burling associate assigned primary responsibility for advising the [Drug Policy] Foundation”. That firm is a leading firm for the cigarette and pharmaceutical industries founded in 1919 in the post WW1 regulatory era; and that attorney, is a leading food, drug, pharmaceutical, dietary substance and insurance industry specialist, according to the law firms’ web site.
This juxtaposition of legal specialties- all relevant to how the drug prohibition statutes are criminal mercantilism that creates its own problems to fight (the public ‘justification’), for the sake of (the hidden agenda of) protecting markets in other alas intrinsically more dangerous competitors such as Tobacco versus Coca, is a theme I stress in my proposal for 2009, "Agricultural Politics of Drug Policy"
Agricultural policies gave forth the existing drug control regimen; this dates back to its milestone of the 1906 U.S. Pure Foods and Drugs Act granting the Bureau of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) the power to ban a substance from interstate commerce via declaring an ingredient as deleterious to health, and of limiting its jurisdiction to substances within the U.S. Pharmacopoeia from which Tobacco was conveniently dropped 1 year earlier in 1905.
Since the U.S.D.A. was established to promote agricultural commodities, its empowerment would have severely unappreciated detriments regarding the market protection of the most intrinsically toxic yet domestic agricultural commodity of Tobacco from the foreign 'menace' of least toxic Coca.
With the public health thus beneath mercantilism, the consequences have been thus severe for numerous people, entities and interests.
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/coca-leaf-stands-out-among-all.htmlThis pro-Bright Leaf Tobacco, anti Coca agricultural mercantilism has been an absolute disaster for health care costs, and they would know that in 1914:
In each major category of intoxicant used by our species, there appear to be one or two drug plants that researchers have noted, are more controllable, hence safer, than all the other plants or synthetics in that category. Coca leaf stands out among all the stimulants, licit and illicit, as the easiest to control and the one least likely to produce toxicity or dependency.
... there are tens of thousands of people in the United States who die every year from the excessive use of cigarettes; and yet I find Senators still pulling away at the cigarette as thought were a perfectly harmless thing. I believe the Senator will agree with me that there are many thousands of people who die from what is called tobacco cancer, a cancerous growth affecting the throat from overuse of cigars; and we find perhaps 60 percent of the Senators pulling away at the cigar as unconcerned as though no one were dying as a result of these cigars...
U.S. Congress, Senator Porter James McCumber (R) North Dakota,
August 15, 1914
And I think they can figure that out. U.S. Congress 1914 a Disaster!
Alternative Coca Reduction Strategies in the Andean Region, adopted from a contractor report prepared for the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment in July, 1991, ended up presenting findings that contradict this dogma of official policy:
...the utility of traditional coca consumption for Andean populations cannot be ignored. Three physiological benefits of coca use (for relief from altitude sickness, as a remedy to vitamin deficiencies, and in conserving body heat), are specifically appropriate to Andeans who must endure the stresses of high-altitude labor and a low protein diet. Evidence does not [emphasis added] support claims that traditional long-term traditional use is harmful. Rather, the multiple advantages of coca use indicate that it has a strong positive role in Andean health. [47]The drug policy reform organizations have devoted ridiculously little time on the Coca issue, the issue of Opium and the issue of our God Given 9th Amendment Rights to the Natural Plants Provided by God.
Alternative Coca Reduction Strategies in the Andean Region, noted Coca's widespread medicinal/therapeutic/dietary importance as an:
Anesthetic/antiseptic: Indigens and non-indigens apply coca topically as a local anesthetic; coca also has antiseptic qualities. The cocaine alkaloid has been shown to exert a powerful bactericidal action on gram-negative and coccus organisms.
Curative/preventative remedy: Coca tea, consumed by indigenous and non indigenous Andean people, alleviates the symptoms of altitude sickness; combats the effects of hypoglycemia; and helps prevent various lung ailments (an attribute of particular significance to the mining population). For example, chewing coca leaves is believed to limit inhalation of silicates that cause silicosis.
Dietary supplement: Coca leaves contain vitamin A and significant amounts of B, B, and C; they also contain calcium, iron, and phosphorus, in either the leaves or the calcium carbonate customarily taken with the leaves. Leaf chewing helps alleviate nutritional deficiencies of a diet consisting principally of potatoes.
Stimulant: Coca leaves give energy for work, reduces physical discomfort and fatigue, alleviates hunger, sharpens mental processes, and, at high altitudes, helps the chewer keep warm. [48]".. reports that Coca is bad are unfounded," and significantly, though deferring somewhat to political and economic realities, suggests that we consider re-legalizing Coca, and its potential benefits: "Options might include expanding the international market for legitimate coca products (e.g. coca tea, pharmaceuticals). However, the large amounts of coca produced are likely to overflow existing legitimate markets.
Alternatively, developing new products from coca may have some merit. Potential medicinal and therapeutic applications include:
1) treatment for spasmodic conditions of the gastro-intestinal tract, motion
sickness, toothache and other mouth sores;
2) caffeine substitute;
3) anti-depressant; and
4) adjunct to weight reduction and physical fitness.
Examination of the other alkaloids found in coca might yield additional industrial possibilities. Although the research and development time required to bring new products to market may reduce the short term utility of this approach, it could be a useful component in an overall package of efforts to reduce illicit coca production."
I do not fault NORML or MPP for this because they are obviously devoted to Marijuana.
But the DPF-DPA has no such excuse.
That firm, Covington & Burling, and its certain attorney "assigned primary responsibility to advise the [drug policy] foundation" would definitely be valuable resources for good, especially with spotlighting the status quo's extremely perverse counter-reformationist nature.
And I frankly think that Ira Glasser should retire.
The sooner, the better.
What Needs to Be Done- Coca Come Back
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2009/02/coca-come-back.html
Douglas Willinger Coca Activism 1987 -
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2012/06/douglas-andrew-willinger-angelo.html
Jesuitical 'National Black Church Initiative'
Favors criminal mercatilism for cigarettes and its shifting drug markets to more dangerious substances: corrupt and stupid confusing MJ for crack. Ignores Bible's Book of Genesis for sake of the Roman Catholic Church's criminal inquisition popularized by William Randolf Hearst
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A nationwide coalition of 34,000 minority churches is condemning the California NAACP for supporting a state ballot initiative that would legalize recreational use of marijuana.
The California State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People announced support for the November ballot measure, saying current laws unfairly target non-whites.
But the Rev. Anthony Evans, president of the National Black Church Initiative, says drugs have "ravaged" the black community with too much violence and death to consider legalization.
Evans says his church will no longer contribute to the NAACP because of its position on marijuana.
A California coalition of black churches also has denounced the NAACP for endorsing legalization.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Jesuitical Gov Brown Against MJ Legalization-Regulation
continuing the criminal Roman Catholic Church's criminal mercantilism against MJ popularized by Vatican suck up Wiliiam Randolf Hearst
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/30/california-rallying-cry-vote-green-not-brown/
California Rallying Cry?: Vote Green, Not Brown
In an apparent attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown yesterday expressed his opposition to the Tax Cannabis 2010 campaign to make marijuana legal in the state.
Mr. Brown, who is was in Monterrey for a conference, said legalizing the drug would open the flood gates for the ruthless and deadly Mexican drug cartels.
“Every year we get more and more marijuana and every year we find more guys with AK-47’s coming out of Mexico going into forests and growing more and more dangerous and losing control,” Mr. Brown said.
For the purpose of this short post, I will not address in full here the idiocy of decrying the involvement of drug cartels in the marijuana trade while opposing a regulated system of distribution. Suffice it to say that burying your head in your ass the sand and hoping the drug war will eliminate drug cartels from the planet hasn’t been the most effective tactic over the past few decades.
But this post is about politics, not policy. The problem for Brown is that he is potentially turning off hundreds of thousands of voters who will be showing up in November simply to vote to make marijuana legal. Many of these “green” voters don’t give a real hoot who the next governor of the state is, as long as they can purchase their recreational drug of choice safely, conveniently and legally.
That said, single-issue marijuana voters tend to lean toward the Democratic side of the spectrum, so their votes would likely benefit Brown overall. The only thing that could reverse that likelihood is Brown dissing Proposition 19, as the initiative is now known. (Brown supporters should hope that the campaign is carefully studying polling data to determine his standing among individuals who will be turning out to vote because of the Tax Cannabis initiative.)
Here is my political advice to Mr. Brown. From now on, if he is asked about Proposition 19, he should say, “I have some concerns about the initiative, which I hope could be addressed by the state legislature if it passes, but if I am elected to be the next governor of the state I certainly plan to respect the will of the people.”
If he chooses to ignore this advice, he may be hearing or seeing – or simply feeling the effects of — the following slogan in the fall: “Vote green, not Brown.”
Steve is the director of state campaigns for the Marijuana Policy Project, co-founder of Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER), and co-author of "Marijuana is Safer: So why are we driving people to drink?" (Chelsea Green, August 2009).
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About Jerry Brown:
http://www.jerrybrown.org/about
Edmund G. Brown, Jr., known as Jerry, was born in San Francisco on April 7, 1938. He attended both public and parochial schools, graduating from St. Ignatius High School in 1955. He completed his freshman year at the University of Santa Clara before entering Sacred Heart Novitiate, a Jesuit seminary in August 1956. Two years later, he took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In 1960, he left the Society of Jesus and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his B.A. degree in Classics the next year and then entered Yale Law School, where he graduated in 1964.
Following law school, Brown worked as a law clerk to California Supreme Court Justice Mathew Tobriner, traveled and studied in Mexico and Latin America and then took up residence in Los Angeles, working for the prestigious law firm, Tuttle & Taylor. In 1969, Brown was elected to the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, placing first in a field of 124. In 1970, he was elected California Secretary of State. During his term, he forced legislators to comply with campaign disclosure laws, exposed President Nixon’s use of falsely notarized documents to improperly earn a large tax deduction and drafted and helped pass the California Fair Political Practices Act. Brown personally argued before the state Supreme Court and won against Gulf, Mobile and Standard Oil for election law violations (Brown vs. Superior Court).
Brown was elected Governor in 1974 and reelected in 1978, by over one million votes.
---
Some comments from the above linked article, reflecting that Jerry Brown serves the whims of the existing political pyramid:
• mikesoul: If anyone thinks that Jerry Brown will offer a progressive alternative to the Republicans, they should read the article that the SF Chronicle published on March 4, 2010, after interviewing him. Brown made it clear he was running as a centrist who will not challenge the status quo on anything, and certainly not the state budget--he even supports continuing the two thirds requirement for budgets to pass. What you can expect from Brown is not bold progressive leadership and real substantive change, but rather more of the same.
• matthewsbeachmikek: I am still amazed at the politicians who don't get it, especially those like Brown who has to know dozens of people who smoke or smoked pot: the war over the legalization of cannabis is over. A politician who gets out in front of this issue will gain more votes than he or she loses. The facts are just too persuasive, ultimately. And politicians nowadays worth their salt should be able to present the issue to voters on multiple fronts.
Such is what I term the dynamics of a political system dominated by a pyramid hierarchy, one that relies upon having two controlled-contrived sides to a political debate, and keeping the people fearful of breaking out of such, as the following statement reflects.
• grolaw: Single issue voters are anathema to democracy. Meg Whitman has committed $150 Meg of her own money to gain the Governor's Office in CA. Think about the implications of that, massive investment, on the part of the former eBay executive and billionaire. No good businessperson makes an investment without expecting a profitable return on that investment. What does Meg Whitman want and how does she expect to realize the return on her investment? Pot politics pales in the light of a Whitman holding office in Sacramento.
How can ‘pot politics’ so pale when they at are the stage where California could become the first US State to break MJ from the criminal mercantilist drug war, and the supposedly ‘progressive’ Democrat, Jesuit Jerry Brown is already leading over Whitman, and would be likelier to pick up votes by favoring rather then opposing MJ legalization?
• winchelenator: According to the latest poll, Brown leads Whitman 45% to 39%, so I don't know why he feels the need to come out against weed at this point. Wasn't he talking pro-legalize some years back? If so, why the flip flop?
• woodyc: He’s always been that way, (flip flops); I guess he is just a politician
• moldy: Jeeze, those comments condemning prop 19 are surprising to say the least. It used to be political suicide to support marijuana but now people know its safe and non toxic. Using the old scare tactics don't work anymore. We've heard it ALL before. But I don’t get it. There is a majority of voters that support prop 19 and like 36% against it. We all know that prohibition is a failure and a fucking colossal one at that. Why would he shoot himself in the foot? Is this moral high ground a short cut to the Gov’s mansion? Or maybe the Prison Guard Union got a hold of him with some $$$$$? A failed initiative is exactly what Brown and his Union is betting on otherwise they may have to shut down some very profitable prisons.
Indeed, this reflects the reality of a grossly corrupt hierarchy that continually profits from the drug war criminal mercantilism, from such entities as the ‘Fraternal Order of Police’ founded in May, 1915, to such interests directly protected, including big pharm and the cigarette industry.
Jerry Brown's Religious Roots
http://spirituallysmart.blogspot.com/2008/11/jerry-brown-jesuit-agent-from-hell.html
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/30/california-rallying-cry-vote-green-not-brown/
California Rallying Cry?: Vote Green, Not Brown
In an apparent attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown yesterday expressed his opposition to the Tax Cannabis 2010 campaign to make marijuana legal in the state.
Mr. Brown, who is was in Monterrey for a conference, said legalizing the drug would open the flood gates for the ruthless and deadly Mexican drug cartels.
“Every year we get more and more marijuana and every year we find more guys with AK-47’s coming out of Mexico going into forests and growing more and more dangerous and losing control,” Mr. Brown said.
For the purpose of this short post, I will not address in full here the idiocy of decrying the involvement of drug cartels in the marijuana trade while opposing a regulated system of distribution. Suffice it to say that burying your head in your ass the sand and hoping the drug war will eliminate drug cartels from the planet hasn’t been the most effective tactic over the past few decades.
But this post is about politics, not policy. The problem for Brown is that he is potentially turning off hundreds of thousands of voters who will be showing up in November simply to vote to make marijuana legal. Many of these “green” voters don’t give a real hoot who the next governor of the state is, as long as they can purchase their recreational drug of choice safely, conveniently and legally.
That said, single-issue marijuana voters tend to lean toward the Democratic side of the spectrum, so their votes would likely benefit Brown overall. The only thing that could reverse that likelihood is Brown dissing Proposition 19, as the initiative is now known. (Brown supporters should hope that the campaign is carefully studying polling data to determine his standing among individuals who will be turning out to vote because of the Tax Cannabis initiative.)
Here is my political advice to Mr. Brown. From now on, if he is asked about Proposition 19, he should say, “I have some concerns about the initiative, which I hope could be addressed by the state legislature if it passes, but if I am elected to be the next governor of the state I certainly plan to respect the will of the people.”
If he chooses to ignore this advice, he may be hearing or seeing – or simply feeling the effects of — the following slogan in the fall: “Vote green, not Brown.”
Steve is the director of state campaigns for the Marijuana Policy Project, co-founder of Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER), and co-author of "Marijuana is Safer: So why are we driving people to drink?" (Chelsea Green, August 2009).
---
About Jerry Brown:
http://www.jerrybrown.org/about
Edmund G. Brown, Jr., known as Jerry, was born in San Francisco on April 7, 1938. He attended both public and parochial schools, graduating from St. Ignatius High School in 1955. He completed his freshman year at the University of Santa Clara before entering Sacred Heart Novitiate, a Jesuit seminary in August 1956. Two years later, he took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In 1960, he left the Society of Jesus and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his B.A. degree in Classics the next year and then entered Yale Law School, where he graduated in 1964.
Following law school, Brown worked as a law clerk to California Supreme Court Justice Mathew Tobriner, traveled and studied in Mexico and Latin America and then took up residence in Los Angeles, working for the prestigious law firm, Tuttle & Taylor. In 1969, Brown was elected to the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, placing first in a field of 124. In 1970, he was elected California Secretary of State. During his term, he forced legislators to comply with campaign disclosure laws, exposed President Nixon’s use of falsely notarized documents to improperly earn a large tax deduction and drafted and helped pass the California Fair Political Practices Act. Brown personally argued before the state Supreme Court and won against Gulf, Mobile and Standard Oil for election law violations (Brown vs. Superior Court).
Brown was elected Governor in 1974 and reelected in 1978, by over one million votes.
---
Some comments from the above linked article, reflecting that Jerry Brown serves the whims of the existing political pyramid:
• mikesoul: If anyone thinks that Jerry Brown will offer a progressive alternative to the Republicans, they should read the article that the SF Chronicle published on March 4, 2010, after interviewing him. Brown made it clear he was running as a centrist who will not challenge the status quo on anything, and certainly not the state budget--he even supports continuing the two thirds requirement for budgets to pass. What you can expect from Brown is not bold progressive leadership and real substantive change, but rather more of the same.
• matthewsbeachmikek: I am still amazed at the politicians who don't get it, especially those like Brown who has to know dozens of people who smoke or smoked pot: the war over the legalization of cannabis is over. A politician who gets out in front of this issue will gain more votes than he or she loses. The facts are just too persuasive, ultimately. And politicians nowadays worth their salt should be able to present the issue to voters on multiple fronts.
Such is what I term the dynamics of a political system dominated by a pyramid hierarchy, one that relies upon having two controlled-contrived sides to a political debate, and keeping the people fearful of breaking out of such, as the following statement reflects.
• grolaw: Single issue voters are anathema to democracy. Meg Whitman has committed $150 Meg of her own money to gain the Governor's Office in CA. Think about the implications of that, massive investment, on the part of the former eBay executive and billionaire. No good businessperson makes an investment without expecting a profitable return on that investment. What does Meg Whitman want and how does she expect to realize the return on her investment? Pot politics pales in the light of a Whitman holding office in Sacramento.
How can ‘pot politics’ so pale when they at are the stage where California could become the first US State to break MJ from the criminal mercantilist drug war, and the supposedly ‘progressive’ Democrat, Jesuit Jerry Brown is already leading over Whitman, and would be likelier to pick up votes by favoring rather then opposing MJ legalization?
• winchelenator: According to the latest poll, Brown leads Whitman 45% to 39%, so I don't know why he feels the need to come out against weed at this point. Wasn't he talking pro-legalize some years back? If so, why the flip flop?
• woodyc: He’s always been that way, (flip flops); I guess he is just a politician
• moldy: Jeeze, those comments condemning prop 19 are surprising to say the least. It used to be political suicide to support marijuana but now people know its safe and non toxic. Using the old scare tactics don't work anymore. We've heard it ALL before. But I don’t get it. There is a majority of voters that support prop 19 and like 36% against it. We all know that prohibition is a failure and a fucking colossal one at that. Why would he shoot himself in the foot? Is this moral high ground a short cut to the Gov’s mansion? Or maybe the Prison Guard Union got a hold of him with some $$$$$? A failed initiative is exactly what Brown and his Union is betting on otherwise they may have to shut down some very profitable prisons.
Indeed, this reflects the reality of a grossly corrupt hierarchy that continually profits from the drug war criminal mercantilism, from such entities as the ‘Fraternal Order of Police’ founded in May, 1915, to such interests directly protected, including big pharm and the cigarette industry.
Jerry Brown's Religious Roots
http://spirituallysmart.blogspot.com/2008/11/jerry-brown-jesuit-agent-from-hell.html
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Drug War UnConstitutional
The Drug War and the Constitution
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/debate/dwarcon1.htm
by Paul Hager
Following is a transcript of the speech I gave at the ICLU Conference. I am appending the companion notes to the end. Text between brackets [] is description or commentary and not part of the actual transcript
---
I'd like to draw your attention to companion notes that I put together for this talk. They're located on the tables out back there, and I think that those of you who are doing CLE have them in your manuals.
Well, I'm going to attempt to descend into the murky depths of political philosophy and Constitutional analysis. At the outset, I do have a caveat: the arguments I am going to be presenting have never been endorsed by Congress or the courts and I hope that during the question and answer session we can get into this in a little bit more detail.
The thesis that I want to advance today is that the drug war and the laws that prohibit the private consumption of certain drugs are un-Constitutional. Prohibition laws, themselves, violate every tenet of limited government that is embodied in our Constitution.
To begin, let me pose a question: why was it necessary to amend the Constitution in order to prohibit the drug alcohol? And, while you are cogitating on that: how is it possible to prohibit other drugs without going through the formal amendment process? Well, I think, in order to answer these questions, it's necessary to take a look at what the Constitution is supposed to be.
At the recent confirmation hearings of Judge Clarence Thomas (uh, Clarence Thomas, by the way, -- he and I have at least two things in common: we're both ex marijuana users [chuckles from the audience], and we're both married to attorneys) -- in any case, there was a lot of discussion at the hearings about natural law and natural rights. Just about all of the participants seemed to agree that our system recognizes the existence of "inalienable" natural rights and that government exists to "secure" those rights for its citizens.
It's just as well that they agreed on that -- the architects of our system of government, in fact, had that principle in mind, and they viewed the Constitution as being a blueprint for a limited government in which those powers that were to be made available to the federal government would be listed. If a power is not listed in the Constitution, it is not supposed to be available to the Federal government. Two hundred odd years ago, when the Bill of Rights -- which we're here to celebrate -- was being debated, there were those who opposed the Bill of Rights on the grounds that, uh, they're completely unnecessary. It's redundant -- the rights already exist and therefore they don't have a place in the Constitution. In fact, they made the argument that a Bill of Rights is dangerous because at some future point in time, people would get the idea that if a right wasn't to be found in the Constitution -- like privacy -- it did not exist. Perhaps the best articulation I've ever seen of this principle is to be found in _The Federalist Papers_. [I hold up a paperback of _The Federalist Papers_.] Alexander Hamilton writing in Federalist number 84 -- and I'll just read some of this out to you. He says:
"... bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous."
And then his argument is:
"For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretence for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority, which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it, was intended to be vested in the national government. This", he concluded, "may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights."
Good writer, Mr. Hamilton. [I gestured with the book and put it aside.] Well, anyway, as we know, Hamilton's view did not prevail and 10 of the 12 Amendments that were proposed as a Bill of Rights were ratified in December of 1791.
In order to mollify critics and meet the arguments of people like Hamilton, language was added to the Bill of Rights to address this idea of limited government and natural rights.
I just happen to have a copy of the Constitution here -- don't leave home without it [I hold up my pocket copy of the Constitution]-- and I'll read the language that bears on this.
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
That's the 9th Amendment, this lays out that whole idea of rights existing apart from the Constitution.
And then we have:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
That's the 10th Amendment and that has to do with delegation of powers and the idea of limited government.
Well, let's go back to those questions. I think the answer to the first question is fairly straightforward -- this idea of alcohol prohibition. We were talking about a new power that was being acquired -- surrendered by the people and the states - and so the 18th Amendment was passed to give that power to the Federal government.
In the case of our second question -- prohibiting other drugs -- I would argue that we are talking about new powers being granted to the Federal government that have never been surrendered by the people and the states. Ergo, the drug war, prohibition laws, the DEA, the whole ball of wax, are all unconstitutional. I think what we have here is a prime example of the illegal acquisition of powers by a central government through a process of slow accretion. And this was exactly the sort of thing Hamilton was warning against back in 1787.
If it is the case the federal government can't get involved in the prohibition business, what about the state governments? Uh, I think one answer to this is to look at the right of privacy which is protected by the 9th Amendment and extended to the states by the 14th. The right has been invoked to protect privacy in such areas as family planning -- birth control -- and, at least so far, the right of privacy seems to be protecting a woman's choice whether or not to have an abortion. Furthermore, this same right should apply in matters involving an individual's decision to consume, privately, a recreational drug in his or her home.
One argument that might militate against this idea of a right of privacy taking precedence might be -- uh, well, what if the people who use drugs are infringing on the rights of other people. For example, users of cocaine and opiates. Is there a compelling state interest -- is there some kind of balancing test that we can apply that gives the state the right to intervene?
I'd like to pose a hypothetical here that we can use for the purposes of analysis. Let's posit the existence of a drug that is 100% addicting and potentiates violence in its users 100% of the time. I think we'd have a very clear case of there being a compelling state interest to get itself involved in prohibiting this drug on the grounds that the state is protecting the rights of the non-users. Well, suppose we begin reducing those percentages. Let's suppose that we're talking about a drug that is 15% addictive and potentiates violence in some lesser percentage of its users. We have an empirical answer for that:
I've just described alcohol. And, just for another for instance, let's suppose that we have a drug that is 90% addictive but doesn't seem to correlate with violence at all. Again, empirically we have an answer: I've just described cigarettes.
I would argue that pharmacological and population data can be adduced to compare alcohol and tobacco with other drugs like opiates and cocaine derivatives. And, if we do this, we find that alcohol is, in fact, more addictive than many forms of opiates and many forms of cocaine although less addictive than crack cocaine.
Furthermore, smoked tobacco is generally recognized as being the most addictive drug around. That other area, having to do with violence and anti-social behavior, once again we find that the drug that is the greatest potentiator of violent behavior is alcohol. And if we look at the other drugs like opiates and cocaine, we find that most of the violence that is associated with these drugs is associated with the black market/organized crime component of the drug trade and is not a pharmacological feature of the drug itself.
Well, I'm the political coordinator of the Hoosier Cannabis Re-legalization Coalition, and I haven't said a word about marijuana yet and I probably should -- uh -- marijuana, which is the Nation's number one illegal drug, which is estimated to have been used by over 60 million people, is recognized as being relatively non-addictive. For a point of comparison, if we look at the common drug caffeine -- which I was dosing myself with earlier today -- caffeine, which is in coffee and soft drinks, is generally recognized as being more addictive than marijuana.
Furthermore, no scientific evidence has ever been brought forth that would support the idea that marijuana leads to violent, anti-social behavior. Thus, by no stretch of the imagination is there a rational or scientific justification for marijuana prohibition and, perforce, there is no marijuana prohibition law that passes Constitutional muster. Moreover, using alcohol and tobacco as our metrics, even heroin and crack prohibition cannot be justified.
At this point, it's probably time to boldly go where no Constitutional interpreter has gone before and so I'm going to move into more speculative areas. The 1st Amendment, which protects religion and speech, I think also by extension protects thought and belief. Well, what is the seat of religion, thought and belief? [A pregnant pause.]
The brain, right? [Tapping my cranium.]
In fact, speech and belief are manifestations of the internal state of a person's brain. Science is beginning to inform us as to how chemicals and neurotransmitters, indeed the physical "wiring" of our brain defines who we are and how we think.
Unless we get involved in metaphysics I think we have to recognize that there is physical basis for belief.
Where I'm heading with this is that, if it is the case that your physical brain state determines whether you are a Methodist, an agnostic, or a Nazi then clearly the state of your brain is protected in some sense.
The question I'd like to put to you is: if it is the case that the 1st Amendment allows a person to alter his or her cognitive system by reading "Mein Kampf" -- which might well alter it permanently, you might become a Nazi for the rest of your life -- then how is it possible for the government to step in and say that a person may not temporarily alter his or her cognitive system for two or three hours by smoking a marijuana joint? [Scattered applause.] Also, another way of looking at this same thing is, what is the rationale for saying that programming your brain across the visual or aural pathways is OK but programming your brain _chemically_ across the blood-brain barrier is not?
And finally -- uh, and I think that this is the most frightening prospect in this whole thing -- consider this: if a state government can come up to you and can say, you may not pass delta-9-THC -- the principal intoxicant in marijuana - you cannot pass that across your blood-brain barrier, what is to prevent a state from saying at some point in the future, you _must_ pass drug X -- let's call it soma like in _Brave New World_ -- you must pass soma across your blood-brain barrier?
I guess what I'm arguing is that the government has intruded into your biochemical and physiological brain and in principle, once the government can do this, then in principle the government can control any part of your body.
I think I've just about wrapped up the general comments I wanted to make. One thing I might suggest: we might also talk about some specific areas where government has been in violation of Constitutional rights all at the behest of this drug war.
Thank you.
---------------------companion notes to talk-------------------
The Drug War and the Constitution
by Paul Hager
Companion Notes
By focusing on the Constitutional dimension of drug prohibition, I've attempted to approach the issue from a different perspective. In claiming that the drug war and drug prohibition violate the U.S. Constitution and fundamental principles of civil liberty I am aware that there is a dearth of present day case law to support my arguments. Instead, I have relied on the writings of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay in The Federalist Papers and, to a lesser extent, selected writings of Thomas Jefferson that appear in Jefferson: Writings (Merrill D. Peterson wrote the notes and selected text, ISBN 0-940450-16-X).
I assert that current prohibitionist policy entails a grant of power to government that was never contemplated and was, in fact, explicitly rejected by the framers of the Constitution.
The Harrison Act of 1914 was the first major step by the Federal government in the direction of drug prohibition. The 18th Amendment and the enabling legislation of the Volsted Act were to come later, in 1919 and 1920 respectively. An excellent analysis of the case law interpreting the Harrison Act is to be found in Arnold S. Trebach's book, The Heroin Solution (Yale University Press, 1982, ISBN 0-300-02773-7), chapter 6. For a short overview of drug prohibition "cycles" in U.S. History, and the place of the Harrison Act in them, see "Opium, Cocaine, and Marijuana in American History", by David F. Musto, Scientific American, July 1991, volume 265, number 1.
An excellent source on the "heroin problem" and possible solutions is The Hardest Drug: Heroin and Public Policy , by John Kaplan (University of Chicago Press, 1983, ISBN 0-226-42427-8). Professor Kaplan devotes the first two chapters of the book to exploding the myths about heroin's addictiveness and dangers that have been used to justify its prohibition. Kaplan also argues that the Harrison Act was in large part responsible for the development of many of the social problems that we now associate with heroin use and considers the Act to have been a mistake. Unaccountably (given the foundation he lays), Kaplan shies away from legalization strategies completely and offers heroin maintenance programs with possible coercive treatment as his alternative to the present approach. Arnold Trebach, on the other hand, argues in his book that doctors should be allowed to prescribe heroin to addicts as needed and to include heroin in their pharmacopoeia. Trebach's legal analysis of the Harrison Act (mentioned above) is used to buttress his argument in favor of a liberal interpretion of the Act. Interestingly, Kaplan, who considers the Act to have been a mistake, favors a much more restrictive solution than does Trebach who considers the Harrison Act to have been an appropriate piece of social engineering.
On the subject of marijuana, John Kaplan is also the author of a book entitled Marijuana -- the New Prohibition (1970). Kaplan argued convincingly for marijuana decriminalization in this book. Arnold Trebach is currently the head of the Drug Policy Foundation, an organization that seeks alternatives to the drug war. The organization generally favors full legalization of marijuana but embraces a variety of opinion regarding changes in the legal status of other drugs.
The issue of "addictiveness" of drugs is complicated. The term itself has fallen into disfavor among the scientific establishment and "drug dependence" is generally preferred. I will stick with the more common term for simplicity. It turns out that the picture of addiction that is a favorite with police departments and drug czars is far from accurate.
In "The Tragedy of Needless Pain", (by Ronald Melzack, February 1990, Scientific American), scientific evidence is presented that morphine used for pain relief is not addictive. Trebach notes statistics that gave a rate of 500,000 heroin addicts and 3,500,000 "chippers" or non-addicted occasional users in the late 1970's which would mean a 12.5% addiction rate. Laboratory studies show a higher rate but these studies use medical grade, pure heroin.
In Health Consequences of Smoking: Nicotine Addiction (Surgeon General's Report, 1988), a comparison is made of the relative addictiveness of smoked tobacco and several other drugs (the 15% figure for alcohol comes from this source). The Surgeon General's Report observes that of service men who became addicted to heroin in Vietnam, aproximatedly 90% were able to avoid readdiction upon return to the U.S. The report also mentions the frequency of "chipping" in heroin use but notes that nonaddicted cigarette users are exceedingly rare. The addiction rate of 90% for cigarette smokers also derives from the Surgeon General's Report.
A more complete comparison of addictive potentional is to be found in the magazine, In Health, in an article entitled "Hooked, not Hooked" by Deborah Franklin (Nov/Dec 1990). Franklin cites addiction experts' rankings of various legal and illegal drugs as follows (p. 41):
1) Nicotine
2) "Ice" (smoked methamphetamine)
3) Crack
4) Crystal Meth (injected methamphetamine)
5) Valium (diazepam)
6-8) Quaalude
6-8) Seconal (secobarbital)
6-8) Alcohol
9-10) Crank (snorted methamphetamine)
9-10) Heroin
11) Cocaine
12) Caffeine
13) PCP
14) Marijuana
15) Ecstasy (MDMA)
16-18) Psilocybin Mushrooms
16-18) LSD
16-18) Mescaline
(The rankings as they appear in the magazine are in the form of a bar graph -- I've converted them to a rank ordering. Note also that, although amphetamine is broken down according to the method of administration, other drugs with multiple modes of administration are not. I.V. injection will, for a number of reasons, be more addicting than oral ingestion. Concentration is also an important factor as well. Although the "potency" of heroin is considered to be 3 to 4 times that of morphine, heroin is actually diacetylmorphine -- morphine reacted with acetic anhydride. In the body, heroin breaks down to morphine in order to produce its effect. Apparently, the "potency" of heroin is the result of the ease with which heroin crosses the blood-brain barrier before it breaks down to morphine.)
The Drug Policy Letter, Vol II, number 2, Mar/Apr 1990 (a newsletter published by the Drug Policy Foundation) uses a back- of-the-envelope calculation to expose the myth that "crack is the most addictive drug known to man." It is often said that if one uses crack just once, a person is addicted. According to the NIDA-sponsored National Household Survey, 2.5 million people have tried crack, and 480,000 used it in the month prior to the survey. Even if one assumed that anyone who used the drug in the past month was an addict, that would still give an addiction rate of only 19%. Using this same method for alcohol would give a 62% rate and, for powdered cocaine a 13% addiction rate. Though this is not the sort of analysis that should be used to gauge addiction rates, it does give the lie to the "one puff and you're hooked" claim.
A number of the sources cited above present evidence that violent criminal activity associated with heroin and cocaine use is actually the result of the high cost of the drugs coupled with the low socio-economic status of inner-city addicts. In other words, violent crime is not a pharmacological feature of the drug itself but a reflection of black market economics. The same Drug Policy Letter cited above also reports on research done by Goldstein, Brownstein, Ryan, and Bellucci on the drug component of violence in New York City. They found that only a very small proportion of drug-related murders were a function of the drug itself and most of those were caused by alcohol. Heroin and other opiates, in particular, are well known to not provoke aggressive or violent behavior in people under the influence.
Two monographs by Professor Bruce L. Benson and Professor David W. Rasmussen of the Policy Sciences Program of Florida State University in Tallahassee give another view of drug use and violent crime from the perspective of incarceration rates in Florida. Benson and Rasmussen find that the overwhelming number of people who have been arrested for a drug offense have no arrest history for a violent or property crime. (See "Drug Offenders in Florida", July 1990, and "Drug Crime and Florida's Criminal Justice Problem", December 1990.) This is not the result one would expect if the drug-violent crime connection were as intertwined as apologists for the drug war would have us believe.
Notes on Additional Materials
Along with these notes, I'm including two additional items. The first is "Marijuana Myths", a collection of some typical anti-marijuana and D.A.R.E. Program falsehoods and their refutation. Each of the numbered refutation sections has an associated reference section which will allow readers to check my sources. The second item is Report #126 of the ABA Law Student Division which recommended that the ABA reverse its 18 year position favoring marijuana decriminalization. Report #126 offers no references of any kind, scientific or otherwise. This is understandable because most of its assertions are without scientific foundation. If this represents the sort of evidence that is considered acceptable for a major policy reversal of the ABA, I believe it reflects badly on the level of scholarship practiced by the national organization.
One item that appears in #126 deserves a comment. Much is made of the increased potency of marijuana. In the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, Vol. 20(1), Jan-Mar 1988, Tod Mikuriya, M.D. and Michael Aldrich, Ph.D. address this matter in "Cannabis 1988 Old Drug, New Dangers The Potency Question." In a careful piece of research, Mikuriya and Aldrich demonstrate that a review of independent, contemporary assays of imported marijuana from the early 70's show it was every bit as potent as modern domestic sensimilla varieties. (Anyone who has personal experience with Thai Sticks, Panama Red, and Oaxacan in the period from the late 60's to early 70's can attest to the potency of the imports.) They also reveal that improper DEA and police evidence handling techniques (e.g., no refrigeration of seized marijuana) led to an underestimate of street potency in the 1970s because samples degraded rather quickly in evidence warehouses.
Besides the country's illicit experience with marijuana, Mikurya and Aldrich point to the extremely potent forms of cannabis (i.e., marijuana) tonics that were in common use in the United States prior to marijuana prohibition in the 1930's. Such tonics were frequently given to children with no reported ill effects. Eli-Lilly and Parke, Davis, & Co. entered into a "joint" venture to produce a potent strain of domestic cannabis sativa for their cannabis pharmaceuticals which they called cannabis americana (note: a picture of the 1929 Parke-Davis catalogue for "Cannabis U.S.P." can be found on page 113 of Dr. Andrew Weil's book, Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs, written with Winifred Rosen, 1983, ISBN 0-395 -33108-0). Parke-Davis claimed uniform effectiveness for their cannabis extract at a 10 milligram dose level (the effective dose of pure delta-9-THC, the main cannabinoid, is between 25 and 50 micrograms per kilogram). For those who appreciate irony, take note that Parke-Davis, which used to make a profit from selling legal cannabis, now makes money from marketing drug testing kits which primarily detect marijuana use.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/debate/dwarcon1.htm
by Paul Hager
Following is a transcript of the speech I gave at the ICLU Conference. I am appending the companion notes to the end. Text between brackets [] is description or commentary and not part of the actual transcript
---
I'd like to draw your attention to companion notes that I put together for this talk. They're located on the tables out back there, and I think that those of you who are doing CLE have them in your manuals.
Well, I'm going to attempt to descend into the murky depths of political philosophy and Constitutional analysis. At the outset, I do have a caveat: the arguments I am going to be presenting have never been endorsed by Congress or the courts and I hope that during the question and answer session we can get into this in a little bit more detail.
The thesis that I want to advance today is that the drug war and the laws that prohibit the private consumption of certain drugs are un-Constitutional. Prohibition laws, themselves, violate every tenet of limited government that is embodied in our Constitution.
To begin, let me pose a question: why was it necessary to amend the Constitution in order to prohibit the drug alcohol? And, while you are cogitating on that: how is it possible to prohibit other drugs without going through the formal amendment process? Well, I think, in order to answer these questions, it's necessary to take a look at what the Constitution is supposed to be.
At the recent confirmation hearings of Judge Clarence Thomas (uh, Clarence Thomas, by the way, -- he and I have at least two things in common: we're both ex marijuana users [chuckles from the audience], and we're both married to attorneys) -- in any case, there was a lot of discussion at the hearings about natural law and natural rights. Just about all of the participants seemed to agree that our system recognizes the existence of "inalienable" natural rights and that government exists to "secure" those rights for its citizens.
It's just as well that they agreed on that -- the architects of our system of government, in fact, had that principle in mind, and they viewed the Constitution as being a blueprint for a limited government in which those powers that were to be made available to the federal government would be listed. If a power is not listed in the Constitution, it is not supposed to be available to the Federal government. Two hundred odd years ago, when the Bill of Rights -- which we're here to celebrate -- was being debated, there were those who opposed the Bill of Rights on the grounds that, uh, they're completely unnecessary. It's redundant -- the rights already exist and therefore they don't have a place in the Constitution. In fact, they made the argument that a Bill of Rights is dangerous because at some future point in time, people would get the idea that if a right wasn't to be found in the Constitution -- like privacy -- it did not exist. Perhaps the best articulation I've ever seen of this principle is to be found in _The Federalist Papers_. [I hold up a paperback of _The Federalist Papers_.] Alexander Hamilton writing in Federalist number 84 -- and I'll just read some of this out to you. He says:
"... bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous."
And then his argument is:
"For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretence for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority, which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it, was intended to be vested in the national government. This", he concluded, "may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights."
Good writer, Mr. Hamilton. [I gestured with the book and put it aside.] Well, anyway, as we know, Hamilton's view did not prevail and 10 of the 12 Amendments that were proposed as a Bill of Rights were ratified in December of 1791.
In order to mollify critics and meet the arguments of people like Hamilton, language was added to the Bill of Rights to address this idea of limited government and natural rights.
I just happen to have a copy of the Constitution here -- don't leave home without it [I hold up my pocket copy of the Constitution]-- and I'll read the language that bears on this.
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
That's the 9th Amendment, this lays out that whole idea of rights existing apart from the Constitution.
And then we have:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
That's the 10th Amendment and that has to do with delegation of powers and the idea of limited government.
Well, let's go back to those questions. I think the answer to the first question is fairly straightforward -- this idea of alcohol prohibition. We were talking about a new power that was being acquired -- surrendered by the people and the states - and so the 18th Amendment was passed to give that power to the Federal government.
In the case of our second question -- prohibiting other drugs -- I would argue that we are talking about new powers being granted to the Federal government that have never been surrendered by the people and the states. Ergo, the drug war, prohibition laws, the DEA, the whole ball of wax, are all unconstitutional. I think what we have here is a prime example of the illegal acquisition of powers by a central government through a process of slow accretion. And this was exactly the sort of thing Hamilton was warning against back in 1787.
If it is the case the federal government can't get involved in the prohibition business, what about the state governments? Uh, I think one answer to this is to look at the right of privacy which is protected by the 9th Amendment and extended to the states by the 14th. The right has been invoked to protect privacy in such areas as family planning -- birth control -- and, at least so far, the right of privacy seems to be protecting a woman's choice whether or not to have an abortion. Furthermore, this same right should apply in matters involving an individual's decision to consume, privately, a recreational drug in his or her home.
One argument that might militate against this idea of a right of privacy taking precedence might be -- uh, well, what if the people who use drugs are infringing on the rights of other people. For example, users of cocaine and opiates. Is there a compelling state interest -- is there some kind of balancing test that we can apply that gives the state the right to intervene?
I'd like to pose a hypothetical here that we can use for the purposes of analysis. Let's posit the existence of a drug that is 100% addicting and potentiates violence in its users 100% of the time. I think we'd have a very clear case of there being a compelling state interest to get itself involved in prohibiting this drug on the grounds that the state is protecting the rights of the non-users. Well, suppose we begin reducing those percentages. Let's suppose that we're talking about a drug that is 15% addictive and potentiates violence in some lesser percentage of its users. We have an empirical answer for that:
I've just described alcohol. And, just for another for instance, let's suppose that we have a drug that is 90% addictive but doesn't seem to correlate with violence at all. Again, empirically we have an answer: I've just described cigarettes.
I would argue that pharmacological and population data can be adduced to compare alcohol and tobacco with other drugs like opiates and cocaine derivatives. And, if we do this, we find that alcohol is, in fact, more addictive than many forms of opiates and many forms of cocaine although less addictive than crack cocaine.
Furthermore, smoked tobacco is generally recognized as being the most addictive drug around. That other area, having to do with violence and anti-social behavior, once again we find that the drug that is the greatest potentiator of violent behavior is alcohol. And if we look at the other drugs like opiates and cocaine, we find that most of the violence that is associated with these drugs is associated with the black market/organized crime component of the drug trade and is not a pharmacological feature of the drug itself.
Well, I'm the political coordinator of the Hoosier Cannabis Re-legalization Coalition, and I haven't said a word about marijuana yet and I probably should -- uh -- marijuana, which is the Nation's number one illegal drug, which is estimated to have been used by over 60 million people, is recognized as being relatively non-addictive. For a point of comparison, if we look at the common drug caffeine -- which I was dosing myself with earlier today -- caffeine, which is in coffee and soft drinks, is generally recognized as being more addictive than marijuana.
Furthermore, no scientific evidence has ever been brought forth that would support the idea that marijuana leads to violent, anti-social behavior. Thus, by no stretch of the imagination is there a rational or scientific justification for marijuana prohibition and, perforce, there is no marijuana prohibition law that passes Constitutional muster. Moreover, using alcohol and tobacco as our metrics, even heroin and crack prohibition cannot be justified.
At this point, it's probably time to boldly go where no Constitutional interpreter has gone before and so I'm going to move into more speculative areas. The 1st Amendment, which protects religion and speech, I think also by extension protects thought and belief. Well, what is the seat of religion, thought and belief? [A pregnant pause.]
The brain, right? [Tapping my cranium.]
In fact, speech and belief are manifestations of the internal state of a person's brain. Science is beginning to inform us as to how chemicals and neurotransmitters, indeed the physical "wiring" of our brain defines who we are and how we think.
Unless we get involved in metaphysics I think we have to recognize that there is physical basis for belief.
Where I'm heading with this is that, if it is the case that your physical brain state determines whether you are a Methodist, an agnostic, or a Nazi then clearly the state of your brain is protected in some sense.
The question I'd like to put to you is: if it is the case that the 1st Amendment allows a person to alter his or her cognitive system by reading "Mein Kampf" -- which might well alter it permanently, you might become a Nazi for the rest of your life -- then how is it possible for the government to step in and say that a person may not temporarily alter his or her cognitive system for two or three hours by smoking a marijuana joint? [Scattered applause.] Also, another way of looking at this same thing is, what is the rationale for saying that programming your brain across the visual or aural pathways is OK but programming your brain _chemically_ across the blood-brain barrier is not?
And finally -- uh, and I think that this is the most frightening prospect in this whole thing -- consider this: if a state government can come up to you and can say, you may not pass delta-9-THC -- the principal intoxicant in marijuana - you cannot pass that across your blood-brain barrier, what is to prevent a state from saying at some point in the future, you _must_ pass drug X -- let's call it soma like in _Brave New World_ -- you must pass soma across your blood-brain barrier?
I guess what I'm arguing is that the government has intruded into your biochemical and physiological brain and in principle, once the government can do this, then in principle the government can control any part of your body.
I think I've just about wrapped up the general comments I wanted to make. One thing I might suggest: we might also talk about some specific areas where government has been in violation of Constitutional rights all at the behest of this drug war.
Thank you.
---------------------companion notes to talk-------------------
The Drug War and the Constitution
by Paul Hager
Companion Notes
By focusing on the Constitutional dimension of drug prohibition, I've attempted to approach the issue from a different perspective. In claiming that the drug war and drug prohibition violate the U.S. Constitution and fundamental principles of civil liberty I am aware that there is a dearth of present day case law to support my arguments. Instead, I have relied on the writings of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay in The Federalist Papers and, to a lesser extent, selected writings of Thomas Jefferson that appear in Jefferson: Writings (Merrill D. Peterson wrote the notes and selected text, ISBN 0-940450-16-X).
I assert that current prohibitionist policy entails a grant of power to government that was never contemplated and was, in fact, explicitly rejected by the framers of the Constitution.
The Harrison Act of 1914 was the first major step by the Federal government in the direction of drug prohibition. The 18th Amendment and the enabling legislation of the Volsted Act were to come later, in 1919 and 1920 respectively. An excellent analysis of the case law interpreting the Harrison Act is to be found in Arnold S. Trebach's book, The Heroin Solution (Yale University Press, 1982, ISBN 0-300-02773-7), chapter 6. For a short overview of drug prohibition "cycles" in U.S. History, and the place of the Harrison Act in them, see "Opium, Cocaine, and Marijuana in American History", by David F. Musto, Scientific American, July 1991, volume 265, number 1.
An excellent source on the "heroin problem" and possible solutions is The Hardest Drug: Heroin and Public Policy , by John Kaplan (University of Chicago Press, 1983, ISBN 0-226-42427-8). Professor Kaplan devotes the first two chapters of the book to exploding the myths about heroin's addictiveness and dangers that have been used to justify its prohibition. Kaplan also argues that the Harrison Act was in large part responsible for the development of many of the social problems that we now associate with heroin use and considers the Act to have been a mistake. Unaccountably (given the foundation he lays), Kaplan shies away from legalization strategies completely and offers heroin maintenance programs with possible coercive treatment as his alternative to the present approach. Arnold Trebach, on the other hand, argues in his book that doctors should be allowed to prescribe heroin to addicts as needed and to include heroin in their pharmacopoeia. Trebach's legal analysis of the Harrison Act (mentioned above) is used to buttress his argument in favor of a liberal interpretion of the Act. Interestingly, Kaplan, who considers the Act to have been a mistake, favors a much more restrictive solution than does Trebach who considers the Harrison Act to have been an appropriate piece of social engineering.
On the subject of marijuana, John Kaplan is also the author of a book entitled Marijuana -- the New Prohibition (1970). Kaplan argued convincingly for marijuana decriminalization in this book. Arnold Trebach is currently the head of the Drug Policy Foundation, an organization that seeks alternatives to the drug war. The organization generally favors full legalization of marijuana but embraces a variety of opinion regarding changes in the legal status of other drugs.
The issue of "addictiveness" of drugs is complicated. The term itself has fallen into disfavor among the scientific establishment and "drug dependence" is generally preferred. I will stick with the more common term for simplicity. It turns out that the picture of addiction that is a favorite with police departments and drug czars is far from accurate.
In "The Tragedy of Needless Pain", (by Ronald Melzack, February 1990, Scientific American), scientific evidence is presented that morphine used for pain relief is not addictive. Trebach notes statistics that gave a rate of 500,000 heroin addicts and 3,500,000 "chippers" or non-addicted occasional users in the late 1970's which would mean a 12.5% addiction rate. Laboratory studies show a higher rate but these studies use medical grade, pure heroin.
In Health Consequences of Smoking: Nicotine Addiction (Surgeon General's Report, 1988), a comparison is made of the relative addictiveness of smoked tobacco and several other drugs (the 15% figure for alcohol comes from this source). The Surgeon General's Report observes that of service men who became addicted to heroin in Vietnam, aproximatedly 90% were able to avoid readdiction upon return to the U.S. The report also mentions the frequency of "chipping" in heroin use but notes that nonaddicted cigarette users are exceedingly rare. The addiction rate of 90% for cigarette smokers also derives from the Surgeon General's Report.
A more complete comparison of addictive potentional is to be found in the magazine, In Health, in an article entitled "Hooked, not Hooked" by Deborah Franklin (Nov/Dec 1990). Franklin cites addiction experts' rankings of various legal and illegal drugs as follows (p. 41):
1) Nicotine
2) "Ice" (smoked methamphetamine)
3) Crack
4) Crystal Meth (injected methamphetamine)
5) Valium (diazepam)
6-8) Quaalude
6-8) Seconal (secobarbital)
6-8) Alcohol
9-10) Crank (snorted methamphetamine)
9-10) Heroin
11) Cocaine
12) Caffeine
13) PCP
14) Marijuana
15) Ecstasy (MDMA)
16-18) Psilocybin Mushrooms
16-18) LSD
16-18) Mescaline
(The rankings as they appear in the magazine are in the form of a bar graph -- I've converted them to a rank ordering. Note also that, although amphetamine is broken down according to the method of administration, other drugs with multiple modes of administration are not. I.V. injection will, for a number of reasons, be more addicting than oral ingestion. Concentration is also an important factor as well. Although the "potency" of heroin is considered to be 3 to 4 times that of morphine, heroin is actually diacetylmorphine -- morphine reacted with acetic anhydride. In the body, heroin breaks down to morphine in order to produce its effect. Apparently, the "potency" of heroin is the result of the ease with which heroin crosses the blood-brain barrier before it breaks down to morphine.)
The Drug Policy Letter, Vol II, number 2, Mar/Apr 1990 (a newsletter published by the Drug Policy Foundation) uses a back- of-the-envelope calculation to expose the myth that "crack is the most addictive drug known to man." It is often said that if one uses crack just once, a person is addicted. According to the NIDA-sponsored National Household Survey, 2.5 million people have tried crack, and 480,000 used it in the month prior to the survey. Even if one assumed that anyone who used the drug in the past month was an addict, that would still give an addiction rate of only 19%. Using this same method for alcohol would give a 62% rate and, for powdered cocaine a 13% addiction rate. Though this is not the sort of analysis that should be used to gauge addiction rates, it does give the lie to the "one puff and you're hooked" claim.
A number of the sources cited above present evidence that violent criminal activity associated with heroin and cocaine use is actually the result of the high cost of the drugs coupled with the low socio-economic status of inner-city addicts. In other words, violent crime is not a pharmacological feature of the drug itself but a reflection of black market economics. The same Drug Policy Letter cited above also reports on research done by Goldstein, Brownstein, Ryan, and Bellucci on the drug component of violence in New York City. They found that only a very small proportion of drug-related murders were a function of the drug itself and most of those were caused by alcohol. Heroin and other opiates, in particular, are well known to not provoke aggressive or violent behavior in people under the influence.
Two monographs by Professor Bruce L. Benson and Professor David W. Rasmussen of the Policy Sciences Program of Florida State University in Tallahassee give another view of drug use and violent crime from the perspective of incarceration rates in Florida. Benson and Rasmussen find that the overwhelming number of people who have been arrested for a drug offense have no arrest history for a violent or property crime. (See "Drug Offenders in Florida", July 1990, and "Drug Crime and Florida's Criminal Justice Problem", December 1990.) This is not the result one would expect if the drug-violent crime connection were as intertwined as apologists for the drug war would have us believe.
Notes on Additional Materials
Along with these notes, I'm including two additional items. The first is "Marijuana Myths", a collection of some typical anti-marijuana and D.A.R.E. Program falsehoods and their refutation. Each of the numbered refutation sections has an associated reference section which will allow readers to check my sources. The second item is Report #126 of the ABA Law Student Division which recommended that the ABA reverse its 18 year position favoring marijuana decriminalization. Report #126 offers no references of any kind, scientific or otherwise. This is understandable because most of its assertions are without scientific foundation. If this represents the sort of evidence that is considered acceptable for a major policy reversal of the ABA, I believe it reflects badly on the level of scholarship practiced by the national organization.
One item that appears in #126 deserves a comment. Much is made of the increased potency of marijuana. In the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, Vol. 20(1), Jan-Mar 1988, Tod Mikuriya, M.D. and Michael Aldrich, Ph.D. address this matter in "Cannabis 1988 Old Drug, New Dangers The Potency Question." In a careful piece of research, Mikuriya and Aldrich demonstrate that a review of independent, contemporary assays of imported marijuana from the early 70's show it was every bit as potent as modern domestic sensimilla varieties. (Anyone who has personal experience with Thai Sticks, Panama Red, and Oaxacan in the period from the late 60's to early 70's can attest to the potency of the imports.) They also reveal that improper DEA and police evidence handling techniques (e.g., no refrigeration of seized marijuana) led to an underestimate of street potency in the 1970s because samples degraded rather quickly in evidence warehouses.
Besides the country's illicit experience with marijuana, Mikurya and Aldrich point to the extremely potent forms of cannabis (i.e., marijuana) tonics that were in common use in the United States prior to marijuana prohibition in the 1930's. Such tonics were frequently given to children with no reported ill effects. Eli-Lilly and Parke, Davis, & Co. entered into a "joint" venture to produce a potent strain of domestic cannabis sativa for their cannabis pharmaceuticals which they called cannabis americana (note: a picture of the 1929 Parke-Davis catalogue for "Cannabis U.S.P." can be found on page 113 of Dr. Andrew Weil's book, Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs, written with Winifred Rosen, 1983, ISBN 0-395 -33108-0). Parke-Davis claimed uniform effectiveness for their cannabis extract at a 10 milligram dose level (the effective dose of pure delta-9-THC, the main cannabinoid, is between 25 and 50 micrograms per kilogram). For those who appreciate irony, take note that Parke-Davis, which used to make a profit from selling legal cannabis, now makes money from marketing drug testing kits which primarily detect marijuana use.
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