The Economist on Drugs

The Economist is knocking on the drug war this week with its online leader: focusing on the confounding gap between scientific reality and public policy, it jabs, "...the ban, which marked a gloomy 40th anniversary this year, has been very much like a war in one sense: the first casualty has been the truth."

The Econ is particularly miffed about Labor MPs commissioning studies on the harmful effects of drugs, and then staunchly refusing to alter public policy when study after study comes back in disagreement. Even worse is when they push to can the scientists for publishing this data.

None the better, this willful ignorance is an embarrassing but strangely incognito trademark of the drug war in America. A bureaucratic armada (made up of the FDA, DEA, NHHS and NIDA) routinely blockades scientific study by disallowing researchers to legally possess the object of their interest. That this stonewall is an orchestrated opposition rather than simple inefficiency is beyond the pale - drugs that common sense would tell you are more dangerous (LSD, heroin & cocaine) are by comparison very easy for researchers to obtain for study.

We must conclude that this pattern of the bureaucratic run-around is part of drug-war strategy here in America. Where the Economist paints the obtuse blindness on the part of ministers as political cowardice, research is at least commissioned and the truth spoken. With cost, granted, but in America the truth can seldom be sought in a structured fashion in this particular domain. This impacts the availability of good information and thus impedes an intellectually honest debate on good law.

The Economist's leader ends with naught but exasperation, and if all this article was meant to do is spur thought this may be sufficient. Magazines like the Economist, Forbes and others have raised questions but they are equally worried about being labeled as radical or loosing credibility, so a gentle nudge towards reality - a timid suggestion that the dead canary might indicate a problem - is all they are willing to do in 2009.

To those of us who see this caliber of reporting as long overdue, it is equally exasperating to walk the slow pace of the caravan of public perception. You long to not only pursue the thought process to its conclusions, but to see the public debate move along more quickly. For instance, why has this drug war strategy of controlling information spanned multiple administrations of both parties? It is hard not to reach the conclusion that the government's interest in the drug war has long since left the realm of the public good -- that the sheer momentum of a futile and super-funded war against a ditchweed, and the industrial dependence on a 40+ billion dollar budget, has caused the drug war to be "too big to fail". When one thinks of the consequences of large cuts in federal funding, significant decreases in prison populations, the uproar would not be unlike that seen in an army town when the government talks about shutting down the local base. Let's talk about the drug war like it's a government-favored bank bail-out - a politician says we need to prop up an industry, but we see no good come of it for our neighbors. Meanwhile those involved in the apparatus of failure are not held accountable, but rewarded at the cost of your neighbor. Is this good policy? Discuss.

The Endangered Alaskan Polar Bear

We always reserve the right to stray a little off topic at this site, particularly because I believe that if you read this site you're a thinking soul.

So it is that I happen to be writing this morning about the rascally polar bear. This is honestly just an extension of what may have started as the Sarah Palin Bullshit Watch, which was itself always more concerned with illuminating Alaska, which Slate awesomely described as:

"the state the lower 48 thinks might not be real."

Too funny! However, in this same Q&A session that Slate hosted, there was the following exchange:

Prescott, Ariz.: I have one idea for Obama. Make a commercial with lots of cute polar bears running around and talk about Sarah Palin's science-ignoring crusade to keep polar bears off the endangered species list.

Emily Bazelon: Ah, playing the polar bear card. And it could be paired with making the point that Palin's stance here undercuts McCain's support for fighting global warming. (Though to be fair, they aren't the same thing.)

The response that Slate gives isn't bad at all, but it's the comment that Palin's position is a "science-ignoring crusade" that should be flushed out.

I'd like to point out a great article, "Of Ice and Men", by Cultural Survival Quarterly in their Summer 2008 issue. I had actually meant to write about this a couple weeks ago, but.. y'know.

The article does a great job of describing why Alaska's indigenous population is opposed to listing the polar bear as an endangered species. They throw the "science-ignoring" comment back in your face:

"It’s not surprising that the Iñupiat’s discussion of polar bear biology, behavior, ecology, habitat, and population was more sophisticated than that of the Fish and Wildlife representatives; after all, the federal representatives had flown in from Washington or Anchorage, and would fly out in a day or two, while the Iñupiat lived their entire lives in the polar bear’s habitat. They were not new to the polar bear, and they weren’t impressed by 30-year studies that Fish and Wildlife called “long-term.” The Iñupiat had cultural knowledge about polar bears—and the rest of their ecosystem—that went back far longer."

The article will expose you to a different way of looking at the issue - the impotence, rather than importance, of listing the polar bear as endangered and the consequences it has on a people whose way of life is very far removed from yours, all for the sake of making some - in their ticky-tacky little boxes on the hillside - feel like they're making a positive difference.

"In short, the science brought by the Fish and Wildlife representatives to justify listing the polar bear as threatened looked great on paper, but was incomplete—even to other scientists—and ignored Iñupiat traditional knowledge. And putting the polar bear on the endangered list wouldn’t stop illegal poaching in Russia, or the sea ice from retreating, or anything else that was actually affecting polar bear populations. In fact it would mask the real issue of climate change.

The Iñupiat solution was for Washington to address climate change head-on by legislating global-warming preventatives, and leave the polar bears to the native peoples of the Arctic. After all, they are subsistence hunters who manage animal populations so that they will be there in the future. The word “sustainable” has been in the American consciousness for about a generation, while it has been the cornerstone of Iñupiat life for millennia. Not taking their lead in this issue would be a terrible loss of opportunity, especially considering that they are living on the front line of global warming, where change is felt first and foremost."

The article is a very good read, so I highly encourage you to drop by if not actually pick up an issue of Cultural Survival in your local bookstore or even subscribe/donate. The group promotes "the rights, voices, and visions of indigenous peoples" who, as they say,

"endure forced assimilation, discrimination, exploitation by powerful economic interests, and poorly considered development policies—all of which threaten their cultural survival."

This issue of Washington, D.C. further interfering in the way of life followed by Alaska's indigenous population is probably a good example of these "poorly considered development policies" and "forced assimilation".

NORML vs ONDCP

There is an excellent write up in The Hill by NORML's executive director, Allen St. Pierre. NORML bills this as

"...passing for one of the first public debates ever between the government’s ‘anti-drug’ office (Office of National Drug Control Policy, aka ONDCP) and the world’s most famous pro-cannabis reform organization (NORML)"

We'll take it. NORML had originally posted an editorial on The Hill's site on August 6th. The ONDCP posted a response on the 12th, and NORML has now posted this rebuttal. Public debate on this subject is what's been missing, and this is shocking given the impact prohibition has on public budget priorities and private liberty.

The government spends an extraordinary amount of money keeping a plant "illegal"; and a weed at that. Talk about a loosing proposition. Are we too proud to be informed by our collective "wisdom of the ages" when speculating on such a fight (man vs. nature)? (add your own literary citations in the comments)


Ayn Rand once said,

"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

The numbers don't lie, and what makes this all the more appalling is that our nation's competence in secondary education has been doing nothing but declining during this same time period. In theory, with our dubious honor of having the worlds highest per-capita rate of incarceration (higher than Russia, China, and Singapore), one might think so many removed "bad-seeds" should be affecting the sample set for testing scores positively (directly or indirectly). Obviously, it has not.

I only halfway joke about this correlation. I'm not making any ergo hoc proposition here, but only asking by what measure we can justify such incarceration rates. What are we as a society getting for such a terrible cost? Is there a graph showing some proportional social improvement relative to incarceration? While we are certainly beginning to frame the costs in quantitative terms, the benefits can only be referred to in dubious qualitative terms.

In Allen St. Pierre's posting at The Hill, he makes the excellent point that

"nearly 9 out of 10 cannabis prohibition-related arrests are for minor possession (i.e., any eye-popping 738,935 in 2006)"

While these arrests do not always directly result in incarceration, the costs for even minor possession only add on to the total cost of prohibition. These may include asset seizure, loss of individual rights and privileges, and other restrictions affecting the liberty and productivity of the state's citizens.

Despite this, the ONDCP seems to audaciously use the language of consolation when saying that only 2.7% of inmates in state prisons are there for marijuana-related offenses. They conveniently fail to mention the growth trends for this percentage. For instance, what rate of incoming state prisoners are arrested for drug crimes vs. violent crime, and how has that been changing over the past twenty years? Further, they obscure the costs by ignoring the aforementioned penalties of arrest without incarceration, and by glossing over the fact that 2.7% of a large population is still quite a large number.

With respect to those growth trends, let's illuminate how the incoming state prison populations stack up, year over year. The graph to the left comes from a paper put together by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, entitled "Poor Prescription: The Costs of Imprisoning Drug Offenders in the United States".

With respect to how percentages translate to actual numbers of citizens affected, we had linked to a MPP video narration of an excerpt from Michael Pollen's excellent book, The Botany of Desire, a while back. It's useful to quote the same passage in context and in closing:

"The swiftness of this change in the weather, the demonizing of a plant that less than twenty years ago was on the cusp of general acceptance, will surely puzzle historians of the future. They will wonder why it was that the "drug war" of the '80s, '90s, and '00s fought the vast majority of its battles over marijuana*. They will wonder why, during this period, Americans jailed more of their citizens than any other country in history, and why one of every three of those were in prison because of their involvement with drugs, nearly fifty thousand of them solely for crimes involving marijuana. ... For in the last years of the twentieth century a series of Supreme Court cases and government actions specifically involving marijuana led to a substantial increase in the power of the government at the expense of the Bill of Rights*. As a result of the war against cannabis, Americans are demonstrably less free today."

* [I would be doing a disservice if I didn't mention that Pollen backs these claims fully in the footnotes of the book with arrest statistics, citations of court opinions, quotes from government officials, etc.]

California's Roadmap for Fed-Friendly Medical Marijuana

Maybe "Fed-Friendly" is jumping the gun a bit.

There are some exciting things going on in California right now (and when are there not?). It's all a little confusing, so I'll try to lay it out here.

First, MM advocates are suing the US AG, making the claim that the federal government is intentionally subverting the state's ability to enforce its own laws. Says U.S. District Judge Fogel [.pdf]:

"...they may be able to show that (federal officials) are deliberately seeking to frustrate the state's ability to determine whether an individual's use of marijuana is permissible under California law."

The Plaintiffs themselves say:

“[the Feds] pursued a policy of threatening and utilizing arrests, forfeitures, criminal prosecutions and other punitive means, all with the purpose of rendering California’s medical marijuana laws impossible to implement and with the intent of coercing California and its political subdivisions to enact legislation recriminalizing medical marijuana.”

An article on the MPP website rephrases this best:

"Federal authorities' goal, the plaintiffs alleged, is to make it impossible for the state to distinguish between medical and recreational use of marijuana and render the state law unenforceable, interfering with California's constitutional power to enact its own laws."

In this sense, they claim the state is being prevented from creating or enforcing its own law. The Federal government is unconstitutionally interfering, they say.

At the same time, the California AG just released a set of guidelines for "approved" dispensaries to follow. This is aimed at making a clear distinction between "legal" and "illegal" activity under state law, and simultaneously giving the fed's no excuse for 'unwittingly' raiding a licensed state dispensary. NORML and MPP seem to have mixed reactions to these guidelines. It's good to have some clarity, but there are some strange provisions. For one, all licensed dispensaries must be "non-profit" organizations. Many people support this to avoid some of the more dubious organizations that have popped into this industry.

In Alaska, and most other states for that matter, dispensaries are an issue not yet tackled. I presume everyone is waiting for some resolution in California.

The Bar's Still Open in the Fourth Dimension

Frankly, I feel like drinking tequila right now. That frequently happens when listening to Mega Bottle Ride by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros. Nasa says they can now see the Gamma Rays.

Actually, I'm trying to ignore the election results tonight here in Alaska. Ted Stevens won the Republican primary. That wasn't hard to predict when about five other people went after the spot. Cut the opposition five ways, and yeah, Ted will make it. Actually, he beat all his opponents combined.

Ted Stevens will be fighting against Mark Begich. It will closely watched - there's national interest in unseating Stevens, but most exciting is how Alaska will weigh a guy who's been indicted by the FBI when he fights a young, Anchorage-born dynastic politician. If you don't know, most folk living in the "Real Alaska" (i.e., rural Alaska) aren't terribly fond of Anchortown politicians. Actually, they just think Anchorage-folk are out of touch with the real Alaska.

Begich is an interesting cat. His dad disappeared in a plane crash shortly after being elected to the United States Legislature. It was Don Young who ultimately succeeded his father. Somewhat ironic and yet natural to see him now taking on Young's contemporary.

IMO, Begich hasn't done a bad job in Anchorage. However, I maintain two large criticisms of his tenure - he first pledged to address the horrible sexual assault problems in Anchorage, and never followed through. Did you know, for instance, that simply by moving from the lower-48 to live in a Alaska, a woman increases her chances of being sexually assaulted by something like 25%? Trust me, I'm probably sugar-coating that stat. As I recall, he made up some bogus line about how focusing on property crime would indirectly reduce sexual assault in Anchorage. That wasn't one of his finer moments.

Second (and paling in comparison), he seemed to try and sneak around every tax cap or anti-tax referendum he could, proposing the absurd fire-hydrant tax, amongst other things (remember, too, the photo radar?). This was so lemon-esque to the city's proverbial paper-cut because the population had clearly (by vote) expressed their adversion to increasing property taxes and others (sales, etc.), and here he was trying to back-door the people's will. Boo! Heh, bow to the Queen of Filth!

There's also been a bit too much smoke about his perhaps-too-close ties to the unions in town for there not to be at least some tundra fire burning there unseen. This has come up regarding his ties to the police union and conflicts of interest, his sale of the city phone utility, ATU, and other issues. One thing about watching politics is that you quickly come to be a disciple of the adage, "Where there's smoke, there's fire".

All that said, he's been a level-headed mayor for Anchorage, improving many neighborhoods and grappling with an arguably hostile assembly. He did bring some level of social sanity to the city in the wake of his predecessor (remember Mayor Weurch banning that gay pride exhibit?). I can't bust Weurch's chops too much, but I do remember enthusiastically, if not frantically, filling in the oval next to Begich's name when he ran.

Is Begich better than Stevens? I don't think Alaska can in good conscience vote Stevens in considering the amount of smoke billowing from a visible (if figurative) fire in Girdwood. It wouldn't surprise me if Stevens did get re-elected though - and you can join I, tequila, glass, and the mega-bottle ride.

'night all.

America's Never-Ending Prohibition

This is a great Reuter's article by Bernd Debusmann. It starts out with a bitter comparison:

"America's alcohol prohibition lasted 13 years, filled the country's prisons, inspired contempt for the law among millions, bred corruption and produced Al Capone. What it did not do was keep Americans from drinking.

America's marijuana prohibition drew into its 72nd year this month. It has created a huge underground industry catering to users, helped the U.S. prison population balloon into the world's largest, and diverted the resources of American law enforcement. What it has not done is keep Americans from using marijuana."

It mentions US HR 5843, which we covered a while back.

"At First We Thought It Was Another Massive Allied Bombing Attack, But This is Quite, Quite Different."

Your music editor here - I like eighties music. Who doesn't? Skinny Puppy? Leaether Strip? Remember that?

Hell, I LOVE Leaether Strip - but maybe they're more a nineties gig. I remember the guy who first handed me a copy of Fit for Flogging. Well, damn - Alfa-Matrix has just (like a week ago, I think) released a new FREAKIN' Strip album.

Thank God for iTunes. I like the album already. This is a two-disc set, and it opens up with a style that you'd expect - plenty of sampling, synth, hard rhythms, and the-world-is-fucked sentiment.

I won't go through a track-by-track narration - dissecting with drivel for show. If you like Leaether Strip, you're probably happy enough knowing another album came out.

The theme of the album is intelligent. Europe has been going through some crazy, crazy shit in the last ten years. Notably all the violence (let alone this Georgia/Poland/Russia/Nato stuff now). Put in context or not, you'll enjoy this album.