Choosing shoulders for a longer view.
So, this blog went into hiatus again two months after I got it back in gear, due to a combination of offline stress with absence of reliable internet. If I get back to a position where I’m able to write again, I will get at least a month’s lead on the work before I actually start publishing.
See you anon.
A portrait of the President as a young man.
So this is a really big one:
The Obama administration will soon announce regulations to make it easier for banks to do business with legal marijuana sellers, Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday.
“You don’t want just huge amounts of cash in these places. They want to be able to use the banking system,” Holder said during an appearance at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “There’s a public safety component to this. Huge amounts of cash—substantial amounts of cash just kind of lying around with no place for it to be appropriately deposited is something that would worry me, just from a law enforcement perspective.”
I linked two pieces yesterday discussing the arrant hypocrisy of allowing every major international bank to launder billions in cartel money while also permitting every bank in Colorado to turn away legal, legitimate, cannabis businesses. Well, the effects of legalisation are already being felt; the sheer turn-over of the first two weeks has forced Holder to move much more quickly on the banking issue than anyone saw coming.
“We’re in the process now of working with our colleagues at the Treasury Department to come up with regulations that will deal with this issue,” Holder said. He added that the new rules were likely to emerge “very soon” and were not intended to amount to a blessing of marijuana by the federal government. “It is an attempt to deal with a reality that exists in these states,” he said.
My emphasis. This is why legalisation from below is such a good idea in a Madisonian democracy.
Hat tipped to the good folks of /r/timetolegalize once again: Good catch!
The ‘dogs not barking’ news for this week is that they’re rolling up, smoking bowls and having a high old time in the Rockies, and yet the zombie apocalypse has not yet arrived. In addition to President Obama’s recent foray into rational commentary in the New Yorker, there’ve been a whole bunch of other developments.
That’s a lot of rolling balls.
H/t to PolicyMic, who found this map and then had a look around the events it documents. Well worth a read.
1. State by State by Nation
This week brought news that Bill Gates supported legalisation in Washington State in 2012, and continues to support the process. We’ve got legislative agendas making the news in a whole bunch of places: Indiana, Maryland, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Oh, and Finland. A note of caution is that none of these are laws yet; but several of them may well become so. As I suggested last post, President Obama seems to be quite happy to let We, The People force him into doing the right thing; and I think it’s good political strategy. I suspect that at the point where there are more states with medical marijuana than without, we might see some actual machinery get into gear in the halls of power. It’s worth noting also that we only need a couple more states for that to happen.
It’s been a week or so since I’ve had the keyboard time to work on the blog, and a great deal has been happening. So it’s time for an analysis of the headline news, followed in a second post by an epic link-dump.
Mr. President
“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”
– Interview by David Remnick of the New Yorker
Good analysis of the Independence question here from Politicoid.
I’m finally getting around to the subject of Scottish Independence. I was really a bit lost on how to start this; I mean, it seems like there’s just so bastard much to consider, right? Currency, the EU, welfare… For what seems now to have been a shockingly long period of time, I couldn’t even understand the question. Identifying as I do with the term ‘British’ as much as I do ‘Scottish’, it seemed, well, just unnecessary.
View original post 1,385 more words
[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]
No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of crime control.
Marc Mauer, The Race to Incarcerate
The US state of California imprisons more people than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. That state alone incarcerates more citizens than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined. The United States as a whole imprisons nearly two million people. The US locks up, proportionately and absolutely, more of its citizens than Soviet Russia under Stalin. Estimates vary, but a likely figure is that half of those prisoners are non-violent marijuana users, and that’s why California locks up so many people. The primary enforcement regime for pot possession busts is administrated via state and local policing.
Eric Schlosser was writing about this at the Atlantic as early as 1998:
The prison boom in the United States is a recent phenomenon. Throughout the first three quarters of this century the nation’s incarceration rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 prison inmates for every 100,000 people. In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States.
In other words, that explosion in incarceration tracks precisely with the increasingly punitive history of US drug prohibition. Continue reading ‘Perverse Incentives IV: Economies of Forced Labour’
[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]
This is not, in fact, an essay about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; they fit neatly into the Beltway enforcement establishment I described two posts back. This is a post about the two of those things which do not provide evening news headlines for ATF bosses to make political hay out of. Representing industrial drug-merchants like Phillip Morris and AB Inbev, Big Booze and Big Tobacco lobbies are significant contributors to the propaganda campaign that underpins the War on Drugs, and just like Big Pharma, they’ve got skin in the game.
Big Tobacco, 1994
But simultaneously, Big Tobacco care less, and spend less, than the beer brewers: if cannabis were widely legalised, no industrial superpowers are better placed to move into that market than tobacco companies. They already operate a vast industry based around a semi-tropical crop; and marijuana is much easier and cheaper to grow, harvest and package than tobacco, which is notoriously prone to horticultural misadventure and is tricky to store. To the beer giants, the competitive threat posed by the specter of cannabis legalisation is more direct, and it has kept the big booze concerns reaching for their cheque-books, year after year, for decades.
Continue reading ‘Perverse Incentives III: Alcohol, Tobacco and FUD’
Apparently /r/timetolegalize/ has noticed the Prohibition series. Welcome aboard, guys :)
The important question isn’t about risks of independence, it’s about the certainties of staying under Westminster rule.
Via a friend in the North, this article on the subject of Scottish independence:
But if staying in the UK seems likely to mean living in a country that leaves the European Union (Miliband, if he wins the election, has not yet promised a referendum on that, but neither has he refused one); if it is to be a country that continues to impose increasingly punitive and humiliating sanctions on its poorest citizens who live on social security benefits (Labour spokespersons on this subject seem determined to show they will match the Tories’ brutalities); if the Human Rights Act is to be repealed (as our present home secretary promises); if the UK continues to have the most centralised government in the Western world (strangling local governments and killing off civic leadership); if ‘green’ policies are to have low priority; and if our armed forces are to remain mercenary outriders to American foreign policy; then I would rather get out, whatever the hazards of independence.
— David Donnison
A perspective I hadn’t considered. Nice catch, Chris Hutchings!
[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]
The modern pharmaceutical industry has evolved entirely during the era of marijuana prohibition. When Anslinger declared war on weed, pharmaceutical chemistry and, most particularly, psychiatric chemistry were barely in gear. Prior to 1937, a significant percentage of remedies in the AMA register made medicinal use of cannabis, and yet by the 1970s the medical establishment had declared marijuana to have no medical uses, in order to classify it as a Schedule I narcotic. How did the majority of the US medical establishment reverse their view on a drug in just two generations? Here, again, we see the power of Hearst propaganda, but we also see another perverse incentive at work; there’s money to be made in banning cannabis.
The pharmaceutical lobby, which I shall follow Ben Goldacre and refer to as Big Pharma, came into existence during the era of designer drugs which emerged after the Second World War. Chemists were, with remarkable speed, finding new and interesting ways to mess about with biochemistry, and many of these inventions were quite genuine medical miracles. But along the way, a bizarre incentive arose; important US institutions make more money if people have to go to a doctor and buy a pill than if people don’t. Health being too good is a problem for Big Pharma.
A parallel problem is people having access to effective remedies no-one owns a patent on. And that’s the problem Big Pharma have with cannabis. We’re all accustomed to scientists debunking natural remedies; this is because a great many such ‘remedies’ are pure hokum, like homeopathy. Others, however, work; willow bark does treat headaches, and quinine did cure malaria. But for the accident of Anslinger, the things we now know and can prove about cannabis as a valuable self-medication for pain, depression, insomnia, and muscular spasmodic conditions would have become common knowledge in the 1950s. Cannabis is a natural remedy for a number of basic ailments which you can make at home, and if it were accepted as such a great many less people would be taking depression medication or popping paracetomol. And that means big money wants cannabis to remain prohibited.
[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
– Upton Sinclair (probably)
The INCB is one of several institutions which labours effectively on behalf of Orwell’s War. They are a UN institution, but they are American in nature, mission, and largely in personnel. I include them with the Beltway Bandits (the DEA, ATF, and company) because they are products of the same US domestic politics, and were originally staffed by US domestic operatives. Their governing mission is inherently bureaucratic: self-perpetuation. As long as the Drug War remains official international policy, they get to sound important and say nice things about a sickening list of human rights abuses around the world: “Time and again, the INCB has simply turned a blind eye to international standards, human rights, science and even basic decency.”
Bureaucracies are organisms which eat budgets and seek to survive. No such organism can admit it is wrong easily, let alone admit that the entire rationale for its existence is misguided. As a result, the INCB is currently in a direct confrontation with the sovereign nation of Uruguay, and look likely to be publicly humiliated: President Mujica’s not for turning. Behind all the propaganda and theatrics, the INCB are the international arm of a Beltway empire-building exercise which would have stunned even Nixon had he seen what it would become. I covered the origins of this Napoleonic enterprise when I spoke of Harry Anslinger, but it only starts with him. What mattered is the institutional legacy his personal ambition left behind him, and the way US governmental incentives created a self-feeding war machine. To cover the DEA and its associated support troops I’ll need to go back into Anglinger’s methods. Continue reading ‘Perverse Incentives I: The Beltway Bandits’
[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]
Anyone who’s been reading along at home should now have some idea of how we got here, and why. Cannabis was criminalised by racist sentiment and lies on the floor of Congress. A twenty-year campaign of misinformation was waged in support of the petty ambitions of a Beltway Napoleon. Via the UN, in 1961, the USA strong-armed much of the world into a war they didn’t want. The relevant authorities have known since 1972 that cannabis is not dangerous and that the War on Drugs as a whole is miguided, and they have deliberately ignored all evidence to that effect. This pernicious attitude has proved durable and persistent. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been destroyed, tens of thousands have been murdered, and the bald economics of demand creates supply have carried on regardless. Vast criminal enterprises have been spawned by prohibition, and the costs to society of this ugly and vindictive conflict have been born, overwhelmingly, by the poor and by people of colour.
The alert reader will have noticed by now that I am writing a series investigating the geo-politics of the War on Drugs and yet I’m mostly talking about marijuana prohibition in the US. You’re right, but I’m not trying to indulge in rhetorical sleight-of-hand; the chronicle and socio-politics of US marijuana prohibition completely changed the way the non-medical use of drugs is perceived and discussed, let alone treated, in the post-Enlightenment West. From Anslinger’s ambition has grown the dominance of a moralistic doctrine on self-medication which prior to that point had not controlled a major polity since the Puritans banned Christmas [1] in the 1650s. The war on drugs (excepting only those which have a powerful, pre-established lobby, of course) starts with marijuana.
Continue reading ‘Us & Them IV: Tipping Point’
[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]
When Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971, Anslinger had been gone from the FBN for nearly ten years, but his legacy was alive and well. The Iron Law still held, though by that time the category of Them had been broadened to include anti-war protesters, civil rights protesters, hippies, teenagers and anyone else who troubled right-wing America. One of Nixon’s first acts in prosecuting his new war was to recruit the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. Typical of Nixon, he did the thing Anslinger had always had the sense not to do; he got some guys together who knew some stuff and instructed them to look at the evidence and tell him what it said. The result rather surprised him.
The use of drugs is not in itself an irresponsible act. Medical and scientific uses serve important individual and social needs and are often essential to our physical and mental well-being. Further, the use of drugs for pleasure or other non-medical purposes is not inherently irresponsible.
A variety of other key findings from the report confounded the orthodoxy Anslinger had invented. Marijuana is not dangerous, and its use is very rarely debilitating. Marijuana is not addictive, but can be habit-forming. If marijuana were legal and regulated, alcohol addiction and its associated social traumas could fall by as much as 25% [1]. Marijuana prohibition might not withstand honest Constitutional scrutiny. The report concluded that:
[Anslinger’s] policy grew out of a distorted and greatly exaggerated concept of the drug’s ordinary effects upon the individual and the society. On the basis of information then available, marihuana was not adequately distinguished from other problem drugs and was assumed to be as harmful as the others.
The increased incidence of use, intensive scientific reevaluation, and the spread of use to the middle and upper socioeconomic groups have led to the informal adoption of a modified social policy. On the basis of our opinion surveys and our empirical studies of law enforcement behavior, we are convinced that officialdom and the public are no longer as punitive toward marihuana use as they once were. [2]
[…]
Law enforcement policy, both at the Federal and State levels, implicitly recognises that elimination is impossible at this time. The active attempt to suppress all marihuana use has been replaced by an effort to keep it within reasonable bounds. Yet because this policy still reflects a view that marihuana smoking is itself destructive enough to justify punitive action against the user, we believe it is an inappropriate social response.
Let that one fester a while. The US government has known since year one of the War on Drugs that the whole shooting match is a waste of time.
“This … is an economic land grab. It is the process of taking a criminal industry away from criminals.” – Hugo Riffkind
In between the investigatory series on the War on Drugs it’s time for another Ball, Rolling round-up of interesting things that have happened in the last few days. So in no particular order:
When the levee breaks…
I commented before that one of the really noticeable effects on journalists of the ballot legalisations in Colorado and Washington is that lots and lots of people are suddenly writing articles they’d never have dared write before, and getting them published in places that would never have offered them a platform prior to 2011. Apparently this kind of combination of a trail-blazer with a tipping-point in popular politlal cover applies to states and nations:
But Mujica reminded that Yans did not say a word about the US states of Colorado and Washington, which also legalized marijuana.
“Does he have different rules: one for Uruguay and other for the world’s strong countries?”
The Torygraph continues to take an interest, doing a brief survey of the state of play in the US of A. And it’s not all bad news in the UK press, either: there’s an attempt at a cannabis cafe in Manchester. We’ve got an interesting review of changing attitudes around the world, and an update on the polling numbers in the US. Big Pharma is interested in Uruguay, and China wants to play. The celebrity chefs have joined the brave new world: even the Swiss are catching up.
And from the world of Science…
It’s been a good week for real data. We have a better idea of why cannabis does not in fact cause insanity, criminality and death. We already knew that cannabis helps kill cancer but this is useful confirmation. Mainly, though, I wanted to draw people’s attention to one aspect of the medical science on cannabis, which also interacts with the social science and with the enormous, lucrative and vigorous corporate opposition to ending the War on Drugs. You see, cannabis may repair the brain damage already done by alcohol. This is one of many reasons that scientific authors since the 70s have been arguing, successfully, that legalising pot would reduce alcohol use by up to 25%, and problem alcohol use by potentially a great deal more than that. I’ll address why this causes big alcohol conglomerates to fund prohibition later on in my ongoing Prohibition series.
In more detail…
A couple of particular entrants into the debate in the UK press have caught my eye for closer investigation. I did wonder about writing a rebuttal to John Rentoul’s rather bumbling Indy piece, but I didn’t feel I needed to. This will be read by a lot more people than my hypothetical piece anyway, and is quite good. But it does perpetuate one mistake made Rentoul and many others:
I think there is quite a lot of evidence suggesting a link between heavy cannabis use among teenagers and mental health problems, particularly schizophrenia. I remember being convinced of this even before much of the recent evidence emerged – one of my best friends from school, a heavy cannabis user, was Sectioned at 17 and has been in and out of ‘sheltered’ accommodation ever since.
For one thing, and I quote Jason Schiffman [1]:”The onset of schizotypal symptoms generally precedes the onset of cannabis use. The findings do not support a causal link between cannabis use and schizotypal traits.” To go on with, findings of schizotypal symptoms associated with heavy cannabis use in non-schizophrenic teenagers are temporary, not permanent, and cannabis does not erode your brain: “They concluded that the heaviest users may have a decrease in their ability to learn and remember information, but that this effect was so small as to be ‘acceptable’.”
By contrast, Hugo Riffkind’s piece in the Spectator is pretty good throughout. My niggles are small (why do several journalists seem to think Uruguay started this ball rolling, when the whole point is that Mujica needed the political cover provided by Colorado and Washington to act?) I mostly wanted to highlight a couple of priceless quotes:
Our media, for obvious reasons, often seems to give the impression that the great evil of the criminal drugs trade is the way that it makes some middle-class kids do unexpectedly poorly in their A-levels. […] a worse evil is the way it makes into criminals people who would otherwise not be.
Well, indeed. And I’ll finish with this one:
If you want to end the war on drugs, the only real solution is to find a way to stop fighting it without surrendering to the bad guys. The triumph here is that people have finally made a more sensible assessment of just who the bad guys are.
[1] In “Symptoms of Schizotypy Precede Cannabis Use,” published Mar. 30, 2005 in Psychiatric Research.
[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]
Harry Anslinger.
In the 1920s and 1930s almost no-one was getting high on cannabis in the US except Mexicans [1], a few Filipinos, and New York intellectuals who’d read some Jung. The American Medical Association used cannabis in a number of medical remedies, which according to the 1937 evidence of the AMA’s Doctor Woodward totalled about a third of those on the register: bear in mind that to this day, cannabis carries a Schedule 1 prohibtion, which defines it as ‘without recognised medical use’. Why did Anslinger pick such an obscure target? Well, he knew a guy who really, really didn’t like Mexicans.
Continue reading ‘Us & Them II: Lies, Damned Lies and Harry Anslinger’
Rapid post drawing attention to this article:
We discovered that the disruptive faction that bombarded climate change posts was actually substantially smaller than it had seemed. Just a small handful of people ran all of the most offensive accounts. What looked like a substantial group of objective skeptics to the outside observer was actually just a few bitter and biased posters with more opinions then evidence.
Negating the ability of this misguided group to post to the forum quickly resulted in a change in the culture within the comments. Where once there were personal insults and bitter accusations, there is now discussion of the relevant aspects of the research. Instead of (almost comically) paranoid and delusional conspiracy theories, we have knowledgeable users explaining complicated concepts to non-scientists who are simply interested in understanding the research. While we won’t claim /r/science is perfect, users seem happy with the changes made.
Like our commenters, professional climate change deniers have an outsized influence in the media and the public. And like our commenters, their rejection of climate science is not based on an accurate understanding of the science but on political preferences and personality. As moderators responsible for what millions of people see, we felt that to allow a handful of commenters to so purposefully mislead our audience was simply immoral.
So if a half-dozen volunteers can keep a page with more than 4 million users from being a microphone for the antiscientific, is it too much to ask for newspapers to police their own editorial pages as proficiently?
— Nathan Allen
The Grist write-up is entitled, Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don’t all newspapers do the same?. Why, indeed.
[ Editor’s Note: the navigation guides at top & bottom of these articles are pre-configured for when the series is finished: the ones with dates in the future (i.e. all of them, to begin with!) will only start to work when the relevant articles publish. ]
[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]
If you belong to any generation raised between 1936 and about 1980, you are likely to have one of three opinions about cannabis. A small percentage are experienced users, who were turned on as Beats in the ’50s or Hippies in the ’60s and ’70s. A larger percentage used the drug then, but as they aged and were absorbed by the establishment order, converted; claimed they never inhaled, so to speak. They often see cannabis as a kind of student disease, like left-wing politics and pot noodles. Many, however, have a clear understanding that cannabis is the Devil’s Weed, the Harvest of Horror, the Assassin of Youth. “Everyone knows” these things: that cannabis causes insanity, criminality, and death. That it is acutely addictive. That it leads directly to heroin addiction. That the drug was banned because of the damage it caused to the war effort; this story varies depending on age between soldiers in WWII, soldiers in Korea and soldiers in Vietnam.
Every item on that list is factually wrong, but people hold this view for a completely understandable reason. They spent their formative decades being systematically and deliberately lied to by the US government and the press. To understand why it was worth intentionally deceiving entire generations about a common plant, you have to understand how different drug use and abuse were before the War on Drugs, and you have to understand the mechanics of prohibition: the psychology of Us and Them.
This is mostly a meta-post about what is about to happen on the blog from tomorrow, but here’s a quick trawl around the net first:
News in Brief
Colorado.
Orwell’s War
Around this time last year, as I was trying to launch this blogging effort, I began a research series on the War on Drugs. The series came in three sections: the two I had mostly completed that time round were Us & Them, which covered the origins of the modern Drug War, and Perverse Incentives, which dealt with how the Drug War is maintained in the present era. That series was still incomplete when I dropped off the internet last year and was unable to continue writing here.
A sufficient number of the existing articles have needed reworking to reflect new developments that I decided I should run the whole series again, with the updates and continuing on through the last two Perverse Incentives essays to Orwell’s War, which will talk about the final days of the War and look forward to a possible peace. I should be able to publish an article every second day or so until the series is complete. Watch this space. If you have time, watch this video.
Missed my Friday Giant due to off-line commitments, but I have read a few things I found interesting over the last couple of days, so here they are.
1. Balls still rolling.
Good Morning, Denver
Something very similar has happened with the growing cracks in the international consensus on cannabis prohibition, and it can be seen easily in the coverage by the FT. After the GCDP report in 2011 in which 149 major world dignitaries outed themselves as in favour of ending cannabis prohibition, the FT published a careful and guardedly positive article pointing out the economic benefits of ending the War on Drugs. There have been several more positive blog posts and op-eds since. But in the last two days they alone have published no less than three different articles [1] on the subject. The Torygraph (oddly) have generally been supportive (they were the main vehicle for Richard Branson’s press campaign in 2011 and 2012) but since ballot legalisation in Colorado took effect several of their authors have come out openly cheerleading for the project. The Independent is not immune. Add in the Nutt-Sack affair, Sanjay Gupta’s informative mea culpa, Uruguay’s current confrontation with the INCB and all the other things that have happened and you can see why this time feels a bit different than last.
Nice to have a new entrant for my Catch of the Day (hat tipped as always to Jonathan Bernstein) feature. In the New York Times Paul Krugman has spotted a right-wing economist (Art Laffer himself, no less) admitting in public that the austerians, hysterians and all other stripes of anti-Keynsian are quite simply wrong. Definitely worth an honourable mention, particularly given the stature of the guy who said this:
“Usually when you find the model this far off, you’ve probably got something wrong with the model, not that the world has changed,” he said. “Inflation does not appear to be monetary base driven,” he said.
– Business Insider
Austerians take note; that is how you respond to the world proving your politics to be mathematically flawed. And to Professor Krugman, nice catch!
Better Giants 