An article in the Wall Street Journal is reporting that some advisors are saying “the U.S. should legalize marijuana, let cocaine pass through the Caribbean and take the profit motive out of the drug trade”.
Interesting points:
Forbes magazine put Mexican drug lord Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman as No. 401 on the world’s list of billionaires.
Imagine if some of that profit went towards treating drug use as a health issue?
Mexico’s deputy agriculture minister, Jeffrey Jones, told some of the country’s leading farmers that they could learn a thing or two from Mexican drug traffickers. “It’s a sector that has learned to identify markets and create the logistics to reach them,” he said. Days later, Mr. Jones was forced to resign. “He may be right,” one top Mexican official confided, “but you can’t say things like that publicly.”
It seems Prof. Nutt isn’t the only one being sacked for being rational about the drug debate.
Oh, and by the way, if you think it’s just those of us that can responsibly use drugs that are after a lift of prohibition, think again. The very same people who’ve been on the front-line of the war against drugs are saying the same thing.
Update: It seems Joaquin Guzman is also the #41 most powerful person. Would he still be the world’s most powerful person and the USA’s most wanted man if it wasn’t for prohibition?
Originally published at DrugR. Please leave any comments there.
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Currently there is a big hoohah about the Australian web firewall. Why is this of interest to us, as proponents of drug reform? Well, in the linked article it says:
“Content defined under the National Classification Scheme as Refused Classification includes child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act.”
Notice the reference to content that’s related to drug use. Do you think Erowid will be filtered? Given that there is a plethora of drug information which includes chemical synthesis, I wouldn’t be surprised. Especially since Australia has in the past been one of the few countries that refused classification of Fallout 3 due to it depicting drug use. This seems strange because plenty of games have power-ups (mushrooms from Mario Brothers anyone?), perhaps the mistake Fallout 3 made was to depict this as actually have a realistic method of implementing these power ups? And surely the impacts of negative consequence and addiction in the game probably scared the censors too, since it’d be terrible thing for people to be forewarned of the potential dangers of drug use right?
Now the Australian government can prevent the public from doing their own research about drugs, and they won’t have to be pestered by the public finding out the relative safety of illegal substances versus alcohol in society. Instead, they can feed people whatever misinformation they like.
Originally published at DrugR. Please leave any comments there.
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One of the events that catalysed the creation of DrugR was the sacking of Professor Nutt, a drug advisor in the UK, who refused to cow to political pressure to stop being rational about a drug policy based on scientific evidence of relative harm instead of moral judgement. Among the papers that Prof. Nutt has published is a relative ranking for a number of legal and illicit drugs. And it’s no surprise to us that alcohol and tobacco are some of the worst whereas MDMA and LSD are among the safer choices.
I’d like to quote a bit from the introduction which struck me in particular:
“Most other countries and international agencies—eg, the UN and WHO—have drug classification systems that purport to be structured according to the relative risks and dangers of illicit drugs. However, the process by which harms are determined is often undisclosed, and when made public can be ill-defined, opaque, and seemingly arbitrary.”
This is actually one of the sources of my many frustrations. During my formative years, school taught me about drugs… except they blatantly told lies which, due to them also teaching my science, I could see through. I did my own research and began to mistrust what authorities said about drugs. Obviously not everything is scare-mongering, and drugs do have risks and harms, but rarely do these match with what drug classification schemes dictate. I would like to trust that my government ad my best interests in mind, but given the buy-in by the alcohol and tobacco lobbies it’s obvious that the government is mostly about maintaining the status quo. Which is somewhat of losing platform when the only constant is change.
The paper is also the source of this often-displayed harm graph. A relative ranking of the drugs they assessed:
You’ve got to wonder if the people behind the drug-classifications schemes are smoking crack.
If your interested in reading the original paper, which I highly recommend, it’s available for download here.
Originally published at DrugR. Please leave any comments there.
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This is not news. The fact that ecstasy is part of an illegal and therefore unregulated market has left users exposed to this problem for years. What has suddenly made it news in New Zealand is the fact that since the banning of BZP a year ago, the problem has become much more marked. Previously, users had a legal, semi-regulated alternative. Adulterated pills certainly existed, but the ability to walk away from them put users in a much stronger position, in that producers who wanted return custom would have to have a reasonable quality product.
Now, it’s much easier to put a variety of different substances into a pill than it is to illegally import MDMA, and the vast majority of pills available on the market today are adulterated with other things. The problem here is that there is no longer an alternative, and people are now dealing solely with this unregulated market. Anyone who thinks the banning of BZP has stopped people seeking substances is delusional. As predicted, it’s simply created a situation where there’s a demand for a scarce substance, all of the advantages are in favour of the supplier, and people are taking what they can get from people for whom there is absolutely no comeback for supplying goods that are ‘not as advertised.’
( So what can be done about this situation? )
Of course, to not take the pill or to walk away from a purchase takes willpower. To donate a pill for lab testing takes willpower too. I’d like to suggest that anyone who finds themselves unable to do these things after discovering that their pill contains unidentified substances that are not MDMA, might want to consider their drug use as a whole in the context of the risks they are prepared to take, and consider the potential consequences of a bad decision made for the sake of a fun night out.
Originally published at DrugR. Please leave any comments there.
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I’m a parent. As a parent, I’m responsible for the welfare and upbringing of a child. I have been told that advocacy for responsible use of recreational drugs, for decriminalisation of many currently illegal substances, and for education of my child about substances that are currently illegal, is irresponsible. Apparently, I should not be encouraging my child to break the law and take risks with health, and by educating children about substances other than the legally sanctioned ones, I am doing this and thus being an irresponsible parent.
So lets compare a legal drug with an illegal one shall we?
Alcohol risks harm not only to the user but to those around them, is addictive with withdrawal symptoms that can kill you, you have to keep dosing with it in order to feel the effects throughout a normal evening socialising, it’s hard to judge the dosage of, it can kill you by overdose, it kills around 1,000 people a year in this country, and it has a misuse risk rate among users of approximately 25%.
Compare this with, say, LSD, a Class A drug. It’s not associated with violence, it’s not addictive and therefore has no withdrawal symptoms, one dose lasts 8 or so hours, it has well tested measured effective dose rates, it’s virtually impossible to overdose on, and it has been associated with a total of two deaths in New Zealand, which were both found to be in association with other drugs.
Here’s a graph you’ve probably seen before – the drugs harm graph. It shows there are only four drugs available that are considered by experts to be more dangerous than alcohol. Yet those who say they have my welfare and that of my child at heart, find it necessary to reduce our choice of intoxicant to this – we may use alcohol, or nothing.
But, I am the irresponsible one for wanting my child to have a wider choice of safer substances and a better education in their use.
I am happy to be an irresponsible parent if it means my child has a better chance of surviving.
Originally published at DrugR. Please leave any comments there.
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tenchinage is now involved in a collaborative project - a blog/site in similar vein to this one, entitled 'Fighting a war on the war on drugs'.
This means there will be more frequent updates, more content and searchable tags/categories. This collaborative project will bring in more viewpoints as well. Please, if you're interested in discussing drugs and drug use in a rational way, head over there for a look.
This blog will continue, but updates will simply be a link to that one. And here's the first:
King Charles II vs US government in the honesty stakes.
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Australian ex-minister is backing drug reform. He mentions the prohibition of alcohol and its complete failure as a comparison. This is pretty common, and I agree - but I take issue with one of his statements:
"Why do they think prohibition of illicit drugs will work any better?"
( So what's the problem with that statement? )
Why does anyone think prohibition of other drugs has been any different from prohibition of alcohol? This report details some of the issues around prohibited drugs, and points out that they are the same issues that were encountered with the prohibition of alcohol. For those who don't want to read the whole report, please at least read this page, which makes policy recommendations for dealing with illegal drugs, the first of which is recognition that prohibition doesn't work.
Then have a look at the date at the top. Yes, that's right - this report was made in 1972. Even back then it was recognised that prohibition was a failure - and why not? There's a long and rich history of crime, death and addiction to draw on for evidence. Yet these recommendations have been resoundingly ignored by governments and the UN for nearly 40 years.
To me, this makes no sense. It makes no sense to go on considering prohibition in any kind of future tense, because in order to be realistic about drugs, it shouldn't even be considered as an option any more - and there's ample history to back that statement up. There is no place in the present world for dithering about whether or not prohibition 'will work' or 'is working' - it didn't. It hasn't. Time for a new approach that actually has a future.
* There are no references attached to these dates as the information is in the public domain and simple enough to find for anyone interested.
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Sometime today, Transform UK (for those who don't know, these guys are in my opinion one of the most switched-on groups of drug reform lobbyists - check out their website!) are launching a book that proposes specific models of regulation for all types of currently illegal drugs.
One of the problems in drug reform debates is the 'unknown quantity' factor - it's never been tried, and predictions range from "OMG total chaos!" to "Less health problems, more money for government = WIN!" and everything in between. This book offers some answers to the question "What could a post-prohibition regime look like?" - and explores regulation models along with the principles and rationale for them.
I strongly suggest downloading and reading this book, along with their other two major publications, Tools For The Debate and After the War On Drugs: Options For Control.
Transform UK successfully move beyond emotive ideology and reframe the argument in a rational way. Recommended reading.
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Drug testing in schools, a controversial topic at the best of times.
The gist of the article is that more kids have been caught with drugs in schools in New Zealand (particularly cannabis) than ever before, police having brought in sniffer dogs and drug testing.
Logic says that bringing in sniffer dogs and drug testing is likely to catch more people with drugs than just guessing, which is what they were doing before. Yet, for some reason the fact that more people have been caught seems to be evidence of some kind of drug epidemic. I'm not sure I agree with the reasoning here.
( Why not? )
Because if people do wrong, they're bad people, right? And if they're bad people, we don't have to care about helping them because they don't deserve it, right? It's so much easier that way.
Schools are (in part) the places where people's attitudes are formed. I wonder how many people caught up in this sniffer-dog, drug-test, expulsion/punishment situation will go on to have a friendly and cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship with society?
* Drug uptake has consistently increased under prohibition.
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Much has been written all over the internet about the sacking of David Nutt, the chair of the UK Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, for his stance on cannabis, ecstasy and LSD being less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. Two of his fellow committee members also quit in protest, and more may follow.
I don't think I need to say much here at all, but I'd like to point interested people to places where information is available. I've been watching the story unfold and have found it interesting to watch the government and popular press go into damage control mode. There have been some blatant attempts to cast doubt* on the science behind the paper that got him sacked.
I think probably the funniest bit was from the Home Office: "The home secretary expressed surprise and disappointment over Professor Nutt's comments which damage efforts to give the public clear messages about the dangers of drugs."
So, by presenting the scientific evidence to the public directly, Prof Nutt was damaging the clear message the government gives the public? Which clear message is that then? This one? (FRANK - which is, frankly, laughable). Or do they mean Gordon Brown saying that skunk is lethal? Because that's such a clear message to all the people who've smoked it and not died. Obviously giving people facts is sullying this clear message. Oh and by the way, England - 'new' skunk has been around in Unzud since the mid-90s. Just saying.
Anyway, I think these two articles are worth reading even if you don't read anything else:
Bad Science on the Nutt Sack Affair.
BBC article on the politics around the sacking.
Anyway, if you think the whole Nutt thing is crazy like a crazy thing, there are a couple of things you can do: Join the Facebook group (25,000 as at today - that's 20,000 since I joined it). Facebook doesn't change anything but it does bring together a large group of similar-minded people, create networks and provide information as it comes to hand. And Sign the petition. You can do this if you're an expatriate so you don't have to be living in England. There are 5,000 signatures on it currently. Even if it doesn't get Nutt reinstated, the response to this sacking will make governments worldwide aware that people are not just sitting there letting the wool be pulled over their eyes by politicians who would feed us misinformation about things that affect our health.
Because for once, it's not just the folks with an interest in drug policy who are taking notice.
* Daily Mail. Nuff said.
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For why drug addiction should be framed as a health issue, not a criminal one.
Cost of controversial new treatment for long term heroin addicts in the UK, that seems to be achieving results not only in reduction of crime (66%) but in changing addicts' attitude towards their addiction? $22,000 per year US (that's $29, 089 NZ).
Average cost of imprisonment in New Zealand? $90,977 per year.
These heroin studies are being undertaken in other countries, with similar results.
Compare and contrast.
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Mr Key announces innovative new plan to address P.
Brace yourselves people, this one's gonna blow you away - here are the critical steps to sorting out the so-called 'P problem':
1. More customs officers! 40 of them!
2. Less pseudoephedrines! Ban them!
3. Spend $22million over three years on 'thousands more beds in special detox facilities'!
Sounds good, right? Stop it at the border (because that's working so well to date), and ban the legitimate sources (to drive it even further underground).
"But there's TREATMENT in there!" I hear you say. "Thousands more beds! Look! Thousands!" Yeah. I saw that too, so I went for a look, and found out some interesting stuff about P treatment.
Apparently it takes ~30 days to detox enough from P before a person's cognitively able to benefit from treatment. Now, Mr Key's throwing $7.3million a year at this - based on the cost of intensive residential programmes (roughly $13.5million for 500 places), that's about 800 more detoxes over three years, or 267 people a year. Sorry John, that's hardly thousands.
And that's only detox. If you decide to only detox 134 people a year and spend the other half on longer term rehabilitative therapy, which lasts approximately 6 months, then you can provide this to 843 people a year. That's not thousands either.
But it is something, and that's great. Just.. I can't help contrast it with the $385 million over the next two years that's being spent on new prison beds - some of which will likely contain a person who's got a health issue with P and has been mislabelled as a criminal.
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Looking around at the pill reports and listening to people talk, it seems that nearly a year after the prohibition of BZP in New Zealand, the number of street ecstasy pills that are adulterated with BZP has skyrocketed to the point where people buying E are now more likely to be getting BZP, or some combination of substances that contains BZP. This was predicted before the ban as a risk, and now it's come to pass.
( So what? )
I am wondering how long it'll take for the media to notice? Or if they have, and are just not reporting it? Thing is I'd be willing to bet there is as much BZP being consumed now as there was before, only now it calls itself E, costs three times as much, and all that money is going into the pockets of people who don't care about the safety of the people who take it. So if BZP was such a health risk as to require a ban, where are the media reports that were rife while Mr Anderton was forcing his bill through parliament, now that it's being taken illegally instead of legally? Thinking BZP use has stopped would be silly. It hasn't stopped. So are people suddenly taking it safely? Or are people presenting to hospitals calling it E? Or could it be that it was never that unsafe in the first place, and all that media hype was just bullshit?
Stuff to think about.
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| 2009-03-27 13:07 |
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Some US states propose random drug testing of beneficiaries.
Nothing quite like marginalising the already-marginalised to show what a great nation you are.
This is me wondering about what they plan to do with people who test positive - remove their benefits? Let's think about that for a while.. where does it lead when you remove the last avenue of income from a person? I'm pretty sure they don't rush out and become productive little capitalists.
In New Zealand about 1 in 5 people (let's say 1 in 7 to be safe) would likely test positive for illegal substances under such a regime. I'm guessing the figures are similar for the US.
That is one hell of a lot of people to cut off for their choice of recreational substance.
I'm harking back to Dargaville in the '90s, where 20-25% of people were unemployed, and where the pubs did the best business in town, especially on benefit day. But apparently that's ok - it's only those other recreational drugs that make you deserve to starve on the streets.
I don't think making these laws will cause humans to stop wanting to get into altered states. I think it's more likely to blow up in the faces of the policy makers when they suddenly have millions more homeless people to deal with.
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Our Shiny New National Drugs Policy has an appendix that collates information gathered about drug use in New Zealand. It's divided into sections for different types of drugs:
Tobacco, Alcohol, Cannabis, Stimulants, Hallucinogens, Opiates, Inhalants and Volatile Substances, Performance and Image-Enhancing Drugs, Diverted Pharmaceuticals, and Legal Highs. Each of these sections has a short rundown of the harms associated with the use/abuse of the substances in question. Except hallucinogens - that section contains this wording:
"Hallucinogens include LSD and ‘magic mushrooms’. In the New Zealand Health Behaviours Survey – Drug Use 2003 report, 1.2% and 1.1% of people reported past-year use of LSD and mushrooms."
That's it.
So I went and had a look at the Health Behaviours Survey. And yep, the only context in which it mentions hallucinogens is either in the glossary, or in 'other drugs' tables showing prevalence of use.
I can only conclude from these snippets of information that there have been no reported or statistically significant harms associated with the use of hallucinogens in New Zealand recently. So, um, why then, is LSD still a Class A substance, attracting "the highest penalties possible for manufacture, sale, and use. Manufacturing, importing, supplying or dealing LSD can attract a maximum sentence of life in jail. Conspiracy to commit an offence, manufacturing, importing, or supplying can attract up p to 14 years imprisonment. Possession of LSD can attract up to 6 months imprisonment, a $1,000 fine, or both."?
I don't get it.
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What did they expect to happen?
Once upon a time there was a group of substances called piperazines, and people found out that some of them could get you high. So naturally, people used them to get high. It wasn't illegal, so people manufactured them and sold them to other people so they could get high.
"Oh noes!" said the government, "People are getting high! Whatever shall we do? I know! Let's not do anything and see what happens!"
So the people got high. And like people, some folks overdid it and got sick, and other folks did it wrong and got sick. The vast majority of people had no problems at all, but those ones didn't get in the paper - only the ones that got sick.
"How can we fix this?" said the government. "I know! Let's make it so only people over 18 can buy it. Because we all know that once you're 18 you become infallibly responsible. Regulate the market? But that would require effort, and thought, and an endorsement of getting high by the government! Can't do that!"
So the people continued to get high. And some folks continued to overdo it and get sick, and it continued to get in the papers. And some of the manufacturers who were less scrupulous than others put sneaky stuff in the pills without telling people what it was, and sold pills that contained more than double the recommended dose, and engaged in a free-for-all orgy of making money from people's desire to get high.
"Oh noes!" said the government, "This unregulated market is getting out of hand! Clearly the people can't be trusted to get high safely, never mind that we've done nothing to help ensure safety by educating people, making labelling laws, regulating sales or requiring manufacturers to adhere to a Code of Practice like everyone else has to! Clearly we should ban it!"
So they did. And the first thing that happened was what that article up there is about. New substances emerged - ones that are less tested than piperazines, and equally unregulated.
Last year, the government brought in legislation allowing the restriction (and therefore regulation) of new substances. On the surface, that sounds bad. But realistically, I think it's a step in the right direction. Imagine a great new substance emerging, and actually being regulated. Imagine avoiding the free-for-all that got piperazines banned. Imagine buying your substance and knowing exactly what you're taking, how much of it you're taking, and that the manufacturer is obliged to adhere to a standard that helps ensure your safety.
Now imagine New Zealand having a recorded history of the effects of this regulation vs simply banning a substance.
Then imagine the next review of the Misuse of Drugs act classification system, with actual evidence-based assessment of regulation vs prohibition as a harm minimisation tool.
So I say bring on the regulation. Because the alternative is more scaremongering and another ban, and no progress.
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Check this out. These regulations have received Royal Assent. Awesome.
So why's this a big deal? Because it was partly the lack of these regulations that allowed piperazine-based pills to become the free-for-all that caused the "Won't anybody think of the children!!??!??" backlash that led to them eventually being banned. Some people have been lobbying government to implement regulations like these for ~7 years.
I find it ironic that the Royal Assent was given to this a mere 8 days after the amnesty on party pills ended.
But, it's a huge step forward in the fight for realistic drug legislation. Yay for the Ministry of Health, and yay for the people who've been working so hard for this to happen.
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Oh look! The 2007 US National Drug use survey is out. Not surprisingly, it shows more people than ever using drugs. Except for.. tobacco!
"ONDCP officials regularly argue that maintaining criminal penalties for marijuana possession is essential to stopping drug abuse. So what's happened with a dangerous drug whose possession is legal: cigarettes? NSDUH conveniently provides figures for past-month cigarette use, and both the number of users and the rate of cigarette use is down markedly. In 2002, 26 percent of Americans were current cigarette smokers; now it's 24.2 percent, continuing a decades-long decline. And the decline in current cigarette smoking for 12-to-17-year-olds is even more dramatic, from 13 percent to 9.8 percent.
That, of course, is with zero arrests for cigarette possession, compared with 739,000 marijuana possession arrests in 2006 (the last year for which stats are available)."
From here.
( And in other news )
It's mostly frustrating because I know that the average person reading an article like that will have a mental picture of a suburban soccer mum, doing that mutton-dressed-as-lamb thing, going wild on E and neglecting her children. It's painting a picture of women 'desperate to recapture youth' behaving irresponsibly and in ignorance. It then goes on to give the impression that anyone in their 30s who uses E is like this - which is manipulating the minds of the reader to have a low opinion of these people because it's playing to a bunch of prejudices about how people in certain age groups should behave. And you know, it probably even works on the younger folks as well - I can just imagine the 18-year-olds going "Stupid boomers, they should stick to drinking, they don't understand, etc etc blah blah."
Hmph. And it barely mentions the men at all. Remember them? The ones whose use of E is increasing faster than that of women? Apparently that's ok.
I really hate it when the media cottons on to a way of playing to people's prejudices, and uses it to push an agenda. Yes, yes, I know. That means I should hate the entire media no matter what they write, right? But when it involves misinformation about drugs as well, that's when I actually care.
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Drugs Swoops Have Little Impact in the UK. Research has shown that despite huge seizures of drugs and arrests of dealers, the black market that prohibition created just keeps on trucking on.
Rule number one of operating a business in a black market - factor in being busted and make sure your business can survive it. Funny that. La la la.
Anyway, it seems that despite mounting evidence to demonstrate that prohibition has failed to even reduce drug access, never mind drug harm, the police are still trying to justify their own existence. A bit like marketing people really I guess. Check this out:
""This is against the law and the law needs to be enforced so whether or not we are actually driving drugs down and making drugs disappear ... there is an element of law enforcement which should and must continue."
*cough* Oh yes, they're right, I guess. If something's illegal then the job of the police is to enforce the law. But I'm pretty sure that when enforcing the law involves arresting people for holding lift doors open, there's something wrong a bit further up the priority chain from the guys doing the arresting. You know that age-old reason for police being slow to make it to urgent calls - "Stretched too thin" ... "Not enough police" etc? I'd suggest to you that there are enough police, but they have too much to do, and a lot of that extra work is in chasing up and arresting people for recreational drug offences.
I watched a documentary the other day, about the US, in which 60% of people in US prisons (that's approximately 250,000 people according to this) are non-violent drug offenders. Think about that.
Anyway, I don't blame the police for carrying out the orders they're given. This particular idiocy is coming from higher up - the people who decide whether the police spend their time (and our money) busting folks for getting high, or preventing violent crime.
And in case you think I'm having a go at the UK and the US, remember this quote from the article?
"Our drugs strategy encompasses enforcement, prevention, education and treatment." From the Home Office. Well, so does the NZ drugs strategy. And while in a certain budget a few years ago enforcement and prevention got $25,000,000 more, drug education and treatment got $3,230,000.
That's the way the priorities stack up here too.
Tell me. Do you like the way our government prioritises spending of our money? Would you continue to pay a manager who carried on throwing your money into a venture that was so obviously not working?
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Michael Sabin is at it again, this time advocating a zero-tolerance drugs policy. He says that the government's 'harm minimisation' approach is failing abysmally, that marijuana is a 'gateway drug' - an outdated idea discredited so many times it's not funny - and that schools and workplaces should introduce compulsory drug testing for everyone.
It amazes me that anyone keeps listening to this guy. He's a private consultant on workplace drug issues, and wouldn't he do well if all workplaces and schools started drug testing everyone? I'm surprised his company isn't already offering this service - it seems clear to me that there's somewhat of a conflict of interest here, and a quick google shows plenty of folks think he's talking through a hole in his head. So why does he get taken seriously?
The US zero-tolerance policy leads to situations like grandmothers getting kicked out of their homes because their grandchildren smoke a bit of pot. You don't need to be a mental giant to see how much good that would do for drug users and their families, never mind the rest of society. Yep, let's make more people homeless. Good plan.
About the only thing I respect about Mr Sabin's opinion is that he thinks drug abuse should be treated as a health issue. Here we agree. As to the rest? Ill-thought-out recommendations with little regard to consequence, and a clear slant towards drumming up business for himself.
Fail.
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