Another winner: medical marijuana in Maine

Reason:

Yesterday Maine voters, by a margin of 59 percent to 41 percent, approved Question 5, a ballot initiative that expands the conditions covered by the state's medical marijuana law and establishes a system of state-licensed dispensaries. Maine has allowed medical use of marijuana since 1999. But as in California, the right to grow and possess marijuana was restricted to patients and their "caregivers." Under the new law, nonprofit organizations regulated by the state Department of Health and Human Services will be allowed to operate storefront dispensaries that sell marijuana to patients with doctor's recommendations. While California has many such pot shops, ostensibly operating as patient "collectives" or "cooperatives," their legal status is matter of dispute. Maine now becomes the third state, after Rhode Island and New Mexico, to explicitly authorize a distribution system for medical marijuana. Ten other states, including California, have laws that allow medical use of the plant but are silent or hazy on the question of where patients can get it. [..] this lack of clarity means DEA raids on medical marijuana dispensaries may continue despite the Justice Department's avowed intent to avoid prosecution of patients and suppliers who comply with state law.

“It’s great to see Maine leapfrog other states in adopting cutting-edge medical marijuana legislation,” says Jill Harris, managing director of Public Policy at the Drug Policy Alliance, which backed Question 5. “What’s especially nice is that the medical marijuana guidelines recently issued by the U.S. Department of Justice provide reassurance to Maine officials that they can implement the new law without fear of reprisal by federal authorities.”

Another victory in the war on drugs

A grandmother in Indiana has been arrested for purchasing cold medicine. We can all sleep more safely now that this hardened criminal has been taught a lesson.

The Terre Haute News reports:

When Sally Harpold bought cold medicine for her family back in March, she never dreamed that four months later she would end up in handcuffs.

Now, Harpold is trying to clear her name of criminal charges, and she is speaking out in hopes that a law will change so others won’t endure the same embarrassment she still is facing.

[..] Harpold is a grandmother of triplets who bought one box of Zyrtec-D cold medicine for her husband at a Rockville pharmacy. Less than seven days later, she bought a box of Mucinex-D cold medicine for her adult daughter at a Clinton pharmacy, thereby purchasing 3.6 grams total of pseudoephedrine in a week’s time.

Those two purchases put her in violation of Indiana law 35-48-4-14.7, which restricts the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or PSE, products to no more than 3.0 grams within any seven-day period.

When the police came knocking at the door of Harpold’s Parke County residence on July 30, she was arrested on a Vermillion County warrant for a class-C misdemeanor, which carries a sentence of up to 60 days in jail and up to a $500 fine.

(ht Cato)

Prohibitions

Appeal to tradition

"Marijuana has been a medicine for 5,000 years. It's only for the last 70 years that it hasn't been a medicine in this country."

—Dr. Donald Abrams of San Francisco General Hospital

An appeal to tradition is no more conclusive for marijuana than it is for gay marriage. There could, potentially, have been new information prompting its prohibition—just as new understanding of homosexuality has led to its equal rights movement seeking to reverse an ancient intolerance.

But I'm not aware of any genuine changes in marijuana science prompting the new prohibition. So what is it that changed 70 years ago to freak people out about a drug that's safer than alcohol and tobacco, only roughly as dangerous as caffeine?

I submit that it's rooted in the Christianist obsession with policing any 'evil' pleasure that could distract people from religious obligations. It began with the temperence movement...



As every student of history knows, alcohol prohibition was a miserable failure. So they turned to the next convenient target, fabricating new, racist lies:

"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others."

"...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races."

"Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death."

"Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."

"Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing"

"You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother."

"Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."

"In the year 1090, there was founded in Persia the religious and military order of the Assassins, whose history is one of cruelty, barbarity, and murder, and for good reason: the members were confirmed users of hashish, or marihuana, and it is from the Arabs' 'hashashin' that we have the English word 'assassin.'"

"Marihuana makes fiends of boys in thirty days -- Hashish goads users to bloodlust."

"By the tons it is coming into this country -- the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms.... Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him...."

"Users of marijuana become STIMULATED as they inhale the drug and are LIKELY TO DO ANYTHING. Most crimes of violence in this section, especially in country districts are laid to users of that drug."

"Was it marijuana, the new Mexican drug, that nerved the murderous arm of Clara Phillips when she hammered out her victim's life in Los Angeles?... THREE-FOURTHS OF THE CRIMES of violence in this country today are committed by DOPE SLAVES -- that is a matter of cold record."

Such bile is how the new prohibition originated. Needless to say, it's been just as miserable of a failure, along with the broader war on drugs.

Link blag

New Hampshire's 'Live Free or Die' UNIX plate turns 20. I suppose the WINDOWS one should say 'Live, Freeze, and Die'.

Perry: Drug laws correlate with drug strength. Essentially, everyone who argues that we shouldn't legalize pot because "It's not like your father's weed" have made the problem they're complaining about worse. It's similar to how high drinking ages contribute to binge drinking, because underage drinkers try to drink all they can, when they can, in a short period of time.

BBC: A database which holds the details of every child in England has now become available for 390,000 childcare professionals to access. Brilliant! ...what could possibly go wrong?

Canadian Parliament sends takedown notice for video of their hearings posted on YouTube.

Cafe Hayek: How health care decisions are really being made.

Fallows admires Obama's speeches.

Cato: Washington DC's Union Station has an Obama shop.

Good news! The war on drugs is over!

We're changing the name.

Link blag

John Schwenkler is against torture thought-experiments.

Reason explains the important recent court developments for gun rights. Bottom line: the Supreme Court may soon take up whether the 2nd amendment's individual right applies to state and local governments.

Megan: Governments have unique power over credit markets, and playing with them is dangerous.

Governator says we must consider legalizing pot.

MSN Money: $1,500 for a free frisbee

Thousands of words make a picture.

Americans now more libertarian

It seems an odd headline to write in today's "American Recovery and Reinvestment" bail-o-rama.  But look at this ABC/Washington Post polling of other issues (.pdf)...

		2003	2009
Gay marriage	Support	37	49
	Oppose	55	46
	Net	-18	3	+21	(6 years)
		1986	2009
Marijuana	Support	21	46
Legalization	Oppose	78	52
	Net	-57	-6	+51	(23 years)
		2007	2009
Amnesty	Support	52	61
for illegals	Oppose	44	35
	Net	8	26	+18	(2 years)
		1989	2009
Gun rights	Support	34	48
	Oppose	60	51
	Net	-26	-3	+23	(20 years)

Link blag

Jim Manzi makes the most compelling argument against torture.

1-800-[GET OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY]... Cato's David Boaz bemoans.

Speaking of tax-and-spend, the Leftopia of Washington, D.C. is now charging residents for parking in their own driveway.

Mexican Senate passes bill decriminalizing drug possession for personal use.

Megan examines why general practitioners are underpaid.

Giving up on politics, a libertarian brainstorms new frontiers of freedom.

Hathos alert: Sarah Palin is a twitter.

An environmentally-friendly pizza box.

Masturbation has fatal consequences (Le livre sans titre, 1844)

Coronor argues drinking age promotes binge drinking, accidents

Via Libertarian Republican, Telluride Daily Planet:

America is one of only four counties in the world with a 21-year-old drinking age. The rest of the Western world, including Europe, Canada and Mexico, has lower drinking ages.

Dempsey is one elected official who thinks that the higher drinking age doesn’t stop young people from drinking. He believes it leads to reckless drinking, that young adults sneak alcohol behind the law and their parents’ backs, drink to excess, and then make stupid decisions. He’d like to see the age returned to 18.

“It would get rid of the need for binge drinking,” Dempsey said. “They would still party, but right now it’s, drink as much as you can as fast as you can while we have this illegal drug.”

Obama: for decriminalization before he was against it

Radley writes in the Daily Beast on Obama's demented drug policy.

I think this may be one reason to look forward to the (likely inevitable) second term. He could try to tackle this once not running for re-election. Hopefully the momentum will have shifted enough by then.

Glenn Greenwald on the success of drug decriminalization

He also touches on Obama's disappointing performance so far on drug policy, executive power, and civil liberties.

Monday night link blag

Andrew:

Mexico's ambassador urges the decriminalization of marijuana as a way to weaken the cartels. Domestic production is way up. Mexico's Congress is considering decriminalization. Cultural mainstreaming, especially in the thirteen states that allow for medical use, is gaining pace. Any day now, sanity threatens to break out.

A TMV columnist likes Rachel Maddow.

Another gathers reactions to Captain Phillips' rescue from Somali pirates.

Another gathers even more reactions. (Hey, they're useful summaries of what people are thinking.)

Politico: Obama boosts anti-abortion efforts, but not the way you think.

The Post: Rahm Emanuel knows how to deal.

Civil liberty watchdogs are pissed at Obama's continuation of Bush policies.

Wikipedia is voting to migrate from the clunky GNU Free Documentation License to a Creative Commons license. Yay!

John McCain's daughter wants a gayer GOP.

Some geezers talk about their work at Area 51 during the 60's.

China has really bad air quality.

Various politicians seek to promote software piracy protect the children by taxing violent videogames. No word yet on whether they'll invest the resulting revenue in abstinence-only miseducation.

Decriminalization works.

Cato:

Over at Drug War Rant, Peter Guither notes the strange reaction of a drug policy official to the new Cato report, Drug Decriminalization in Portugal:

Glenn Greenwald’s excellent report (on the successful decriminalization of all drugs in Portugal for personal use) was picked up by Scientific American: Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results

What really caught my attention in this article was that they got the UNODC to agree that it seemed to work, but the response was Kafkaesque.

Walter Kemp, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says decriminalization in Portugal “appears to be working.” He adds that his office is putting more emphasis on improving health outcomes, such as reducing needle-borne infections, but that it does not explicitly support decriminalization, “because it smacks of legalization.” Yes, decrim works, but we don’t support something that actually works because it sounds like something we’re afraid to talk about. Right.

A spokesperson for the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy declined to comment, citing the pending Senate confirmation of the office’s new director, former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs also declined to comment on the report.Well, I guess no policy is better than what we’re used to.

Glenn Greenwald has more.

Why legalization is gaining momentum

Five weeks ago Nate produced this chart:


I've been trying to find good demographics of usage, and he's delivered:

The peak time for pot usage occurs at or about age 20 -- a period known to most of us as "college" -- before declining fairly rapidly throughout one's 20s and then plateauing from roughly age 30 through age 50.

More important to the policy debate, however, may be the fraction of adults who have used marijuana at any point in their lifetimes. This is a dual-peaked distribution, with one peak occurring among adults who are roughly age 50 now, and would have come of age in the 1970s, and another among adults in their early 20s. Generation X, meanwhile, in spite of its reputation for slackertude, were somewhat less eager consumers of pot than the generations either immediately preceding or proceeding them.

The key feature of this distribution is how rapidly lifetime usage rates decline after about age 55 or so. About half of 55-year-olds have used marijuana at some point in their lives, but only about 20 percent of 65-year-olds have.

There is not, of course, a one-to-one correspondence between having used marijuana and supporting its legalization; one can plausibly support its legalization without having ever inhaled, or vice versa. Nevertheless, I would venture that the correlation is fairly strong, and polls have generally found a fairly strong generation gap when it comes to pot legalization.

From that link:

There is a huge generation gap on this issue. More adults under 45 (49%) approve of legalizing marijuana use than oppose (45%), while just 31% of adults over age 45 approve of it; six in 10 are opposed.

Nate continues:

As members of the Silent Generation are replaced in the electorate by younger voters, who are more likely to have either smoked marijuana themselves or been around those that have, support for legalization is likely to continue to gain momentum.

Put less delicately: as with support for things like gay marriage, it's a matter of waiting for more bigoted geezers to die.

Link blag

Coates: Nihilism and Gay Marriage...

[...] paranoia is key, and it really defines, not just anti-Semitism, but bigotry itself. The most laughable aspect of America's long war against racism, is the justification racist would always trot out--the specter of interracial union. I can remember being a kid and reading about black folks struggling for some small right, that, these days, we take for granted. So you'd have some black dude who'd been born a slave, in some one room shack, but had risen to become a lawyer, arguing for, say, school funding for black kids in rural Alabama. And then you'd see some bigot responding with, essentially, the following, "If we give the nigras school funding, they'll take our women! Do you want a nigra marrying yer daughter?!?!?"

Cato: Terrible Example, Mr. Secretary...

Duncan [Obama's Secretary of Education] had the gall to frame as a protector of the status quo the same governor who for years has been crystal clear that schooling in his state is dismal and that school choice – real change that takes power away from politically ferocious special interests and gives it to parents – is the key to real change. It’s also the same desperately sought after reform, by the way, that President Obama and his education secretary are happy to let die a slow – but politically convenient – death in Washington, DC.

Mother Jones: Pouring Biofuel on the Fire...

Food prices have risen 130% since 2002. The World Bank estimates that up to 75% of the increase is due to demand for biofuels.

Clearing grasslands to plant biofuel crops releases 93 times as much greenhouse gas as will be saved by the fuels grown on the land each year. Destroying Indonesian peat bogs releases 420 times as much.

There were food riots in at least 30 countries in the past 2 years. More than 40 people were killed when Cameroonians protested rising prices.

The US government spent $9.2 billion on ethanol subsidies in 2008. It spent $1.5 billion on food aid.

Wilkinson comments:

[That's ] what the green government does when it picks winners. But now we’ve got better people and won’t destroy the environment and cause food riots this time! Right?

TIME: The Queen and Mrs. Obama: A Breach in Protocol...

On Wednesday, Michelle Obama put her hand on the Queen only after the Queen had placed her own hand on the First Lady's back as part of their conversation. So there is room for theological argument as to whether the American reciprocity of touch was allowable given the social dynamics of the situation. (Less explicable was when President George W. Bush winked at the Queen.)

Jeffrey Goldberg: Is This How The Israeli Media Works?...

A half-hour ago, my phone rang; it was a reporter from Israel Channel 10 News.
"There's a big controversy about your Netanyahu interview," the reporter says.
"What is it?" I ask.
"Netanyahu's people are denying that he threatened President Obama. Do you have proof that he threatened him?"
"What are you talking about?"

TIME: Why Legalizing Marijuana Makes Sense...

there are big issues here, issues of economy and simple justice, especially on the sentencing side. As Webb pointed out in a cover story in Parade magazine, the U.S. is, by far, the most "criminal" country in the world, with 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public.

Economist: Mexico is going back to the IMF for the first time since 1995.

TAPPED: The GOP budget is a naive attempt at messaging?

ThinkProgress: Republicans continue to spread false claims about cap and trade costs.

Note to criminals: It may not be a good idea to announce your theft on national television.

Decriminalization in Portugal

Cato:

On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm.

In a new study, constitutional lawyer and Salon.com writer Glenn Greenwald examines the Portuguese model and the data concerning drug-related trends in Portugal, and argues that, “judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success.”

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Commonweal Magazine: Obama & Notre Dame...

“The church is not simply the prolife movement, and to the extent that every interaction between the church and our political system is held hostage to the demands of the most confrontational elements of that movement, the church’s social message, including its message about abortion, will be marginalized and ineffectual. The respect and honor owed the office of the president does not depend on any particular president’s merits (as Buckley often reminded his liberal critics). That respect is, among other things, a powerful affirmation of the willingness of Americans to live together peacefully, despite profound disagreement. Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama is perhaps best understood in that light.”

E.D. Kain: Pop Christianity...

Christianity in America has been weaved into pop culture much to the detriment of that religion. The co-opting of pop culture to try to make Christianity seem more “hip” to the times has backfired. Simply countering every Nirvana or Green Day with a Christian version of the same will not make teenage boys prefer the latter to the former. When cool becomes more important than sacred then we’ve got a problem. The fact of the matter is that secular movie makers will always be able to make more edgy films, and secular musicians will always be able to make cooler music, and the reason for this is they’re just trying to make movies and music - they’re not trying to make explicitly Christian movies and music.

Josh Wimmer:

“It’s not fair for me just to single out the lyrics, because I also know I’m listening to Christian radio immediately because of the shimmery keyboards and amped-up major-key guitar lines — there’s a sound there that Christian pop musicians have staked out as their own, and I get why it sounds “Christian” to them, but it rings about as true to me as a heaven actually full of harp-strumming cherubs. Mainstream pop may suck, but at least it sucks in so many different ways.”

Cato: Democrats Agree on Health Plan Outline: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid...

Given the problems facing our health care system-high costs, uneven quality, millions of Americans without health insurance–it seems that things couldn’t get any worse. But a bill based on these ideas, will almost certainly make things much, much worse.

Atlantic:

Health care isn't a single good, nor, like food, is it easily defined in terms of a minimum to sustain life. Studying other countries' supposedly universal systems only demonstrates how fraught the concept of "health care" is: one bundle of services in British Columbia and a less-generous one in Nova Scotia, one in England and another in Scotland, one in New Zealand before the election and another afterwards. Arguably the U.S. already has universal care, in the sense that everyone can get some care-if only from an emergency room-for some things, and that citizens (a critical word in this context) without money are covered by Medicaid. The real issue is how you define "health care." What gets included is a matter not only of medicine and economics but of culture and politics.

Politico: Budget cuts concern contractors...

Though the details of the $534 billion defense budget are still unknown, there are numerous signs that Gates could take the ax to a major defense weapons program as early as next week.

That has defense industry officials, whose fortunes will rise or fall on the outcome, madly trying to decode which programs are the most vulnerable and scrambling to defend them.

Red State Update on legalization:


A U.S. unemployment map

Finally a true map of Europe

Scenes from Afghanistan

An Afghan security officer stands guard as flames rise during a drug burning event on the outskirts of the city in Herat province, west of Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, March 18, 2009. Over 2,000 kilograms of narcotics, composed of heroin, opium and hashish, were burnt along with some bottles of alcoholic drinks

More at TBP

"Cannabis stimulus"

Via Andrew, Mark Kleiman:

Legal cannabis, even taxed, would presumably be way cheaper than the current illicit product. Other things equal, that would mean that the legal cannabis industry would have lower revenues than the current illicit industry. That wouldn't stimulate the economy: just the reverse.

wtf? Cheaper legal cannabis means no resources being spent on the culture of illicit cannabis, which means less money in the hands of cartels and drug dealers, with some going to local governments via taxes and the rest staying in the pockets of cannabis users, all to be spent as they see fit.

I would never call re-legalization a short-term stimulus. It's the elimination of a long-term drag on the economy with very harmful effects.