TIME MAG: Are we on the way to adult use legalization?

Will States Lead the Way to Legalizing Marijuana Nationwide? 

By Adam CohenJan. 28, 20135 Comments 

When citizens of Colorado and Washington voted to legalize marijuana in November they created a conflict, because pot remains illegal under federal law and anyone who lights up is committing a federal crime and could theoretically still be arrested for it. After Colorado passed the referendum, Governor John Hickenlooper said the implementation of the law in his state would be a “complicated process” and he warned residents not to “break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly.”

While it seems unlikely that the federal government will make much of an effort to arrest pot users in Colorado or Washington—Obama has said he has “bigger fish to fry”— the tension between federal and state laws on marijuana remains. Just last week, an appeals court rejected a suit that sought to lower the classification of medical marijuana under federal drug laws.

That court ruling threw the issue back to Congress and the Drug Enforcement Agency, which should start a serious reconsideration of national policy toward marijuana. The federal government should start by reclassifying medical marijuana, legalizing it outright, or at least dialing down the penalties. And it should begin to have the sort of serious discussion about legalizing recreational marijuana that is now occurring in the states.

(MORE: U.S. Marjuana Laws Ricochet Through Latin America)

The campaign to legalize marijuana has long been viewed as a fringe cause, backed by young people and old hippies. That perception has lingered even though public opinion polls have shown that a growing percentage of the public favors legalization – as much as 68% in one recent poll. In the past two decades, supporters of marijuana have focused on legalizing medical use, and they have had impressive success. Today, 18 states and the District of Columbia have made medical use legal – and at least seven morestates are considering it. Meanwhile, the DEA still classifies marijuana as a “schedule 1” drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970 – a classification for drugs that have no accepted medical use. Americans for Safe Access, a pro-marijuana group, challenged this classification, but last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the lawsuit. That ruling left in place the DEA’s blunt position that there is “no currently accepted medical use for marijuana in the United States.”

The votes in Colorado and Washington were a watershed, however, because they shifted the debate from medical marijuana to outright legalization. And the votes were not even close. In Colorado, the referendum passed by more than 6%. In Washington, the margin was 10%.

Afterwards, President Obama said that the federal government has a lot of crime to prosecute and “it does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that, under state law, that is legal.” Last week, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said that he had a conversation with Attorney General Eric Holder that encouraged him about his state’s ability to carry out the referendum legalizing marijuana.

(MORE: New Research Questions Marijuana’s Impact In Lowering IQ)

It is good that the Obama administration appears to be standing down now, but that has not always been the case. As recently as last year, the Justice Department was cracking down on medical marijuana producers in California and other states. There is no way to know that the federal government will continue to leave marijuana policy to the states. And whatever policy the Obama administration adopts, it could be undone when a new President takes office.

Justice Louis Brandeis once said that the states should function as “laboratories,” testing new ideas for possible adoption by the whole nation. We have seen enough over the past 16 years from the states that have legalized medical marijuana to know that the benefits are real and the alleged dangers overblown. With this data in hand, the DEA should reclassify marijuana to acknowledge its possible medical uses.

In Colorado and Washington, a bolder experiment is now underway. The rest of the nation should watch closely. It is possible that legalization will lead to higher crime rates, increased use of harder drugs, and other menaces that marijuana critics warn about. But if legalization in these states has few negative effects, we will have the strongest argument yet for why marijuana should be legal nationwide.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/28/will-states-lead-the-way-to-legalizing-marijuana-nationwide/#ixzz2JHmohFcV

Chicago Tribune: War on pot a failure

The war on pot is no safe bet

Protecting teens? It hasn't worked
Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-oped-0120-chapman-20130120,0,7436520.column
by Steve Chapman
January 20, 2013

As recreational drugs go, marijuana is relatively benign. Unlike alcohol, it doesn't stimulate violence or destroy livers. Unlike tobacco, it doesn't cause lung cancer and heart disease. The worst you can say is that it produces intense, unreasoning panic. Not in users, but in critics.

Those critics have less influence all the time. Some 18 states permit medical use of marijuana, and in November, Colorado and Washington voted to allow recreational use. Nationally, support for legalization is steadily rising. A decade ago, one of every three Americans favored the idea. Today, nearly half do — and among those under 50, a large majority does.

These trends have die-hard drug warriors screaming bloody murder. Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., has formed a new organization to stop what he imagines to be the "300-miles-per-hour freight train to legalization." He says that such a change would be especially harmful to teenagers.

White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske insists that even allowing medicinal pot "sends a terrible message" to adolescents. Mitchell Rosenthal, a psychiatrist who founded the substance-abuse treatment group Phoenix House, says there is "mounting evidence of the dangers it poses, especially to young users."

They might have a point if existing drug laws were keeping weed out of the hands of wayward kids. In truth, they're about as effective as a picket fence in a tidal wave. In a 2009 survey, high school students said they found it easier to get than beer. In 2011, 23 percent of 12th-graders said they had used weed in the preceding month.

In the past five years, drinking and cigarette smoking have dropped by more than 10 percent among high school seniors. But pot smoking has risen by 23 percent. Alcohol and tobacco are legal for adults. Marijuana is not.

What these trends indicate is that authorizing the sale and use of a substance does not necessarily mean more people will use it. There is no contradiction between letting adults make up their own minds, with some government regulation, and providing effective education for youngsters about the hazards of underage consumption.

No one, after all, is talking about putting pot in vending machines or handing out blunts at Taylor Swift concerts. The idea is to treat pot like booze — permitting its sale and use to adults in a government-regulated market, with penalties for behavior (like driving under the influence) that endangers other people.

The tolerance-fuels-use theory is thunderously lacking in real-world support. In the Netherlands, where "coffee shops" are allowed to sell pot, teenagers are far less likely to use it than their American peers.

The experience here falls short of bloodcurdling. "In the states that have passed medical-marijuana laws, youth marijuana use has decreased," Amanda Reiman, policy manager for the Drug Policy Alliance, told me. In California, "the number of seventh-, ninth- and 11th-graders reporting marijuana use in the last six months and in their lifetimes all declined" after 1996, when the state passed its medical marijuana law.

The alleged harms of cannabis on the teen mind and body are generally exaggerated. Critics have trumpeted a study last year that said teenagers with a heavy habit turn out to have lower IQs as adults than their peers who avoided the stuff.

But a new assessment by Norwegian scientist Ole Rogeberg, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the IQ differences might well stem from differences in income, education and other factors. "The true effect," he said, "could be zero." It's pretty clear that heavy drinking is a far bigger danger to developing brains.

Those worried about the welfare of potheads might also want to take into account the dangers that exist only because cannabis is illegal. Criminals who grow or supply the stuff have little incentive to monitor quality, prevent adulteration or assure consistent doses.

A kid who gets his hands on beer doesn't have to worry about getting toxic chemicals or nasty fillers. Buying pot in illicit markets may also expose users of all ages to violence, robbery or extortion. But you don't see innocent bystanders getting killed in shootouts among liquor store owners.

The alternative to legalization is sticking with a policy that has produced millions of arrests, squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and turned many harmless people into criminals in the eyes of the law — all while failing to stem the popularity of pot. For kids or adults, there is nothing healthy in that.

Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/chapman.

schapman@tribune.com

Twitter @SteveChapman13

HuffPo: Hate drugs? then end the drug war....

Why People Who Hate Drugs Should Want to End the Drug War

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-newman/why-people-who-hate-drugs_b_2497780.html
by Tony Newman- Drug Policy Alliance

Many people hate drugs. It is easy to see why. Most families have had a loved one with a problematic relationship to alcohol or other drugs. People who struggle with drug problems can cause incredible pain to themselves and their loved ones. Broken marriages, loss of jobs, incarceration and even dying from an overdose are all possible tragic consequences of serious drug problems.

While it might be counterintuitive, people who hate drugs should be at the forefront of ending our nation's failed drug war. The drug war makes all of the problems I mentioned above much worse.

Drug War = Mass Incarceration and Lack of Treatment
Let's start with people struggling with drug misuse or addiction. Our drug war doesn't keep drugs out of the hands of people who want drugs; drugs are as plentiful as ever. But getting caught with drugs can land someone in a cage for many years. Spending time behind bars is not the way to help someone who has drug problem and most likely will make that person more traumatized. The sad fact is that we spend 50,000 dollars a year incarcerating someone for a drug offense, yet at the same time there is not enough money to offer treatment to people who want it.

Drug War = More Overdose and More Dying
People who have lost a loved one to an overdose feel an unimaginable pain and often want to wipe drugs off the face of the earth. Tragically, the drug war leads to many such deaths. Despite 40-plus years trying to eliminate drug use, there is an overdose crisis in this country right now. Overdoseis now almost neck-and-neck with car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in the country. Most people who experience an overdose are with friends when it happens and would survive if someone called 911. But because of our drug war, people often don't call 911 because they are too afraid that the police will show up and arrest them. It is outrageous that we discourage people from calling 911 to save a life because of laws that pit their interest to help someone who is ODing against their motivation to not be arrested.

Another way to potentially save people who are overdosing on an opioid is to provide them with an antidote called naloxone, which can reverse the effects and restore normal breathing in two to three minutes if administered following an opioid overdose. Unfortunately our society does not come close to doing enough to make naloxone available to people who use drugs and their friends and families.

Drug War = Unsafe Neighborhoods
People who live in neighborhoods with drug dealing out in the open and with violence associated with the drug trade are some of the most vocal supporters of the drug war. Of course people want and need to feel safe in their neighborhoods. But most "drug-related" violence stems not from drug use, but from drug prohibition. That was true in Chicago under alcohol kingpin Al Capone, and it is true now. The killings and violence in many U.S. cities are not from marijuana or other drug use, but because prohibition makes the plants worth more than gold, and people are willing to kill each other over the profits to be made.


Drug War = More Danger for Our Children
Many people may know the drug war is a failure but are afraid of change course because they worry about their children and want to keep them safe. Ironically, the drug war is a complete failure when it comes to keeping young people from using drugs.

Despite decades of DARE programs with the simplistic "Just Say No" message, 44 percent of teenagers will try marijuana before they graduate and nearly 75 percent will drink alcohol. Young people often claim it is easier for them to get marijuana than alcohol because drug dealers don't check IDs. Young people also feel the brunt of marijuana enforcement and make up many (and in some places most) of the arrests for marijuana offenses. Arresting young people will often cause more damage than drug use itself. Teenagers need honest drug education to help them make responsible decisions. Safety should be the number one priority. We have dramatically reduced teen smoking without tobacco prohibition and without a single arrest.

Drug Abuse Is Bad. The Drug War Is Worse
There is no doubt that drugs have ruined a lot of people's lives. It is understandable why many people hate drugs and want to protect their families. But when you looks at the greatest harms from drugs, the drug war and prohibition almost always make the problem much worse -- and make our families and communities much less safe. We need the people who hate drugs to actively join the movement to end the war on drugs. Because the war on drugs is a war on all of us.


Tony Newman is the director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org)

MEXICO might quit taking people to jail for weed

Mexico considers marijuana legalization after ballot wins in U.S.
Mexico, which has fought a long war against drug cartels that supply U.S. users, is rethinking its marijuana policy after Colorado and Washington approved legalization.




A man pretends to smoke a giant marijuana cigar in Mexico City last year during a demonstration calling for legalization of the substance. (Yuri Cortez / AFP/Getty Images / May 5, 2012)

By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times
January 4, 2013, 6:54 p.m.
MEXICO CITY — Forgive the Mexicans for trying to get this straight:

So now the United States, which has spent decades battling Mexican marijuana, is on a legalization bender?

The same United States that long viewed cannabis as a menace, funding crop-poisoning programs, tearing up auto bodies at the border, and deploying sniffer dogs, fiber-optic scopes and backscatter X-ray machines to detect the lowly weed?

The success of legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington in November has sparked a new conversation in a nation that is one of the world's top marijuana growers: Should Mexico, which has suffered mightily in its war against the deadly drug cartels, follow the Western states' lead?

Mexico's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, opposes legalization, but he also told CNN recently that the news from Washington and Colorado "could bring us to rethinking the strategy."

Such rethinking has already begun. Shortly after the approval of the U.S. ballot measures, the governor of Colima state, Mario Anguiano, floated the idea of a legalization referendum for his small coastal state. In the MexicanCongress, Fernando Belaunzaran, a lawmaker with the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party, has introduced a national legalization bill. The cartels probably derive 20% to 25% of their drug export revenue from marijuana, and Belaunzaran contends that legalization will eat into profit that allows the cartels to buy the advanced weapons that are the cause of much bloodshed.

"It's a matter of life or death," Belaunzaran said in a recent news conference. "And after 60,000 deceased" — an estimate of the death toll in the six-year war against the cartels — "no one can say that it isn't essential to Mexicans' lives."

Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera called for a national legalization forum a month before the Colorado and Washington votes. Since then, a number of prominent Mexican voices have questioned the wisdom of following the strict prohibitionist policies still favored by the U.S. government when many Americans at the state and local levels have rejected those policies at the ballot box.

In Mexico City's centrist Reforma newspaper, columnist Sergio Aguayo called the broadening legalization movement in the United States a "slap in the face" to former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who had vigorously pursued the cartels for the bulk of a term that ended Dec. 1.

Although the fight did little to stop the flow of drugs, Aguayo said, Calderon declined to substantively challenge the zero-tolerance line coming from Washington, D.C.

"He had an ethical responsibility to lead the search for alternatives," Aguayo wrote. "He did not do that, despite the evidence that was accumulating that history was passing him by."

Columnist Claudio Lomnitz struck a giddier tone in the liberal paper La Jornada, imagining a future in which Mexican artisanal pot is marketed much like fine tequila. He even suggested future brand names for Mexican cannabis strains, based on the Cold War-era gringo counterculture the stuff helped fuel: On the Road, perhaps, or Howl.

At this point, there is limited public support for legalization here. A poll released in November showed that 79% of Mexicans remained opposed to the idea. By comparison, a Gallup poll released last month showed 50% of U.S. residents against legalization and 48% in favor.

The fact that the Mexican public is generally less buzzed about legalization comes as no surprise to Isaac Campos, a historian at the University of Cincinnati, who said conservative attitudes on drug use have deep roots in Mexico.

Mexico, he says in a book published in April, outlawed marijuana in 1920, 17 years before the U.S. did, and Mexican newspapers of the era pushed the idea that marijuana smokers were mentally unstable and prone to violence.

In recent years, however, the idea of legalization has been moving closer to the mainstream, said Jorge Hernandez, president of Mexico's Collective for a Comprehensive Drug Policy, which supports the loosening of marijuana laws.

In 2009, the Mexican legislature decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana and hard drugs. But Hernandez said the conversation remains "immature" in Mexico, "in the sense that the people use emotions and moral questions to debate it, and haven't had a real technical-regulatory debate."

The national legalization bill will probably face stiff opposition in Congress. Hernandez has his own issues with the bill, but said that even if it fails, it may end up "opening a space" for further discussion.

Peña Nieto has used similar language, although what the new president means by a "space for rethinking" drug war policy, while opposing legalization, is anyone's guess. He might be waiting to see whether polls in Mexico move in a Colorado-like direction.

But even then, endorsing legalization could risk damaging Mexico's relationship with the U.S., and jeopardize the millions of drug war dollars Washington pours into the country.

Although President Obama recently said he would not make it a priority to go after recreational pot smokers in Colorado and Washington state, he reiterated that he does not support legalization, and the sale, possession and cultivation of the plant remain illegal under federal law.

In recent months, Latin American leaders have grown bolder in challenging the U.S. position.Uruguay's parliament was poised to pass a sweeping pot legalization measure, but President Jose Mujica recently asked lawmakers to wait because polls there also show that the public is reluctant to legalize.

Mexico's Calderon said in September somewhat cryptically that "market alternatives" might be one solution to the hemispheric drug problem. A number of other current and former heads of state have been more direct in their support for legalization, or at least a serious debate on the topic.

A study released by the Mexican Competitiveness Institute in October estimated that legalization measures in Colorado, Washington and Oregon (where legalization failed) would mean that American consumers would enjoy less expensive and higher-quality U.S. weed, eating into Mexican drug cartel profit, creating "the most important structural shock that narco-trafficking has experienced in a generation."

But what if Mexico were to legalize weed? Reforma columnist Ximena Peredo contends that it would "open the doors to enormous possibilities for growth" in Mexico, though Alejandro Hope, coauthor of the Competitiveness Institute's report, is not so sure. The risks involved in getting marijuana to market are what makes it so expensive, he said, and legalization could cause prices to plummet.

Moreover, the drug cartels, facing increased heat in the drug market, have already branched out to kidnapping, extortion and human trafficking. Would shutting down their pot operations just push the cartels into even more acts of violent crime?

Marijuana is "part of our patrimony," said Adrian Vaquier, a 37-year-old cellphone service salesman who was walking outside Hernandez's Mexico City drug legalization office. It was smoked by Pancho Villa's peasant soldiers in the Mexican Revolution and mentioned prominently in the famous corrido"La Cucaracha," he said.

At the same time, he said, the current strategy isn't working while making the cartel leaders rich: "Just like Al Capone."

richard.fausset@latimes.com

HUFFPO: Disastrous Drug War

Connecting the Dots: 10 Disastrous Consequences of the Drug War

Tony Newman

Director of Media Relations, Drug Policy Alliance

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-newman/drug-war-consequences_b_2404347.html


The war on drugs is America's longest war. It has been 40-plus years since Nixon launched our modern "war on drugs" and yet drugs are as plentiful as ever. While the idea we can have a "drug free society" is laughable, the disastrous consequences of our drug war are dead serious. While it might not be obvious, the war on drugs touches and destroys so many of the issues we care about and values we hold. Below are ten collateral consequences of the drug war and reasons we need to find an exit strategy from this unwinnable war.

Racial Injustice:
The war on drugs is built on racial injustice. Despite roughly equal rates of drug use and sales, African-American men are arrested at 13 times the rate of white men on drug charges in the U.S. -- with rates up to 57 times in some states. African Americans and Latinos together make up 29 percent of the total U.S. population, but more than 75 percent of drug law violators in state and federal prisons.

Denied Access to Education, Housing and Benefits:
Passed by Congress in 1998, the Higher Education Act delays or denies federal financial aid to anyone ever convicted of a felony or misdemeanor drug offense - including marijuana possession. A drug offense will also get you and your whole family kicked out of public housing. 32 states ban anyone convicted of a drug felony from collecting food stamps.

Wasted Taxpayer Dollars:
U.S. federal, state, and local governments now spend $50 billion per year trying to make America "drug free." State prison budgets top spending on public colleges and universities. The prison industrial complex is ever more powerful. Nevertheless, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit drugs are cheaper, purer, and easier to get than ever before.

Unsafe Neighborhoods:
Most "drug-related" violence stems not from drug use, but from drug prohibition. That was true in Chicago under alcohol kingpin Al Capone and it is true now. The mass killings in Mexico and in many U.S. cities are not from marijuana or other drug use, but because the plants are worth more than gold and people are willing to kill each other over the profits to be made.

Shredded Constitutional Rights:
Armed with paramilitary gear, police break into homes unannounced, terrorizing innocent and guilty alike. Prosecutors seize private property without due process. Citizens convicted of felony offenses lose their right to vote, in some states for life. More and more Americans are subject to urine tests without cause. And the list goes on.

Bloodbath in Latin America:
U.S. drug policies in Latin America have failed to reduce the supply of illicit drugs. Instead they have led to a bloodbath with more than 60,000 people killed in prohibition violence since 2006 in Mexico alone. Our policy and strategies have empowered organized criminals, corrupted governments, stimulated violence, assaulted the environment and created tens of thousands of refugees.

Compromising Teenagers' Safety:
The defenders of the failed war on drugs say that we can't discuss alternatives to prohibition because it would "send the wrong message to the kids." Ironically, the drug war is a complete failure when it comes to keeping young people from using drugs. Despite decades of DARE programs with the simplistic "Just Say No" message, 50 percent of teenagers will try marijuana before they graduate and 75 percent will drink alcohol. Young people also feel the brunt of marijuana enforcement and make up the majority of arrests. Arresting young people will often cause more damage than drug use itself. Teenagers need honest drug education to help them make responsible decisions. Safety should be the number one priority.

Drug Treatment:
Despite the government's lip service to the need for treatment, most of the drug war budget still goes to criminal justice and military agencies. The majority of those who need treatment can't get it. And for many, the only way to get treatment is to get arrested. We should never put people in a cage because they have a drug problem, and we should make treatment available to all who want it.

Public Health:
Unsterile syringe sharing is associated with 100,000s of HIV/AIDS infections in the U.S. among injection drug users, their sex partners and children. Yet state paraphernalia and prescription laws limit access to sterile syringes in pharmacies, and the U.S. government stands alone among western industrialized nations in refusing to fund needle exchange.

Destroyed Families:
The number of people behind the bars on a drug charge in the U.S. has ballooned from 50,000 in 1980 to more than half-a-million today. That's more than all of Western Europe (with a bigger population) incarcerates for everything. Millions of people in the U.S. now have a father, mother, brother, sister, son or daughter behind bars on a drug charge.

Momentum Builds to End Drug War:
The war on drugs is really a war on people. It is hard to imagine an issue that has caused so much damage to so many people on so many fronts. Thankfully momentum is building in the this country and abroad toward a more rational drug policy based on science, compassion, health and human rights. States like Colorado and Washington just dealt a blow to marijuana prohibition by legalizing marijuana. World leaders, including multiple presidents in Latin America are calling for open debate on alternatives to drug prohibition. Many countries in Europe have implemented public health strategies like "safe injection facilities" and prescribing medical heroin to reduce HIV/AIDS and overdose deaths. Both red and blue states are reducing their prison populations by offering alternatives to jail for low-level drug offenses.

Everyone has a reason to oppose and be outraged by the failed drug war. We need to step up our efforts, grow our numbers, and continue to win hearts and minds because the casualties from the war continue to grow every day. And the war on drugs is not going to end itself.

Tony Newman is the director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance.