B12 Solipsism

I wouldn’t read too much into this decision, but still an encouraging step.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a landmark decision today in which California state courts found that its medical marijuana law was not preempted by federal law. The state appellate court decision from November 28, 2007, ruled that “it is not the job of the local police to enforce the federal drug laws.” The case, involving Felix Kha, a medical marijuana patient from Garden Grove, was the result of a wrongful seizure of medical marijuana by local police in June 2005. Medical marijuana advocates hailed today’s decision as a huge victory in clarifying law enforcement’s obligation to uphold state law. Advocates assert that better adherence to state medical marijuana laws by local police will result in fewer needless arrests and seizures. In turn, this will allow for better implementation of medical marijuana laws not only in California, but in all states that have adopted such laws.

“It’s now settled that state law enforcement officers cannot arrest medical marijuana patients or seize their medicine simply because they prefer the contrary federal law,” said Joe Elford, Chief Counsel with Americans for Safe Access (ASA), the medical marijuana advocacy organization that represented the defendant Felix Kha in a case that the City of Garden Grove appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Perhaps, in the future local government will think twice about expending significant time and resources to defy a law that is overwhelmingly supported by the people of our state.”

[From ASA : U.S. Supreme Court: State Medical Marijuana Laws Not Preempted by Federal Law]

The Republican hatred for States rights - solely when applied to marijuana - is hypocrisy without even a pretense of rationality. From my perspective, the pendulum is swinging towards a liberalization of drug laws. US prisons are too full of non-violent drug offenders, costing cash-strapped state governments real dollars to house and feed them. Many states are using ballot initiatives to enact medical marijuana laws that politicians are too cowardly to initiate themselves, I have a sliver of hope things might be getting better. Of course, Biden is a hardened drug warrior, but perhaps he’s had an awakening of sorts as well.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy is by far one of the most ridiculous wastes of taxpayer money in our nation. Their mandate is to convince young folks that marijuana is a demon weed, and that one toke will corrupt young minds forever, and ever, amen. A current ad asserts that if you partake of cannabis, the only career options left for you will be comical dead-end jobs like “Burrito Taster” and “Couch Security Guard” and so on.

Here’s my challenge to Agitator readers, bloggers, and others: In this comments thread, let’s compile a master list of admitted pot smokers—current or former—who not only haven’t ended up as heroin junkies or burnouts, but have gone on to lead successful lives. If the person is famous, include a link. But feel free to add yourselves and what you do now, too, if you fit the criteria. School teacher? Cop? Stay at home mom? Grad student? Count yourself in. You can leave out your name if you like. Or include it. Either way.

I’ll get it started:

Barack Obama, president-elect. Bill Clinton, 42nd president of the U.S. John Kerry, U.S. Senator and 2004 Democratic nominee for president. John Edwards, multi-millionaire, former U.S. Senator, and 2004 Democratic nominee for vice president. Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, 2008 Republican nominee for vice president. British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, and and Chancellor Alistair Darling. Josh Howard, NBA all-star. New York Governor David Paterson. Former Vice President, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Oscar winner Al Gore. Former Sen. Bill Bradley, who smoked while playing professional basketball. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and former New York Governor George Pataki. Billionaire and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

That’s the result of a five-minute Google search. The presence of so many high-ranking politicians so early in the search results puts the lie to the ONDCP’s ridiculous ad campaign, and shows that to the extent that marijuana is harmful, the harm lies mostly in what the government will do to you to you if it catches you

[From The Agitator » Blog Archive » Successful Pot Smokers: Let’s Make a List]

I don’t want to name any names, but in my own experience, I know pot smokers who are: condominium developers, police, teachers, lawyers, real estate agents, restaurant moguls, stock traders, and so on and so on.

Our tax money funds crappy logic like this? We need a change. The list of famously successful pot-smokers being built at The Agitator is extensive, and amusing.

The first thought I had upon reading this article about methadone use is that insurance companies probably love methadone because it doesn’t have an active patent, and thus is cheap to proscribe.

Methadone, once used mainly in addiction treatment centers to replace heroin, is today being given out by family doctors, osteopaths and nurse practitioners for throbbing backs, joint injuries and a host of other severe pains.

A synthetic form of opium, it is cheap and long lasting, a powerful pain reliever that has helped millions. But because it is also abused by thrill seekers and badly prescribed by doctors unfamiliar with its risks, methadone is now the fastest growing cause of narcotic deaths. It is implicated in more than twice as many deaths as heroin, and is rivaling or surpassing the tolls of painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin.

“This is a wonderful medicine used appropriately, but an unforgiving medicine used inappropriately,” said Dr. Howard A. Heit, a pain specialist at Georgetown University. “Many legitimate patients, following the direction of the doctor, have run into trouble with methadone, including death.”

…

OxyContin is still widely prescribed, but a survey of Medicare plans in 2008, by the research firm Avalere Health LLC, found that many did not even include OxyContin on the list of reimbursable drugs. Critics like Dr. June Dahl, professor of pharmacology at the University of Wisconsin, fault the insurance companies for favoring methadone simply because of its monetary cost. “I don’t think a drug that requires such a level of sophistication to use is what I’d call cheap, because of the risks,” Dr. Dahl added.

Federal regulators acknowledge that they were slow to recognize the dangers of newly widespread methadone prescribing and to confront physician ignorance about the drug. They blame “imperfect” systems for monitoring such problems.

[From Methadone Rises as a Painkiller With Risks - NYTimes.com]

and apparently, I was right:

The rise of methadone is in part because of a major change in medical attitudes in the 1990s, as doctors accepted that debilitating pain was often undertreated. Insurance plans embraced methadone as a generic, cheaper alternative to other long-lasting painkillers like OxyContin, and many doctors switched to prescribing it because it seemed less controversial and perhaps less prone to abuse than OxyContin.

The subtext is that the FDA only was concerned with methadone for narcotic abuse¹:

In what critics call a stunning oversight, the F.D.A-approved package insert for methadone for decades recommended starting doses for pain at up to 80 mg per day. “This could unequivocally cause death in patients who have not recently been using narcotics,” said Dr. Robert G. Newman, former president of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York and an expert in addiction.

The F.D.A. says that in the absence of reports of problems by doctors or surveillance systems, “we would have no reason to suspect that the dosing regimen” might need to be adjusted.

In November 2006, after reports of overdoses and deaths among pain patients multiplied and The Charleston Gazette reported on the dangerous package instructions, the F.D.A. cut the recommended starting limit to no more than 30 mg per day. “As soon as we became aware of deaths due to misprescribing for pain patients, we began the process of instituting label changes,” Dr. Rappaport said.

1. in other words, there was not expensive advertising campaign touting the benefits of methadone, thus the FDA didn’t really care what the materials describing proper use actually said. Junkies don’t care what the current advertising says, and the FDA officials can’t get future jobs [↩]

“The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star” (Nikki Sixx)

Nikki Sixx is just a putz. John Dolan concurs.

Yet heroin that gets the blame when Nikki’s retarded band mates discuss his descent to what Tommy Lee calls “a dark fucking place.” If you’ve spent any time in L.A. you’ve probably met guys like this. For them, cocaine is simply part of a normal healthy diet, whereas heroin is just plain evil. Odd, because among intelligent druggies opiates get a lot of respect, while coke is simply despised. For serious drug people there are two ways to go: up with some variety of speed, or down with some kind of opiate. Coke is scorned as a short-acting verbal emetic, a silly drug for moneyed trash. The only intellectuals who took it seriously were Freud and Sherlock Holmes — one a half-baked intellectual who masqueraded his literary criticism as therapy, postponing effective treatment for schizophrenia and depression by generations, the other an apotheosized peeping tom, who of course never really existed. Indeed, both were nasty voyeurs; perhaps that’s a feature of coke addiction too.

Opiates, by contrast, have been the drug of choice for an astonishing number of the really talented people of the last few centuries: Coleridge, de Quincy, Poe, Donald Goines, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix. And prescription opiates are still the choice of L.A.’s upper class, which is why when one of the stars is arrested, their glove compartments are always full of perfectly legal percodan or Demerol. (If you’re a star, you see, you can get special prescriptions which are issued after your arrest but dated weeks before.)

Of course injected street heroin has a terrible potential for fatal overdoses, because you don’t know the purity of the dose until it’s already in your bloodstream. What no one seems to realize is that this too is a side effect of Prohibition. When you make a drug illegal, you are encouraging smugglers to import it in the most concentrated, potent form available, then charge insanely high prices for infinitesmal amounts. In the case of heroin, these quantities are so tiny that the drug must be injected to be effective. Without Prohibition, quantity and content would be clear, and people would be free to smoke opium in legal dens. In such conditions, accidental overdoses are rare. Conversely, in countries like Iran which prohibit that allegedly safe, mainstream drug, alcohol, many users die or go blind from ingesting street booze laced with the usual variety of poisons. Prohibition kills far more people than “drugs.”

Alas, even educated Americans are too intimidated to point this out. In a provincial, Puritan society like ours, nothing is worse than your neighbors’ disapproval, and speaking up against the drug laws can get you whispered about. And if Nikki’s betters won’t speak out honestly on the topic, we can hardly expect him and his idiot hessian friends to get it. So naturally, they’re all eager to blame heroin, “the worst drug in the world.” They’re also in love with its notoriety — hence the book’s title.

[From Why Is Coke Glamorous and Heroin Scary? Because of Halfwits Like Nikki Sixx | DrugReporter | AlterNet]

I had a witty rejoinder to this article, and to the nonsense of Nikki Sixx, way back when I discovered the article in 2007, but it never made it through my movabletype blog filter¹, so I’ll just let Mr. Sixx wallow in his own depravity. I remember part of my critique was of those who cocaine is a drug of choice. I’ve partaken, even a few times, but cocaine never seemed very fulfilling of an inebriant.Empty calories, basically. The entire article is good, check it out if you have a moment.

1. I had a lot of trouble posting content for a while [↩]

Was reading a Gore Vidal polemic (Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace), and ran across a mention of a published New York Times op-ed piece from September 26, 1970. With some trepidation, but a belly full of wine and thus courage in the realm of copyright matters, I reproduce the article in full. 1970 was thirty-eight years ago after all. Please forgive any typos: the New York Times digital archive only goes back as far as the 1980s, previous articles are available only as image scans, and the OCR contained in my copy of Adobe Acrobat is somewhat anemic. Better than typing it myself, but not perfect.

It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect-good and bad-the drug will have on whoever takes it. This will require heroic honesty. Don’t say that marijuana is addictive or dangerous when it is neither, as millions of people know-unlike “speed,” which kills most unpleasantly, or heroin, which is addictive and difficult to kick.

For the record, I have tried-once-most every drug and liked none, disproving the popular Fu Manchu theory that a single whiff of opium will enslave the mind. Nevertheless many drugs are bad for certain people to take and they should be told about them in a sensible way.

Along with exhortation and warning, it might be good for our citizens to recall (or learn for the first time) that the United States was the creation of men who believed that each man has the right to do what he wants with his own life as long as he does not interfere with his neighbor’s pursuit of happiness (that his neighbor’s idea of happiness is persecuting others does confuse matters a bit).

This is a startling notion to the current generation of Americans who reflect on our system of public education which has made the Bill of Rights, literally, unacceptable to a majority of high school graduates (see the annual Purdue reports) who now form the Unsilent majority”-a phrase which that underestimated wit Richard Nixon took from Homer, who used it to describe the dead.

Now one can hear the warning rumble begin: if everyone is allowed to take drugs everyone will and the GNP will decrease, the Commies will stop us from making everyone free, and we shall end up a race of Zombies, passively murmuring “groovie”¹ to one another. Alarming thought. Yet it seems most unlikely that any reasonably sane person will become a drug addict if he knows in advance what addiction is going to be like.

Is everyone reasonably sane? No. Some people will always become drug addicts Just as some people will always become alcoholics, and it is just too bad. Every man, however, has the power (and should have the right) to kill himself if he chooses. But since most men don’t, they won’t be mainliners either. Nevertheless, forbidding people things they like or think they might enjoy only makes them want those things all the more. This psychological insight is, for some mysterious reason, perennially denied our governors.

It is a lucky thing for the American moralist that our country has always existed in a kind of time-vacuum: we have no public memory of anything that happened before last Tuesday. No one in Washington today recalls what happened during the years alcohol was forbidden to the people by a Congress that thought it had a divine mission to stamp out Demon Rum and so launched the greatest crime wave in the country’s history, caused thousands of deaths from bad alcohol, and created a general (and persisting) contempt for the laws of the United States.

The same thing is happening today. But the government has learned nothing from past attempts at prohibition, not to mention repression.

Last year when the supply of Mexican marijuana was slightly curtailed by the Feds, the pushers got the kids hooked on heroin and deaths increased dramatically, particularly in New York. Whose fault? Evil men like the Mafiosi? Permissive Dr. Spock? Wild eyed Dr. Leary? No.

The Government of the United States was responsible for those deaths. The bureaucratic machine has a vested interest in playing cops and robbers. Both the Bureau of Narcotics and the Mafia want strong laws against the sale and use of drugs because if drugs are sold at cost there would be no money in it for anyone. If there was no money in it for the Mafia, there would be no friendly playground pushers, and addicts would not commit crimes to pay for the next fix. Finally, if there was no money in it, the Bureau of Narcotics would wither away, something they’re not about to do without a struggle.

Will anything sensible be done? Of course not. The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money-and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible (particularly to the professional politician), the situation will only grow worse.

Gore Vidal, playwright and novelist, is the author of the newly published “Two Sisters.”

“Two Sisters” (Gore Vidal)

The more things change…

Actually, some things have changed, mostly the names of the drugs in question, and the repressiveness of the federal government. Hundreds of thousands of people are still in jail for the crime of using or selling a weed, and the word “groovie” is only used ironically².

1. sic - I’ve never seen the word spelled this way, but hey, it was published in the New York Times, so maybe a variant spelling? [↩]
2. even when spelled groovy, it still is only used ironically [↩]

Well, duh.

In 2003, the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 420. The law was intended to clear up some of the confusion caused by Proposition 215, which had failed to specify how patients who could not grow their own pot were expected to obtain the drug, and how much pot could be cultivated for medical purposes. The law permitted any Californian with a doctor’s note to own up to six mature marijuana plants, or to possess up to half a pound of processed weed, which could be obtained from a patients’ collective or coöperative—terms that were not precisely defined in the statute. It also permitted a primary caregiver to be paid “reasonable compensation” for services provided to a qualified patient “to enable that person to use marijuana.”

The counties of California were allowed to amend the state guidelines, and the result was a patchwork of rules and regulations. Upstate in Humboldt County, the heartland of high-grade marijuana farming in California, the district attorney, Paul Gallegos, decided that a resident could grow up to ninety-nine plants at a time, in a space of a hundred square feet or less, on behalf of a qualified patient. The limited legal protections afforded to pot growers and dispensary owners have turned marijuana cultivation and distribution in California into a classic “gray area” business, like gambling or strip clubs, which are tolerated or not, to varying degrees, depending on where you live and on how aggressive your local sheriff is feeling that afternoon. This summer, Jerry Brown, the state’s attorney general, plans to release a more consistent set of regulations on medical marijuana, but it is not clear that California’s judges will uphold his effort. In May, the state Court of Appeal, in Los Angeles, ruled that Senate Bill 420’s cap on the amount of marijuana a patient could possess was unconstitutional, because voters had not approved the limits.

[From A Reporter at Large: Dr. Kush: How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry: The New Yorker]

I had some pithy commentary here, but in the light of day, didn’t make sense. Whatever.

Oversized Volcano

For some reason, this bothers me¹ .

The U.S. spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year hiring pilots, mechanics, and military and police trainers to combat the drug trade in South American countries, as well as Afghanistan and other Central Asian states. Lockheed Martin Corp. also supports peacekeeping forces in Darfur.

Last year, the Defense Department tapped Northrop as one of five to lead a five-year contract focused on fighting terrorism and the drug trade. The contract could be worth as much as $15 billion if fully funded, but the work, under the Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office, will be assigned through small contracts depending on the government’s needs. Others given a shot at competing for the work include Blackwater, Raytheon Co., Lockheed and Arinc Inc.

“The military is not enamored of these other missions,” said Brian Jenkins, a senior adviser at Rand Corp. and former Army Special Forces officer.

The Pentagon has awarded Northrop Grumman Corp. seven smaller contracts as part of the larger counterdrug contract, but details are classified. Northrop spokesman Randy Belote said the company is making greater inroads into that line of business as such efforts become more high-tech. “It’s moving more into the electronic surveillance, intelligence and reconnaissance realm, so it’s perfectly aligned with our business,” he said.

[From U.S. Relies More on Contractors To Fight Drug Trade - WSJ.com]

Why are we outsourcing electronic surveillance to the Northrop Grummans of the world? Why are we spending $15,000,000,000 with minimal oversight on drug wars in third world countries? Doesn’t seem like a good use of limited tax resources.

1. Digg-enabled link to full article for non-WSJ subscribers via this link. [↩]

Is there a joke here? Probably not: I lived on Guam (which is part of the Mariana Islands in fact if not in political jurisdiction) for 6 months - the amount of cannabis plants growing everywhere was amazing. Hard to eradicate a weed from a jungle. Maybe why Jack Abramoff and Frank Black paid so much attention to the island chain….

Pacific island in spin over planned pro-marijuana conference - Yahoo! News :
A proposed pro-marijuana conference to be held in the US-administered Northern Mariana Islands has led to a bizarre row among local legislators.

Opponents of the conference of Californian-based activists advocating that marijuana should be legalised have suggested the territory should be renamed the Northern Marijuana Islands.

But the cash-strapped government says the conference would be a boon for the sagging tourism industry.

“We welcome anybody who wants to hold a conference here, whether it be to discuss marijuana or not,” government spokesman Charles Reyes said Thursday.

“We want to attract conferences in the Northern Marianas because conferences are good for tourism.”

…
Marijuana is a popular if illegal drug in the Northern Marianas where there are regular seizures of plants.

Neal Pollack writes an interesting book review of Robert Greenfield’s Timothy Leary bio.

“Timothy Leary: A Biography” (Robert Greenfield)

AlterNet: Neal Pollack: DrugReporter: Timothy Leary’s Long Acid Trip : …

Leary’s life was one of those rare American ones with a second act. After the 1970s he moved to Beverly Hills, went on a political minstrel-show lecture tour with G. Gordon Liddy, snorted coke in the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner and hung out at the Viper Room. He also developed some of the earliest interactive computer games. What lessons are we to learn from such a life? Obviously, the specifics don’t apply to us ordinary mortals. And we certainly don’t want to follow Leary’s lead in terms of family life. As Greenfield painstakingly details, he was a serially bad husband and an even worse father. Leary’s careerism, while quintessentially American, was corrosive and destructive, another warning siren against the false promises of celebrity-obsessed modernity.

Yet his life contained surprising pockets of peace, extraordinary grace notes. When Leary’s famous commune in Millbrook, New York, wasn’t being raided by local authorities or invaded by trashy jet-setting hipsters, people achieved transcendence there, or at least had a lot of fun. As Greenfield writes, “When Charlie Mingus heard the tap in the sink yowling, followed by banging noises, he took out his bass and began playing counterpoint.” Of all the crazy scenes in the book, that’s the one I would have most liked to see, though I also enjoyed the one where Leary’s wife attempts a seduction of Jerry Brown in order to blackmail Leary out of prison.

While I find Leary’s writing bloated, self-absorbed and, let’s face it, hippy-dippy and dated, Pinchbeck makes a far more persuasive, modern case for psychedelics.

Breaking Open the Head

is The Doors of Perception written from a skeptical East Village perspective. Pinchbeck’s latest book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, expands on his thesis, arguing that psychedelics may be opening a portal to a transformation of consciousness that has the potential to change the world forever. I can’t say whether I believe that or not, and I certainly hope the Phoenix Suns win an NBA title before this evolution happens, but Pinchbeck’s skeptical, analytic reportorial approach to the subject appeals to my brain far more than Leary’s musty counterculture rhetoric.

errr, umm, yes. I am of the generation of whom Leary is only known via his actions and words, and he seems like nothing more than a loud-mouthed charlatan. Without Leary’s self-aggrandizement and nose-thumbing at authorities, perhaps certain substances might still be available through legal channels. Perhaps not, but from my perspective, Leary did nothing but bring negative attention to the whole mind-expansion community, with dire results. The psychedelic class of drugs is not for most people to explore, haphazardly. Leary wanted everyone to take them, and everyone shouldn’t.

Still, interesting reading, and I’ll add these books to my ’summer reading’ list (which is now 3 stacks tall).

More Pollack here