Drug Prohibition: Still Stupid

[El Borracho]

What about the huge win for liberty in California - by a liberal regime - legalizing jaywalking? (Insert self-promoting link here.)

 

[MR.CLEAN]

The article I posted says there's no such thing as a NY license yet.



Or did you mean some other kind of license?

That's the problem with getting information from for-profit news articles Tom. It makes you dumb.

https://cannabis.ny.gov/list-aucc-licenses

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

That's the problem with getting information from for-profit news articles Tom. It makes you dumb.

https://cannabis.ny.gov/list-aucc-licenses

Those are "conditional cultivator" licensees.

The article said no one has a dispensary license.

Can a "conditional cultivator" operate as a dispensary?

Or have you changed the subject to some other kind of license?

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Slightly worse.

Overall, yes, with exceptions everywhere, of course.

For example, on drug war looting, Rand Paul is far better than Joe Biden. But I guess that's another thread.

 

[Olsonist]

Overall, yes, with exceptions everywhere, of course.

For example, on drug war looting, Rand Paul is far better than Joe Biden. But I guess that's another thread.

This thread will do. What has your boy Rand accomplished with respect to the drug war?

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

This thread will do. What has your boy Rand accomplished with respect to the drug war?

I get your desire to deflect away from your boy Joe's indefensible drug war looting history.

As for the stupid drug war more broadly, you can read the thread. The most recent example is:

Cory Booker And Rand Paul File Bill To Reschedule Psychedelic Breakthrough Therapies And Remove Research Barriers

Cory Booker is very good on the stupid drug war, far better than Joe Biden. Without looking it up, I'm going to guess that your boy Joe won't support Cory and Rand on this one.

 

[Olsonist]

I get your desire to deflect away from your boy Joe's indefensible drug war looting history.

As for the stupid drug war more broadly, you can read the thread. The most recent example is:

Cory Booker And Rand Paul File Bill To Reschedule Psychedelic Breakthrough Therapies And Remove Research Barriers

Cory Booker is very good on the stupid drug war, far better than Joe Biden. Without looking it up, I'm going to guess that your boy Joe won't support Cory and Rand on this one.

Thanks, but I asked about your boy Rand. What has your boy accomplished?

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

Can a "conditional cultivator" operate as a dispensary?

Like filling a growler at a craft brewery? What about "tasting rooms"? Are those a thing? I don't smoke but I think both of those would be great.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-man-lifetime-ban-entering-us-cbd-oil-1.6660816

"B.C. man faces lifetime ban from entering U.S. after border agents find forgotten bottle of CBD oil in his car"​

Locking up a basketball player in Russia is still stupid, but this article is more relevant to how drug prohibition is still stupid in the USA.

...
In a statement, Rhona Lawson, a spokesperson for the U.S. Customs Border Protection (CBP) said it "enforces the laws of the United States and U.S. laws will not change following Canada's legalization of marijuana.

"Determinations about admissibility and whether any regulatory or criminal enforcement is appropriate are made by a CBP officer based on the facts and circumstances known to the officer at the time."

CBD is a non-psychoactive chemical found in marijuana. It's not a controlled substance in the U.S., as long as it contains less than 0.3 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — the principal psychoactive compound found in marijuana.

Houweling says an agent told him the CBD oil tested positive for THC, although he claims they didn't provide proof despite multiple requests for it.
...

So those would be secret "facts and circumstances" with secret proof.

Can't really argue with that.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Can a "conditional cultivator" operate as a dispensary?

Or have you changed the subject to some other kind of license?

Like filling a growler at a craft brewery? What about "tasting rooms"? Are those a thing? I don't smoke but I think both of those would be great.

I doubt those are allowed.

The answer to my second question appears to be that there are three kinds of licenses and Clean didn't expect me to pick up on this fact.

The article I commented on clearly referenced "dispensary" licenses. This comment on cultivator licenses was intended as the usual messenger attack on me.

That's the problem with getting information from for-profit news articles Tom. It makes you dumb.

https://cannabis.ny.gov/list-aucc-licenses

To readers of the article, it makes Clean look dumb, or possibly deceptive. I specifically asked if he was talking about a different kind of license. He clearly was, but expected me to be like the non-readers around here and unable to figure it out. Problem is, I read, so I continue to not fall for his lame tricks.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Another hat tip to Bernie Sanders, who has now introduced a bill to end the war on cannabis at the federal level.

Tom will be back shortly to say that they’re probably better than Bernie on marijuana decriminalization.

Huh?

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

UK Drug Dealers Are Now Being Charged With Human Trafficking

It's another example of how the failure of the stupid drug war to accomplish its goals leads to more abuses of power pursued in futile attempts to make drug prohibition work.

...
Wabelua was the first drug dealer to be prosecuted under the U.K.'s Modern Slavery Act, but not the last. There's no doubt "that slavery prosecutions are on the rise, and that the authorities are targeting domestic drug dealers—even more so than the cross-border human traffickers who inspired the law," says the Times. "A survey of five years' worth of local news reports shows that most of the defendants in drug-related slavery cases were Black men under 21. Many, if not all, were only one rung removed from the streets themselves."


It's not difficult to theorize why authorities like using human trafficking laws against drug dealers and sex workers. Laws targeting prostitution and low-level drug crimes may seem overly punitive to you and me, but for many authoritarians these punishments don't go far enough. By ratcheting up the charges to human trafficking or modern slavery, officials can subject sex workers and drug dealers to much longer periods of incarceration, larger fines, and more stringent restrictions on movement, employment, free association, free speech, and privacy.

In addition, claims of targeting "human trafficking" or "modern slavery" tend to give authorities carte blanche for whatever law enforcement spending and civil liberties infringements they like. But in order to justify these claims, authorities need—at least sometimes—to actually convict some people of human trafficking. Estimates of the prevalence of human trafficking are wildly inflated, however, which makes catching actual human traffickers difficult. But authorities can juice their numbers by charging drug dealers, sex workers, etc., with human trafficking. Expanding the definition of human trafficker means more convictions, which in turn means huge "increases" in human trafficking numbers that authorities can point to in order to further justify expanding the police state to stop this crime.

 

[MR.CLEAN]

The article I posted says there's no such thing as a NY license yet.



Or did you mean some other kind of license?

How could anyone who has any interest in the subject think there is 'no such thing as a NY license yet' unless they are unthinking targets of for-profit news pubs? It's not like you don't have enough free time, Tom. Read better.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

How could anyone who has any interest in the subject think there is 'no such thing as a NY license yet' unless they are unthinking targets of for-profit news pubs? It's not like you don't have enough free time, Tom. Read better.

Is this a true statement or not?

"The state legalized adult-use marijuana more than a year ago but is yet to issue a single dispensary license."

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Is this a true statement or not?

"The state legalized adult-use marijuana more than a year ago but is yet to issue a single dispensary license."

Clean obviously won't answer that question.

The answer is: the statement was true when written and a week later NY issued the first dispensary licenses.

New York issued its first 36 cannabis dispensary licenses on Monday, taking a monumental step in establishing a legal and lucrative marketplace for recreational marijuana.

The licenses approved by the state’s cannabis control board were the first of 175 the state plans to issue, with many in the first round reserved for applicants with past convictions for marijuana offenses.


Eight non-profit groups were among the 36 licensees granted on Monday.

Some of the dispensaries, selected from a pool of more than 900 applicants, are expected to open by the end of the year.
...

The licenses were issued the day before Clean claimed to have an acquaintance with a license, so maybe he meant a dispensary license, but try getting a straight answer out of the guy.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Raise a glass on Repeal Day to Pauline Sabin, The Woman Who Spearheaded Prohibition's Repeal

Yeah, I know it's not repeal day any more. It's my late brother's birthday.

But we could use a leader like Pauline Sabin to help end the stupid drug war.

...
Sabin initially supported Prohibition. But she tended to be skeptical about expanding federal power, and she often opposed paternalistic legislation. (In 1920, when the Lord's Day Alliance was opposing the playing of movies on Sundays and pushing for federal censorship, Sabin said: "I'm heartily opposed to any legislation that will deprive the public of a wholesome entertainment on Sunday.") As Prohibition failed to deliver on its promises, Sabin became increasingly disenchanted. She finally endorsed Repeal in a 1928 article titled "I Change My Mind on Prohibition."


While Sabin was not enthusiastic about the Republican presidential nominee that year, Herbert Hoover, she was encouraged by Hoover's promise to appoint a commission to study Prohibition. But after Hoover's inaugural address, in which he promised to enforce the law against alcohol, she decided she'd had enough and resigned from the RNC. She then met with 11 other women to lay the groundwork for founding the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR).


Speaking at a luncheon in her honor a month after Hoover's inauguration, Sabin channeled the spirit of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. "To tell citizens what they must or must not do in their strictly personal conduct as long as public safety is not affected is a function which government should not attempt," she said. "It is the age-old effort of the fanatic which has been behind every invasion of personal liberty in the past." Later that year, she told the National Civic Federation: "We have exchanged the government of the people for the government of and by the Methodist Board of Morals."

...

The WONPR demanded that political candidates state their views on Prohibition, telling its members to vote only for those supporting reform, regardless of party. Reporting on the WONPR's second convention in 1931, Sabin wrote that they would enlist "an army of women so great that its backing will give courage to the most weak-kneed and hypocritical Congressman to vote as he drinks." A key plank in the WONPR's platform was to reject any compromises that would still leave the issue in the hands of Congress, making it vulnerable to future political swings.

"When Mrs. Sabin formed her Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform it gathered members so fast that within an incredibly short time it has more of them than all of the W.C.T.U.'s and other such dry organizations put together," the anti-Prohibition activist William H. Stayton told the journalist H.L. Mencken. "This alarmed the politicians and they began to jump. They saw that the women were actually more dangerous to them than the men."

Sabin's final abandonment of partisanship came with her endorsement of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. "It has been said that the Democratic candidate is a very recent convert to the cause of Repeal because of political expediency," said Sabin. "It cannot be said up to this date, the Republican candidate is a convert to Repeal for any reason."
...

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Researching the possibility of allowing research on cannabis is finally allowed. Sorta.

...
H.R. 8454 requires the DEA to annually "assess whether there is an adequate and uninterrupted supply of marijuana, including of specific strains, for research purposes." And it instructs HHS, "in coordination with the National Institutes of Health and relevant federal agencies, to report on the therapeutic potential of marijuana for various conditions such as epilepsy, as well as the impact on adolescent brains and on the ability to operate a motor vehicle."

In an interview with Science, University of Mississippi pharmacologist Larry Walker described the law's limits on the DEA's response time, which previously could extend to a year or longer, as a "great advance." Ziva Cooper, director of UCLA's Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids, called the law "exciting" and "a significant step forward with respect to chipping away at the barriers" to marijuana research. But let's not get too excited.

Although Biden has instructed HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Attorney General Merrick Garland to review marijuana's classification under the Controlled Substances Act, H.R. 8454 does not address that issue. Marijuana is still listed in Schedule I, a category supposedly reserved for drugs with a high abuse potential and no accepted medical use that cannot be used safely even under a doctor's supervision. Marijuana's Schedule I status triggers special requirements for storing and handling it.

Nor does H.R. 8454 allow researchers to use marijuana sold by state-licensed dispensaries, which would be more representative of the cannabis Americans actually consume. "There's no substitute for studying real-world products that our patients and recreational consumers are using," Staci Gruber, a neuroscientist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, told Science.

Shane Pennington, an attorney at the Denver-based cannabis law firm Vicente Sederberg, raises several additional concerns in a July 26 Substack essay. Pennington says H.R. 8454 gives the DEA "unbridled authority to avoid licensing any marijuana manufacturers at all simply by refusing to place a notice in the federal register seeking more applications." He adds that the DEA's deadlines for processing applications have no teeth because the law does not specify any consequences for missing them and because the agency can "avoid triggering any of the deadlines…simply by refusing to accept any particular application as 'complete.'"

Pennington also notes that H.R. 8454 creates a new requirement for DEA registration of researchers studying CBD and other cannabis derivatives that contain minimal or no THC. "By imposing registration requirements on these otherwise-non-controlled substances," he writes, "this bill dramatically increases barriers to cannabis research."

Even aside from those specific shortcomings, support for H.R. 8454 should not be confused with support for broader changes to federal law. Rep. Andy Harris (R–Md.), an original co-sponsor of the bill, is an arch prohibitionist who has devoted much time and energy to obstructing voter-approved legalization in Washington, D.C., where recreational use has been allowed since 2014 but nonmedical sales remain illegal.

"We will now be able to treat marijuana like we treat any other substance or pharmaceutical for which we hope there is potential benefit," Harris said. "We will be able to subject it to rigorous scientific trial." When nine out of 10 Americans already think marijuana should be available as a medicine, that stance looks more like a delaying tactic than a concession to public opinion.

Still, H.R. 8454 reflects how the national debate about marijuana has changed since the 1990s. One provision in particular is uncontroversial today but would have raised the hackles of Democrats as well as Republicans back when state-approved medical marijuana was a novelty. The law says "it shall not be a violation of the Controlled Substances Act" for physicians to discuss the risks and benefits of medical marijuana with their patients.

That principle has been well established since the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to punish doctors for such conversations by prosecuting them, excluding them from Medicare and Medicaid, or revoking the DEA registrations that allow them to prescribe controlled substances. In 2002, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld an injunction that blocked those threats on First Amendment grounds. The Supreme Court declined to hear the government's appeal.

In the current context, the controversy at the center of that case is hard to fathom. But when voters in California and Arizona approved medical marijuana ballot initiatives in 1996, the Clinton administration viewed that development as such a grave threat to pot prohibition that it justified a heavy-handed, constitutionally dubious response. The New York Times editorialized that the administration "has little choice but to insist that Federal drug statutes be enforced." Given that imperative, the Times said, the federal government's "aggressive campaign to combat the state initiatives, including criminal prosecution of doctors who prescribe marijuana…makes sense."

Drug warriors were right to worry. Medical marijuana did in fact pave the way for broader legalization, which the Times itself finally endorsed in 2014. Today 37 states allow medical use, and 21 of them also allow recreational use. The latter policy, which was supported by a quarter of Americans in 1995, is now favored by more than two-thirds. Yet Congress has responded to those realities with nothing more than piecemeal reforms that fall far short of what a large majority of voters say they want. H.R. 8454 is emblematic of that situation.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans 18-45.

Is that so? Source?

I think we have a fentanyl problem largely because the pill mills that sold safer products were easier to shut down, but the black market itself can't be extinguished. People like to get fucked up on all kinds of substances and governments can't protect us from ourselves. Fentanyl's popularity is what happens when it is tried.

There is some progress, but the stupid drug war is still standing in the way with archaic "paraphernalia" laws banning fentanyl test strips.

There's other progress as well, with the possibility of non-prescription Narcan on the horizon.

The bipartisan Duopoly answer at the federal level is to continue locking up people who sell cannabis. A smarter answer would be to model our drug policy after Portugal's and stop trying to incarcerate (and loot) our way out of the problems of addiction.

But the looting is profitable and the incarcerating is the safe, we've always done it this way answer, so...

 

[Dog 2.0]

Is that so? Source?

I think we have a fentanyl problem largely because the pill mills that sold safer products were easier to shut down, but the black market itself can't be extinguished. People like to get fucked up on all kinds of substances and governments can't protect us from ourselves. Fentanyl's popularity is what happens when it is tried.

There is some progress, but the stupid drug war is still standing in the way with archaic "paraphernalia" laws banning fentanyl test strips.

There's other progress as well, with the possibility of non-prescription Narcan on the horizon.

The bipartisan Duopoly answer at the federal level is to continue locking up people who sell cannabis. A smarter answer would be to model our drug policy after Portugal's and stop trying to incarcerate (and loot) our way out of the problems of addiction.

But the looting is profitable and the incarcerating is the safe, we've always done it this way answer, so...

Fentanyl overdoses become No. 1 cause of death among US adults, ages 18-45: 'A national emergency'

Fentanyl overdoses have surged to the leading cause of death among adults between the ages of 18 and 45, according to an analysis of U.S. government data from fentanyl awareness organization Families Against Fentanyl.

www.foxnews.com

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Fentanyl overdoses become No. 1 cause of death among US adults, ages 18-45: 'A national emergency'

Fentanyl overdoses have surged to the leading cause of death among adults between the ages of 18 and 45, according to an analysis of U.S. government data from fentanyl awareness organization Families Against Fentanyl.

www.foxnews.com

Thanks.

From the article:

"This is a national emergency. America’s young adults — thousands of unsuspecting Americans — are being poisoned," James Rauh, founder of Families Against Fentanyl, said in a statement. "It is widely known that illicit fentanyl is driving the massive spike in drug-related deaths. A new approach to this catastrophe is needed."

Rauh, who lost his son to an overdose, added that "declaring illicit fentanyl a Weapon of Mass Destruction would activate additional and necessary federal resources to root out the international manufacturers and traffickers of illicit fentanyl and save American lives."

Emergency deregulation seems like a much better idea than misusing words to double down on failed federal boondoggling.