In California, annual retail sales of medical marijuana may be as high as $1.3 billion. But to use it, people have to grow it, and deliver it, and the laws governing the substance are anything but clear. What’s more, the feds’ official position is: no marijuana is legal. And they’re cracking down. Writer David Freed takes us on a road trip through the medical marijuana morass as part of the “Medicine on the Front Lines” report in the January-February 2012 issue of Miller-McCune magazine. We’re riding south out of Northern California’s Humboldt County, pushing 75 miles an ... Read More
U.S. Crackdown Highlights Mixed-Up World of Medical Marijuana
October 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
“The problem is that this is a multibillion dollar industry that literally has no guidelines. … Every time anybody goes before some city council somewhere or the county, nobody knows what the hell they’re doing. And every time the elected officials change, it’s all new. It’s a friggin’ nightmare.” So explains certified master gardener and marijuana farmer Kevin Jodrey, the cultivation director for the nonprofit Humboldt Patient Resource Center in Arcata, California, a city-regulated dispensary that distributes to its patients medical marijuana grown in the center’s own ... Read More
War on Drugs Remains at Stalemate After 40 Years
June 24, 2011 • By •
The headlines, commission reports and op-eds have been singing in chorus this month around the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s declaration of a national war on drugs. “Panel Calls War on Drugs a Failure," reads the Wall Street Journal headline on a new high-profile report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy. “Law Enforcement Study: War on Drugs is a Failure,” announced the release of another analysis from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Next came “U.S. Mayors Call U.S. ‘War on Drugs’ a Failure.” And just to underscore the bipartisan nature of all this ... Read More
Fighting Drug War Creates Drug War
April 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It's clear enough that the American appetite for weed, cocaine and meth — but mostly weed — has contributed to evil and lurid gang wars in Mexico. An appetite for heroin in Europe has helped fund the war in Afghanistan, too, and in that sense the old and new continents face the same important question: What might quell the violence? Over the last few weeks, this column has explored various drug policies in Europe and the United States. "War" still summarizes the American approach, in spite of changing rhetoric from the Obama administration. "Harm reduction" roughly summarizes the ... Read More
Budget Idea: Divert Money From Prisons to Schools
April 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Solving state and national budget woes is going to demand a painful set of decisions on where to carve out money — from public services, public safety, environmental protection? — no matter where legislators look. But an unlikely coalition of organizations, including the NAACP, ACLU and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform,* is rallying around a common target: Why, they ask, are we spending so much money on prisons? Over the last 40 years, America's inmate population has quadrupled, from 500,000 to 2.3 million, giving the U.S. 5 percent of the world's population, but 25 percent ... Read More
Is a Dip in Cocaine Use a War on Drugs Victory?
April 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
When The New York Times ran a review last summer of a book about legalizing coke, Tom Feiling's Cocaine Nation, the head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy wrote an old-fashioned letter to the editor. The review "correctly states that the Obama administration has moved beyond 'war on drugs' rhetoric to a comprehensive public health and public safety approach ... to reduce drug use and its consequences," Gil Kerlikowske wrote. "What is not mentioned is the fact that since 2007, cocaine use has decreased sharply in the United States, while in Europe it has ... Read More
A Smarter Way to Deal With Drug Offenders
March 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Asa Hutchinson, a staunch Republican who once ran the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, went to Canada early in March to do a peculiar thing. He tried to talk the Conservative Party out of some new tough-on-drugs legislation that lawmakers may pass in Ottawa. “We have made some mistakes, and I hope you can learn from those mistakes,” he told a legislative committee, offering a mea culpa for some of America’s drug-war policies. The main mistake, he said, was jailing nonviolent drug offenders. He argued that a low-profile but fruitful move toward “drug courts” in the U.S., which aim ... Read More
Don’t Legalize Drugs, Decriminalize ’em
March 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
When Portugal took a leap into the unknown in 2000 and decriminalized drugs, people howled. Abuse would soar, they said, and the little nation on Europe’s Iberian coast — already a summer dumping ground for drunken Germans and Brits — would become a haven for drug tourism. “I am against liberalization of drugs,” one conservative opposition leader in Portugal told a documentary maker at the time. “Why?” “Because I am against,” he repeated. “I don’t want the state giving signs of weakness [on] drug policy.” But in 2000, the Casal Ventoso slum in Lisbon — ... Read More
‘Shooting Galleries’ Take Aim at Illicit Drug Market
March 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In a late essay on the Reagan drug war, the Beat novelist William Burroughs gave a surprising statistic. Heroin was freely available by prescription in Britain in 1957, he wrote, so addicts could shoot up from a government stock of junk dispensed by the National Health Service. "There were about 500 addicts in the U.K.," in those days, Burroughs wrote blandly, "and two narcotics officers for metropolitan London." When the U.K. criminalized heroin in 1971, he argued, it lapsed into "the same dreary spectrum as the USA — thousands of addicts, hundreds of drug agents, some of them on the ... Read More
Contending With Afghan Heroin (And How Not To)
March 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One open secret about the war in Afghanistan is that it has led to a flood of pure, cheap heroin in the world’s cities since 2001. “Despite reported decreases in white heroin production in most source countries,” the U.S. Justice Department admitted in 2006, “increased production in Afghanistan has resulted in an overall increase in worldwide white heroin production.” The production of white (or pure) heroin, in other words, had generally receded around the world — but supplies from war-torn Afghanistan more than picked up the slack. Now, according to some estimates, Afghanistan ... Read More
