(AARP Bulletin) A widely prescribed and expensive cholesterol drug is not as effective as niacin, a cheap vitamin, in helping to unclog coronary arteries in people already taking statins, the standard medicines used to lower cholesterol, according to a new study.

The research, which appears Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is sending rumbles through the medical community because it is the third recent study to raise questions about the effectiveness of Zetia and its sister drug, Vytorin, highly profitable pharmaceuticals made by Merck & Co.

Introduced in 2002 and 2004 amid heavy direct-to-consumer marketing, Zetia and Vytorin became blockbusters for Merck and Schering-Plough, which had collaborated on their development. The companies recently merged.

Last year, a study released by Merck showed that Zetia did not reduce plaque in arteries compared with patients taking only statins, which are much less expensive and available in generic form. Although released in January, the study had been completed in 2006, prompting a class-action lawsuit alleging that Merck intentionally withheld unfavorable results of a clinical trial. The company paid $41.5 million in August to settle the claims.

Another study published last year showed a potential increase in cancer among patients taking Zetia and Vytorin, compared with those taking only statins.

So what does this have to do with medical marijuana?  Everything.  Understand that these same profit-making mega-corps of Big Pharma are desperately trying to create cannabinoid-based medicines that can’t be grown in your back yard or closet.  While we rejoice that the AMA reversed its position and urged the rescheduling of cannabis, keep your mind focused on why they might have done that.  Is it the pure altruism of realizing a mistake and returning to a rational scientific approach to cannabis moderated by compassion for suffering people and the benefit herbal cannabis would provide?

Or is it the realization that the people are crusading for legal marijuana and succeeding, and if herbal cannabis becomes truly legal their friends in the pharmaceutical industry lose all the profits off of cannabinoid pills, sprays, and inhalers to the ultimate “less expensive generic”?

Remember that drug companies only make money if you take drugs.  If you’re not sick, you don’t take drugs, so they need to keep finding new drugs to push on you for new ailments you never knew you had.  If you go about relieving your unhealthful stress with a joint after a long day, you’re not going to get those stress-related diseases for which you’ll need a lifelong regimen of drugs.

Beware the medicalization of marijuana.  I can forsee a ruling where herbal cannabis is placed in Schedule II so research is then allowed to take place.  At Schedule II, your doctor could prescribe it to you, but since Schedule II drugs are tightly controlled (no refills, for instance) perhaps he won’t.  Meanwhile, Big Pharma identifies and synthesizes the medically-effective compounds in cannabis (taking out the pesky “high”, of course) and these expensive drugs are packaged and mega-hyped on TV.  These drugs are placed, like Marinol, at Schedule III or lower.  With effective alternatives to herbal cannabis found (and lobbying pressure from Big Pharma looking to protect their investments), states have no reason to begin or continue their herbal cannabis programs.  Next thing you know, the “medical marijuana era” is a relic of the history books, “crude” marijuana is rejected, and those who grow it are busted just like now (remember, possession and manufacture of an unauthorized Schedule II substance can get you in as much trouble as Schedule I.)

Related posts

• While gov’t lies about pot… (0)

Joss Stone: “I smoke cannabis, but I don’t think it’s really a drug. It’s more of a herb. I don’t regret saying that at all.”

(Celebrity Health & Fitness) Joss Stone, the UK singer, who rose to fame at 16 because of her sultry, blues-inflected voice, is determined to live a rock star life. She openly admits she smokes marijuana and says she is likely to “dabble” in other illegal drugs because they look like “fun.” Is she high, or just crazy?

Stone said cannabis is less harmful than alcohol, and while she acknowledged that drugs are horrible, she said the also sound like “fun.”

“I might dabble now and then,” she declared. “I smoke cannabis, but I don’t think it’s really a drug. It’s more of a herb. I don’t regret saying that at all.”

First, if you haven’t heard Joss Stone sing, do yourself a favor and find one of her tracks.  I first heard her when she was hitting at age 16 but it wasn’t until I saw her on Austin City Limits with Michael McDonald that I realized she wasn’t an African-American woman singing in an old black church’s choir since the age of 3 like I’d suspected, but she was some white teenage British girl!

Now I have even more reason to like her.

Plus, let’s not get too outraged over her saying that she might dabble with drugs.  She’s telling one of the secrets about hard drugs they never tell you in school: they are fun.  Why do you think people do them?  There are people who have taken all manner of drugs, enjoyed their experiences, and didn’t become addicts.  There are also people who have played Russian Roulette and not shot themselves in the skull.  Drugs themselves aren’t bad; to quote Clapton, “it’s in the way that you use it”.

Some will read this and think I’m encouraging hard drug use.  Nope.  Neither encouraging or discouraging, I’m just telling it like it is.  Drugs are fun… until they stop becoming fun anymore.  That’s why I prefer cannabis.  Nineteen years with Mary Jane and she’s still fun.

Related posts

• Stash for Wed, Nov 11, 2009 (0)

We all know Judge Jim Gray is a powerful advocate for ending marijuana prohibition.  We all know David Evans is a rabid prohibitionist.  Let’s just skip to the fun parts and give you the bullet points from David Evans’ reefer madness:

(CBS News) David Evans: We cannot legalize marijuana because…

• Marijuana is far more powerful today than it was years ago… [Yes, because prohibition forces illegal producers to make the most potent product.]
• …it serves as an entry point for the use of other illegal drugs. This is known as the “gateway effect.”… [There is no "gateway effect", Institute of Medicine debunked that a decade ago and every serious study since has agreed.]
• Higher potency marijuana may be contributing to a substantial increase in the number of American teenagers in treatment for marijuana dependence…. [No, that's because of drug courts that sentence marijuana users to rehab.]
• Drug legalization advocates claim that marijuana is less dangerous than drugs like alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. However, studies … show that marijuana is not harmless but that it is toxic and addictive.  [Marijuana is notably non-toxic to healthy cells and organs and is not even as addictive as coffee.]
• The legalizers claim that as legalized drugs become less expensive, people will no longer need to commit crimes in order to pay for their drug use. The problem with this claim is that some drugs are already inexpensive. Marijuana, the most abused and addictive drug for young people, is very inexpensive….  [Really, you consider $10-$15/gram inexpensive for a young person?]
• Even supporters of drug legalization admit that “low prices would encourage use.” A good example of this is [crack] cocaine. … Higher levels of drug use cause increased crime, especially property crime to pay for the drugs.  [Wasn't this a discussion about marijuana?  So, then, you're saying the people who'd rob someone for money for that $400 ounce now will rob more people for that $40 ounce in the future?]
• Drug users, many of whom are unable to hold jobs, commit robberies and other crimes not only to obtain drugs, but also to purchase food, shelter, clothing and other goods and services. Even if drugs were legalized, addicts will still need to pay the rent and may resort to crime to do so.  [Uh, if marijuana is legal, marijuana users can keep their jobs or find new ones without being discriminated against for the metabolites in their urine.]
• …most violent drug related crime is committed because people are under the influence of drugs. The use of drugs changes behavior and causes criminal activity because people will do things they wouldn’t do if they were rational and free of the drug’s influence…. Cocaine-related paranoia is an example.  [Again with the cocaine!  Please, what crimes are being committed by people under the influence of marijuana, except for noodling too long on a guitar solo or not sharing the bag of Doritos?]
• If legalizing drugs will increase drug use, then drugged driving will also likely increase. Many studies show a clear correlation between drug use and motor vehicle accidents, trauma, and dangerous driving….  [If legalizing marijuana causes more people to choose it instead of alcohol, we'll have less dangerous driving!]
• Pot use among Dutch kids was very low before they “decriminalized” pot. It was about 5%. It is now approaching US levels but is still lower than the US. It has risen substantially due to the more relaxed attitude….  [Pot use among adults and teens in the Netherlands is half what it is in the US.]
• Your comment that increased pot use will not lead to more addiction is preposterous…. This argument does not work when we consider that drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and marijuana are dangerous and highly addictive.  [Cocaine and heroin are dangerous and highly addictive.  Can we please stick to talking about pot?]
• [Prohibition] keeps potential drug users from using drugs by virtue of the fear of arrest and the embarrassment of being caught.  [Right, all 22 million of us who will smoke this year are terrified, but it's not stopping us from using cannabis.]
• [Prohibition] helps drug users/addicts into treatment through the use of laws and drug courts that offer treatment as an alternative to incarceration.  [Helps drug rehabs, you mean, by providing them unaddicted people forced into rehab by courts.  Over one third of those attending marijuana rehab haven't even used cannabis in the past thirty days!]

Some other points to notice from Mr. Evans’ rants:

• He insists on calling us “legalizers”.  I call Evans a “prohibitionist” because he supports continuing the status quo of prohibition.  But to say that we support “legalization” of drugs is not semantically correct.  A “legalized” drug, as Judge Gray points out, would be something like aspirin, a substance that has no restrictions on marketing, age of use, sales, manufacture, and purchase.  We don’t call for that, we call for sensible regulations on marijuana not unlike alcohol and tobacco.  It would be more accurate to call us “regulators”.
• He must always bring drugs into the discussion – cocaine, heroin, and meth – because a discussion of the dangers of marijuana use alone doesn’t scare people anymore.
• He continues to harp on the negative consequences of drug use while ignoring the demonstrable consequences of drug money, which include corruption, violence, and terrorism.

There will be a part two to this debate on CBS News website tomorrow.

Related posts

• Violence in Mexico – It’s the prohibition, stupid! (1)
• The complete CBS News Poll on Legalization (2)
• Subtle ways the mainstream media undermines the medical marijuana issue (2)

(Guardian UK) “I first took coke when I was 18 and at university. I remember two friends who did chemistry told me I should get really drunk first because it would mix into this new chemical in my blood and make me even higher,” a 30-year-old woman who works in publishing told the Observer yesterday.

What her friends did not tell her is that the combination of cocaine and alcohol in her then teenage body will have left a highly toxic chemical in her liver called cocaethylene.

For not only is cocaethylene toxic in the liver, it is also blamed for heart attacks in the under-40s and a surge in social problems. But because so little is known about the drug, few experts can agree on the nature of the threat to users, and indeed society as a whole.

Cocaine-related deaths are also increasing in the US. The US National Household Drug Survey estimated that around five million people used alcohol and cocaine each month.

Yes, but five million people also realize that they can have a great Friday or Saturday night out on the town, dancing and drinking til the wee morning hours, with a bump of coke every now and then, sleep it off Sunday, and unless their workplace random drug testing pops them early on Monday morning, they can probably pass a urine screen.

But if 14 million people wanted to have a fun weekend with a toke of a natural, herbal social relaxant shared communally among friends, knowing it is non-toxic to their liver and far safer to themselves and society than alcohol or cocaine or mixing the two, a workplace random drug test anytime in the next week to a month means chugging nasty-tasting body flushes and water or mixing up freeze-dried urine, strapping it to their thighs along with a chemical hand warmer and maybe even wearing a prosthetic penis to be certain they can beat the pee test and continue to pay their mortgages and feed their families.

Related posts

• Why I’m Standing Up Against Random Drug Testing at My High School (3)
• Stash for Mon, Nov 9, 2009 (0)
• Health Risks of Marijuana Still Not Nailed Down… really? (4)

Check out the thirty-minute interview with our Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske, on National Public Radio.  What’s telling to me isn’t the Drug Czar’s typical lies and spin, but that every single caller to the program but one was so intelligently disagreeing with him.  Here’s a sample:

MARY (Caller): Good afternoon. I wanted to just pass on, as someone who is a social worker, who’s in the field, I work with both the homeless population, as well as people in both active addiction and in recovery and have seen what hard drugs have done and the damage that they have done to the lives of any number of my clients. Having said that, and having seen that, I think we really must look at the way we’re handling marijuana in this country. A lot of the clients that I have dealt with, the repercussions from them have not been from the use of the drug. It has been from the illegality of the drug. It exposes them to criminal elements they wouldn’t otherwise have been around. It exposes them to harder drugs they wouldn’t ordinarily have been around. And I think if we continue to handle it the way we handle it, we’re just – we’re not going to make any progress on any of it unless we really sit back and, as a country, go, okay, what’s the primary concern here?

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

Related posts

• NPR piece on “pot-friendly California” quotes reefer-mad DEA agent (4)
• National Public Radio: What if marijuana were legal? (1)
• We don’t say it is a “War on Drugs” anymore… we just write it on posters (1)

(New Scientist) IF THERE is one thing that politicians can and should do to limit the damage caused by illegal drugs, it is to take careful note of the evidence and develop a rational drug policy. Some politicians find it easier to ignore the evidence, and pander to public prejudice instead.

I can trace the beginning of the end of my role as chairman of the UK’s official advisory body on drugs to the moment I quoted a New Scientist editorial (14 February, p 5). Entitled, fittingly enough, “Drugs drive politicians out of their minds”, the editorial asked the reader to imagine being seated at a table with two bowls, one containing peanuts, the other the illegal drug MDMA (ecstasy). Which is safer to give to a stranger? Why, the ecstasy of course.

I quoted these words in the Eve Saville lecture at King’s College London in July. This example plus other comments I have made – such as horse riding is more harmful than ecstasy – prompted Alan Johnson, the home secretary, to say that I had crossed the line from science to policy. This, he said, is why I had to go.

But simple, accurate and understandable statements of scientific fact are precisely what the advisory council is supposed to provide. Why would any scientist take up some future offer of a government advisory post when their advice can be treated with such disdain?

The results of a government inventing its own reality and acting on it can be seen in the appalling consequences the George W. Bush presidency had for world peace, the environment and human rights. The message for the British government is a simple one: don’t exclude rational argument in order to exploit a visceral public response. Politicians have to win the hearts and minds of their electorate. If your policy is informed by an underlying moral imperative, be open about what that is, and don’t try to disguise it with a veneer of pseudo-science. We ignore scientific evidence at our peril.

David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, was chairman of the UK government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs until he was dismissed last week by the UK home secretary

It’s a message President Obama needs to hear as well.  He promised to return us from the George W. Bush presidency’s disdain for rational thought and scientific evidence.  Obama promised to base our policies on sound science with respect to global climate change and other issues.  But stubbornly, this administration’s drug czar is still out parroting the completely unscientific falsehood that “the raw cannabis plant is certainly not medicine”.  Obama himself is laughing off the notion of marijuana legalization as having any economic benefit to cash-strapped states, despite the rational analysis by many prominent economists.  And despite the evidence of reduced social farms in the Netherlands, Portugal, and other countries that have experimented with drug decriminalization and tolerance, Obama continues to push a federal policy that relies heavily on interdiction and incarceration.

For over a century now, every time hard scientists, social scientists, economists, and policy experts gather to take a rational and scientific look at marijuana policy, they recommend decriminalization and tolerance or they recognize medical usage of cannabis, from the 1894 British East India survey to the 1942 Laguardia Commission to the 1972 Shaffer Commission to the 1999 Institute of Medicine study.  Cannabis can no longer be the exception to the “we believe in science” rule!

Related posts

• Former Drug Czar Walters: “medical marijuana is an utter fraud” and “dispensaries of California fund the mafias of Mexico” (2)
• Ted Nugent wants to be Drug Czar. Seriously. (7)
• Stash for Tue, Aug 18, 2009 (0)

The folks who follow the big money at CBS MarketWatch can see the handwriting on the wall – there is too much money going underground in the War on Drugs that corporate America is missing out on:

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Mexican drug lord “El Chapo” made the Forbes list of billionaires earlier this year. No, you can’t make this stuff up: He runs the Sinaloa cartel, a major supplier of cocaine to the United States. He’s an assassin, another bin Laden … and Forbes honors him right up there with the world billionaires.

Psychologist Anne Wilson Schaef saw the trend coming a couple decades ago: We’re a “Nation of addicts … our society is deteriorating at an alarming rate.” Why? We refuse to face the real problem: Demand. Legalizing it will.

Till then we’re losing the war. In a “nation of addicts” it doesn’t matter if drugs are legal or not … where the drugs come from … who gets hurt … nor if we have to waste hundreds of billions fighting ineffective wars to protect suppliers … a corrupt Afghan government, the source of 95% of the world’s heroin … or Mexico, the main traffic route for wholesalers feeding America’s addicts … or Big Pharma the biggest pusher for prescription drug addicts. When a “nation of addicts” needs a fix, they always find it.

Seriously, drugs are a megabusiness. America spends about $2.5 trillion on health care annually — including $315 billion in Big Pharma revenues last year. They must be secretly exploring the untapped market in illicit drug traffic that siphons off an estimated $400 billion annually — plus keep in mind another $175 billion on alcohol addiction.

If Big Pharma can capture part of the market share that’s now going to competing Mexican and Afghan drug warlords, then they can feed their shareholders addiction to earnings, feed their CEOs’ addiction for megamillion paychecks, while capitalizing on the American addicts need for a fix. We just need to end our moralistic charade, decriminalize and control all illicit drugs.

The truth is, there’s no war on drugs to win, nor to lose, just millions of addicts who need help. I’ve been in recovery 36 years. Back in the ’80s I worked professionally with hundreds who went through places like Betty Ford Center. Statistics show that over 10% of Americans are physiologically predisposed to addictive behavior. That will never change. It’s in our DNA.

Given that painful reality, Big Pharma should wise up and get ahead of the legalization trend. Lead it. If Big Pharma capitalizes on their unique experience, they can capture new products and new markets driven by the relentless demand for a fix. Lead in the development of a new national policy shifting away from military action to treatment, decriminalization and regulation, generate new sources of tax revenues, and help millions of addicted Americans.

Big Pharma is already on that trend, examining different ways of synthesizing the therapeutically-active cannabinoids in marijuana in pill, spray, lozenge, and inhaler form.  The problem for Big Pharma is that their bar-coded, marked-up, highly-profitable cannabis drugs can’t compete with the raw cannabis plant itself.  They need a system wherein raw plant cannabis is prohibited, but synthesized cannabinoid extracts are allowed.  This would be somewhat like a cookie maker requiring a law that chocolate chip cookie dough is illegal, but a box of Chips Ahoy is not.

Furthermore, Big Pharma is also aware of reports from medical marijuana patients around the country who’ve found they can cut their need for prescription opioids and benzodiazepenes in half by using natural raw cannabis.  Big Pharma can’t have a free plant competing with their cannabinoid drugs and reducing demand for their other products!

Related posts

• The Benefits of Medical Cannabis (chart) (1)
• Stash for Wed, Nov 4, 2009 (0)
• Stash for Thu, Apr 9, 2009 (0)

In a two-part article called, “Why I Give My 9-Year-Old Pot”, writer and parent Marie Myung-Ok Lee talks about using cannabis as a therapy to treat her nine-year-old son’s pain, irritable bowel, and other effects from his autism.  You should really read Part One and Part Two in full, but I will just give you some snippets of the positive responses this little boy named “J.” has experienced from medical marijuana:

My son J has autism. He’s also had two serious surgeries for a spinal cord tumor and has an inflammatory bowel condition, all of which may be causing him pain, if he could tell us.

We made the cookies with the marijuana olive oil, starting J off with half a small cookie, eaten after dinner. J normally goes to bed around 7:30 p.m.; by 6:30 he declared he was tired and conked out. We checked on him hourly. As we anxiously peeked in, half-expecting some red-eyed ogre from Reefer Madness to come leaping out at us, we saw instead that he was sleeping peacefully. Usually, his sleep is shallow and restless. J also woke up happy.

[S]ince we started him on his “special tea,” J’s little face, which is sometimes a mask of pain, has softened. He smiles more.

[My mother] remarked that J seems calmer. As we were preparing for a trip to the park, J disappeared, and we wondered if he was going to throw one of his tantrums. Instead, he returned with Grandma’s shoes, laying them in front of her, even carefully adjusting them so that they were parallel and easy to step into. He looked into her face, and smiled.

Pre-pot, J. ate things that weren’t food. There’s a name for this: pica. … His pica become so uncontrollable we couldn’t let him sleep with a pajama top (it would be gone by morning) or a pillow (ditto the case and the stuffing)…. The worst part was watching him scream in pain on the toilet, when what went in had to come out. I had nightmares about long threads knotting in digestive organs. (TMI? Welcome to our life!)

Almost immediately after we started the cannabis, the pica stopped. Just stopped. J. now sleeps with his organic wool-and-cotton, hypoallergenic, temptingly chewable comforter. He pulls it up to his chin at night and declares, “I’m cozy!”

Next, we started seeing changes in J.’s school reports. … At one parent meeting in August (J. is on an extended school year), his teacher excitedly presented his June-July “aggression” chart. An aggression is defined as any attempt or instance of hitting, kicking, biting, or pinching another person. For the past year, he’d consistently had 30 to 50 aggressions in a school day, with a one-time high of 300. The charts for June through July, by contrast, showed he was actually having days—sometimes one after another—with zero aggressions.

When J. was in his dark phase, we spent our time out of sight, out of mind, inside our house with a screeching, violent, food-and-dish-flinging J. The sounds were contained by double-paned windows (when they weren’t broken). Now, within our family, we’ve reached a lovely homeostasis: household goods unbroken, our arms and J.’s face unscratched.

Fortunately for Marie, she lives in Rhode Island, one of the thirteen states that allow parents to use this non-toxic therapeutically active herb for their severely ill child.  Marie also tells of her life with J. prior to cannabis and how doctors were quick to prescribe Risperdal (”Thorazine for kids”, she calls it,) a drug that has never been studied for long-term safety in children and has a list of nasty side effects.  Almost a quarter million children under age 12 were prescribed Risperdal last year and from 2000-2004, 45 children died from it and five other popular “atypical antipsychotics”.  Fortunately for J., his mother and his doctor chose a much safer and more effective alternative in cannabis.

Related posts

• The Top Five States with Most Marijuana Use (7)
• Texas man gets 7 years for child pot-smoking videotape (0)
• Support Rhode Island SB 185 / HB 5359 (medmj compassion centers) (0)

Hey, any time more than half of Americans think something good about marijuana, we're happy.

…but 44% think marijuana is equally as dangerous or more dangerous than alcohol!

Fifty-one percent (51%) of American adults say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 19% disagree and say pot is worse.

But 25% say both are equally dangerous. Just two percent (2%) say neither is dangerous.

Younger adults are more likely than their elders to view alcohol as the more dangerous of the two.

Unmarried adults are more critical of alcohol than those who are married. Those with children at home think alcohol is more dangerous than those without kids living with them.

This finding surprised me, as I figured parents with kids at home would be more likely to succumb to reefer madness hysteria.  Is it really possible that a majority of parents would rather catch their kid smoking a joint than drinking a beer?

As California looks for solutions to its ongoing budget problems, 47% of voters in the state say marijuana should be legalized and taxed. Nearly as many (42%) oppose the state legalizing and taxing the drug.

Nationally, 41% of likely voters think the United States should legalize and tax marijuana, but 49% are opposed.

President Obama’s new drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has signaled a shift away from the decades-old war on drugs toward more emphasis on health treatment for drug users. However, 54% of voters say illegal drug use is primarily a criminal justice issue rather than a matter of public health.

This I would attribute to the other illegal drugs and the tendency of their users to commit more crimes.  I’d like to see the question narrowed down to just marijuana use; is it an issue of public health or criminal justice?

Only 28% of voters believe that the legalization of marijuana in the United States would help to reduce drug-related violence in Mexico.

This number shows that we haven’t done a good enough job educating people about the contribution of marijuana to the profits of the Mexican cartels.  Even with Arizona’s attorney general and others estimating 60%-70% of cartel profits stem from marijuana trafficking, it seems the people haven’t gotten the word.  They also may believe that even if we did dry up their major funding source through marijuana legalization that the cartels would just shift their profits and violence to controlling the trafficking of hard drugs.  Nobody ever stops to consider how the cartels are going to magically create millions of new American cocaine and heroin users to make up for the loss of marijuana business, especially when marijuana users would have greater access to a better product under legalization.

There is a reason there is no Cocaine Culture or Heroin Times magazines.  Cocaine and heroin use most often are addictions; marijuana use is most often a lifestyle.

Related posts

• Bomb Amazon (metaphorically), buy “Marijuana is Safer” TODAY (13)
• University of Arkansas Students Seek Sensible Drug Policy (4)
• The Top Five States with Most Marijuana Use (7)

We reported last week on the new law in Mexico decriminalizing personal possession of drugs. As is often the case, what can look like a great law on first read can have many unintended consequences in actual practice. We received an email from Jorge Hernández Tinajero of the Mexican drug reform organization CUPIHD (Colectivo por una Política Integral Hacia las Drogas) explaining the issue (official news release in English / Spanish):

The new law determines the quantities of drugs allowed to be carried for personal consumption, and it is here where some important concerns arise. First of all, the amounts of drugs permitted (5 grams of marijuana, equivalent approximately to 4 or 5 cigarettes, 0.5 gr. of cocaine, close to four lines, 0.04 g of methamphetamine or ecstasy, maybe 2 pills) are not realistic in terms of the illicit drug market. Cocaine, for example, sells by the gram on the streets. Also, these quantities are not realistic in terms of what a user actually consumes. In comparison, Paraguay for example allows 2 grams of cocaine for personal consumption, four times as much as Mexico.

Establishing such low thresholds can be dangerous because it can become a way to improperly categorize a large number of users as traffickers. Under the new Mexican law, a person is considered a small scale trafficker if caught with more drugs than the quantities allowed, with sentences from 4 to 10 years if they have the “intent to sell”. It remains unknown how this intent will be determined or proven, opening up the door to extortion and increasing the possibility of corruption of both police and the judicial power, already a significant problem in Mexico. The risk of corruption and extortion is now even greater because the new law allows local and state institutions to pursue, prosecute and sanction small level trafficking
—something that was limited before to the federal level. It is a this local level where corruption and inefficiency is greatest and where reforms have not been implemented.

Worse, even when the intent to sell cannot be proven, users found with quantities of drugs greater than those allowed can receive a sentence of up to three years in jail, an increase from before the law was passed. The new law now establishes these quantities of drugs as the determining factor to distinguish between a user and a trafficker. For these reasons, this law runs the risk of criminalizing a vast group of users, as well as those who make a living off the small-scale dealing but who in reality are not part of the organized crime networks. Imprisoning these users and dealers will not diminish the supply of drugs on the street, nor will it improve Mexico’s current public security situation and overwhelming violence. It will however allow the government to justify its current strategies against organized crime by boasting about the number of people incarcerated, but in reality worsen Mexico’s already serious prison overpopulation problem.

Marijuana on the street is usually sold in eighths, which is 3.5 grams (if your dealer’s honest), so the 5g limit for personal possession seems reasonable.  However, as Jorge points out, many people who are mere personal users will have more than 5 grams and low-level dealers are more than likely to carry more than that.  This new law is supposed to put the focus on the high level traffickers, but they have the bribe money to avoid prosecution, so once again the low-level dealer and unlucky who possess more than a “personal” amount will be the true targets

Decriminalization of personal amounts is a step in the right direction, but only under legalization will the problems at both the low-level personal-use/dealing range and the high-level murderous and corrupting cartels range be solved.

Related posts

• Will you enlist in the war to end adult marijuana prohibition? (15)
• Violence in Mexico – It’s the prohibition, stupid! (1)
• Vicious drug turf war turns Mexican border town of Tijuana into a killing zone (1)