Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 1:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
The Christian Science Monitor’s editorial board is weighing in on the increasingly popular issue of marijuana legalization with an editorial they call “Legalize marijuana? Not so fast.” and a veritable who’s-who parade of reefer mad prohibitionists:
A harmless drug? Supporters of legalization often claim that no one has died of a pot overdose, and that it has beneficial effects in alleviating suffering from certain diseases.
True, marijuana cannot directly kill its user in the way that alcohol or a drug like heroin can. And activists claim that it may ease symptoms for certain patients – though it has not been endorsed by the major medical associations representing those patients, and the Food and Drug Administration disputes its value.
The AMA is in the back pocket of Big Pharma; they’re not going to endorse a product that cuts by at least half the need for opioids, benzodiazepenes, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. There are plenty of major medical associations that endorse medical marijuana, including the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Student Association, and the American Nurses Association. Also, the FDA doesn’t dispute marijuana’s value; it merely has never approved marijuana, and the government, through FDA, DEA, and NIDA, have opposed all efforts to actually put marijuana through the approval process, which we all know it would sail through.
Rosalie Pacula, codirector of the Rand Drug Policy Research Center, poses this question: “If pot is relatively harmless, why are we seeing more than 100,000 hospitalizations a year” for marijuana use?
Emergency-room admissions where marijuana is the primary substance involved increased by 164 percent from 1995 to 2002 – faster than for other drugs, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network.
The way Rosalie puts it, you’d think 100,000 people were running into the ER and screaming, “Quick, doctor! I need help! I’ve taken marijuana and I think I’m going to die!” (in four years of doing this, I’ve only heard one such case…)
But the fact is that these DAWN statistics just survey the drugs people admit to using or what is detected in their body when they are admitted to the emergency room. DAWN doesn’t measure the cause of why someone’s in the hospital. If you smoked a joint, went to a restaurant, sat down for dinner and had the server accidentally drop scalding hot coffee in your lap, and you went to the hospital for the burns, and when asked, admitted you had smoked a joint that day, cha-ching, that’s a “marijuana [as] the primary substance involved” in that admission. You might as well say iPods are harmful, because the number of people admitted to hospitals that own an iPod has skyrocketed since 1995.
Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 1:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
Everyone’s talking about marijuana because the public is ready to listen. Last year around 4/20, we had a special promotion we called the “420 Money Bomb”. This was a one-day promotion where on April 20, people can join NORML online for only $4.20. We hyped it quite a bit with a special page and links from High Time and the NORML main page. Last year, we had over 700 new people join online and raised $5,000 in memberships and donations.
This year, we had the Money Bomb available, but didn’t really hype it much. This year, we had twice as many people join NORML on 4/20 and we raised almost $13,000. That’s grassroots interest in action!
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It’s a tempting idea: Legalize and tax a commodity that a lot of people like, collect the revenues, and reap the budgetary benefits. In economic times like these, that might be just the formula we need to pull us out of the red. In this case, the truth does not live up to the hype.
Now how many examples of Reefer Madness do you think Dr. Sabet can fit within 600 words of newspaper type? Read on, dear Stasher, for the answer!
Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 10:25 am | By: Radical Russ
(ABC News) Whether it’s binge drinking or addiction to alcohol, Americans have a real problem with the bottle.
So says new research released Monday, which found that nearly one out of three Americans can expect to have a problem with alcohol at some time during their lives.
“We found that 30.3 percent of the U.S. population at some time in their lives — though maybe not currently — has had an alcohol use disorder,” said study author Bridget Grant of the Division of Biometry and Epidemiology at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
But perhaps most sobering was the fact that few with alcohol problems ever reached out for help.
“What we found was that very few people who have lifetime disorders ever seek treatment,” Grant says, adding that only 24 percent of those suffering from alcohol dependency seek help. The percentage of those seeking treatment for alcohol abuse is even lower, at 7 percent.
Have you considered arresting people for possession, sales, or home-brewing of alcohol? Dr. Kevin Sabet tells me that this is an excellent way of getting people into treatment. ”The activist-phrase ‘treatment over incarceration’ or ‘treatment versus incarceration’ is an accepted term within the drug policy discourse,” Dr. Sabet writes regarding the 1000% increase in marijuana treatment admissions in New York City, coinciding with Mayor Guiliani’s crackdown on marijuana smokers. “Indeed, this paper suggests that law enforcement intensity may be one of many different activities that could increase treatment entry.”
If it works so well with pot smokers why wouldn’t you apply the prohibit-arrest-sentence-to-treatment model to alcohol users, who are getting into domestic abuse problems, impaired driving problems, and aggressiveness problems unlike cannabis users? Oh, yeah, because we tried that in the 1920s and it didn’t work.
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 10:24 am | By: Radical Russ
A new study looks at the increased arrest of marijuana smokers in New York City and the increase in marijuana smokers seeking treatment, and comes to a conclusion only a hardened drug warrior like Dr. Kevin Sabet could make:
In the mid-late 1990s Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Chief William Bratton focused on arresting and detaining people for crimes that contributed to a lower “quality-of-life” in New York City. This aggressive arrest policy (AAP) resulted in a record growth in marijuana arrests. In 1992, the number of marijuana arrests was around 5,000. By 2000, the arrest rate hit an all-time high of about 60,000 (the large majority of which were for misdemeanor arrests in both years). Through a triangulation of data sources, including the Uniform Crime Reports and the Treatment Episode Data Set from 1992 to 2003, and other published accounts, this paper shows that entries into treatment for marijuana dramatically increased in New York City at the same time as misdemeanor and felony arrests for marijuana also rose.
Good so far, right? Matches up nicely with that graph there showing that 1992-2000, marijuana arrests increased 1000% and so did court referrals for marijuana “treatment”. After 9/11 as arrests declined, referrals began to decline. Shows what we’ve been saying for a while now, that few people actually seek professional drug rehab for marijuana alone; most are forced into it after being arrested for marijuana possession.
Well, not to Dr. Kevin Sabet:
While it is unclear if these arrests caused the treatment increase (vis-à-vis criminal justice referral programs), the presence of these two phenomena show that policy regimes of increased treatment and increased law enforcement actions can co-exist. The oft-heard phrase “treatment versus law enforcement” may represent a false dichotomy in drug policy analysis.
Unclear?!? You think 1000% more pot smokers just up and decided they were marijuana “addicts” and voluntarily sought treatment? Could this paper get any sillier? (Yes. Yes it can.)
RevRayGreen: I'll post a pic of me and my son....gimme a minute
Missippi Hippy: Guess what... I'm gonna be a new... ummmmm well, my pet piggie Ganja is in labor and they ain't mine in the same sense. See what your wife [...]
RevRayGreen: days they didn't talk back..or act disrespectful..
RevRayGreen: feel so lucky my son is 18 going 19 and my daughter 16 going on 17..relish the days that can't talk back
Urb Age: Congrats Spof thats awesome. My little Clara is about to hit 20 months. Im not the activist I used to be, but its made me a better man.
Urb Age: Heck I was gonna go up there, but just not feeling well this weekend..Dang it, I hate it when that happens..
RevRayGreen: wishing I was hanging at NORML cafe...
JohnH: Just a quick comment about tokin' and sperm motility....been tokin since age 14 and have 8 kids ranging in age from 30 to 9...(what can I say, I found 2 [...]
slash5city: really ..oprah 35 yr or more in the closet toker ...outed ....o my god !!
SneakerPimp: that would be huge news just imagen the headline
Marijuana-Related Health Costs Minimal Compared To Those Of Alcohol, Tobacco; California Medical Association Says Pot Prohibition Is A "Failed Public Health Policy"; Oregon: State NORML Affiliate Opens First 'Cannabis Café'. […]
American Medical Association Calls For Scientific Review Of Marijuana's Prohibitive Status; Dutch Marijuana Use Lower Than European Average, Study Says […]
"Truth In Trials Act" Reintroduced In Congress; Maine: Voters Approve Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Measure; Colorado: Breckenridge Voters Overwhelmingly Decide To End Pot Penalties. […]
Some of the nation’s top athletes discuss why today's pros are turning to cannabis — and away from alcohol and painkillers — off the field, and question why pro sports leagues are continuing to sanction those who do. Moderator: Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com * Toby Grear, MMA fighter * Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmm […]
Cannabis Law Reform's Missing Link: Law Enforcement Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper; LEAP and NORML Advisory Board; Author of Breaking Rank Putting the Mexican Cartels Out of Business Mexican drug cartels now employ over 100,000 soldiers and are responsible for nearly ten thousand deaths per year. Their largest source of income is marijuana. […]
Christian Science Monitor’s Reefer Madness
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