When one of your cities has more Drug War murders than California, it refocuses your attention on ending the Drug War

The marijuana internets are abuzz with the latest headline about world leaders declaring the War on Drugs to be a failure and calling for the legalization of marijuana. Here are a few:

World Leaders: Time to End Marijuana Prohibition

Who’s Who of World Leaders Call Global Drug War a “Failure”

World Leaders Recommend Ending The ‘Failed’ Drug War

These headlines cover the report released by the Global Commission on Drug Policy yesterday.  However, I think the preceding headlines fail to make an important distinction, one that was not lost on the editors at NPR (emphasis mine):

‘Global War On Drugs Has Failed,’ Former World Leaders Say

MEMBERS OF THE GLOBAL COMMISSION ON DRUG POLICY

– Asma Jahangir; human rights activist, former U.N. Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary, Extrajudicial and Summary Executions; Pakistan.
– Carlos Fuentes; writer; Mexico.
– Cesar Gaviria; former president of Colombia.
– Ernesto Zedillo; former president of Mexico.
– Fernando Henrique Cardoso; former president of Brazil.
– George Papandreou; Prime Minister of Greece. [The exception that proves the rule? --"R"R]
– George Shultz; former secretary of state.
– Javier Solana; former European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy; Spain.
– John Whitehead; banker and civil servant, chair of the World Trade Center Memorial; United States.
– Kofi Annan; former secretary general of the United Nations.
– Louise Arbour; former U.N. high commissioner for human rights; Canada.
– Maria Cattaui; member of the board, Petroplus Holdings; former secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce; Switzerland.
– Marion Caspers-Merk; former state secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Health, Germany.
– Mario Vargas Llosa; writer; Peru.
– Michel Kazatchkine; executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; France.
– Paul Volcker; former chairman of the Federal Reserve.
– Richard Branson; entrepreneur; founder of the Virgin Group; U.K.
– Ruth Dreifuss- former president of Switzerland.
– Thorvald Stoltenberg; former minister of foreign affairs and U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees; Norway.

It’s rarely current world leaders expressing these sentiments.  They seem to only speak out after they are out of office and lacking the power to help end that “failure”.  I’ve been reporting on the “former leaders” who call for an end to the Drug War since 2008:

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox calls for debate on marijuana legalization

Latin American ex-presidents urge US to decriminalize marijuana, rethink drug war

Former UK Drug Warrior: “What harms society is the illegality of drugs…”

Fortunately a few brave leaders speak out while they are still in office:

Argentine president calls for decriminalization of drug use

Jamaica lawmaker calls for legalizing small amounts of marijuana for private use

And when they succeed in decriminalization of drug use, they get amazing results:

United Nations backs drug decriminalization

The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal

The report itself makes many of the same recommendations NORML has been touting for four decades now.  The former world leaders recommend that we stop ”the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others.”  They point out that “models of legal regulation of drugs” should be instituted by governments to reduce the power of organized crime and protect the health of citizens and that this “applies especially to cannabis.”  They explain that a realistic government drug policy would avoid “simplistic ‘just say no’ messages and ‘zero tolerance’ policies in favor of educational efforts”.  It’s nice to finally have world leaders, even former ones, recognizing we were and are right.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Unfortunately, it’s the current ones – the ones who have the power to make these changes – we have to convince… and they’re not budging from their “Schedule I dangerous drug what about the children?!?” rhetoric:

(Los Angeles Times) ”Making drugs more available — as this report suggests — will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe,” said Rafael Lemaitre, spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

More available?  Almost 1 in 4  high school kids can get a bag of weed within an hour and say it’s easier to buy than beer and prescription drugs.  Twenty-five million American adults are using cannabis annually and fifteen million use monthly.  Marijuana is already quite available, it’s just a question of who controls and profits from the market – regulated businesses or violent criminals.

“Legalizing dangerous drugs would be a profound mistake, leading to more use, and more harmful consequences,” drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said this year.

Administration officials dispute the idea that nothing can be done to reduce the demand for drugs in the United States. A spokesman for the White House drug agency said U.S. consumption peaked in 1979, when surveys showed that 14% of respondents had used illegal drugs in the previous month. Now that figure has dropped to 7%.

Remember that when Gateway Gil says “drugs”, he means “marijuana”.  Among 12th graders, monthly use of marijuana peaked in 1978, but amphetamines peaked in 1981, cocaine use peaked in 1985, ecstasy use peaked in 2000, hallucinogen use peaked in 1975, heroin use peaked in 2000, and sedative use peaked in 1975.  Since marijuana is far more popular (15 million annual users) than all other drugs combined (6 million annual users), any movement of the marijuana numbers moves the “drugs” numbers.

And since he brought it up, I’d remind Gateway Gil that his claim of that monthly drug use dropped in half since 1979 came as sixteen states passed medical marijuana laws and two states decriminalized marijuana possession.  Your predecessors warned us that if we legalized marijuana, even in those very specific and limited ways, it would be a profound mistake, leading to more use, and more harmful consequences.  It’s understandable, since you and your predecessors are bound by law to oppose any move toward legalization, so you can understand when we completely ignore your Chicken Little warnings about legalization.

examiner Federal agents beefed up by local law enforcement personnel raided two West Hollywood medical marijuana dispensaries on Tuesday, arresting one person.

The agents, along with Los Angeles Police Department officers and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies, raided Alternative Herbal Health Services and Zen Healing on Santa Monica Boulevard around 2:10 p.m., the Los Angeles Times reported. The two dispensaries are among four West Hollywood has allowed to operate.  Sarah Pullen of the Drug Enforcement Administration declined to tell the Times what led to the raids, what was seized or who was in custody.

The last DEA raid in West Hollywood was in 2007, The Times reported.

In 2009, The U.S. Justice Department said it would not investigate dispensaries that observe California law, even though federal law continues to bar marijuana use.

Yup, that Holder memo has a huge loophole.  It said they wouldn’t prosecute those dispensaries operating in “clear and unambiguous compliance” with state law.  Well, nothing about California’s medical marijuana is “clear and unambiguous” when it comes to storefront sales.

But it certainly goes against the interpretation many had about that memo in the context of President Obama’s responses to the question of medical marijuana raids while running for office.  He said “I’m not going to be doing is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue simply because I want folks to be investigating violent crimes and potential terrorism. We’ve got a lot of things for our law enforcement officers to deal with.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Apparently all the violent crimes and potential terrorism have been taken care of.

(Los Angeles Times) It’s difficult to raise the topic of marijuana usage in America today without somehow touching off intense debate over whether this relatively mild, but still harmful drug should be decriminalized, even fully legalized. That’s how much the pro-pot crowd has hijacked the national conversation over the nation’s ongoing struggle with drug use.

That’s how Nicole Brochu opens her column, originally published in the Sun Sentinel, entitled “Bid to legalize marijuana all smoke and mirrors“.  I’m still left wondering how we “hijacked the national conversation” when she’s the one whose column is appearing in 725,000 copies of the Los Angeles Times and another 225,000 copies of the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel.  The reefer mad mainstream media columnist with almost a million readers complaining that we’re dominating the conversation reminds me of the drug czar with a $421 million annual budget complaining about the “well-funded pro-legalization forces“.

“Hijacked” in this sense means “told the public the truth”.  Isn’t it remarkable how the national conversation leans toward legalization when people know cannabis doesn’t lead to heroin, doesn’t cause cancer, doesn’t cause lung disease, doesn’t make you stupid, doesn’t get you addicted, and doesn’t make your girlfriend leave you for an alien.

Exhibit A: an opinion piece posted in this space earlier this week by a drug treatment psychologist bemoaning a national spike in teen pot smoking and attributing it largely to society’s growing tolerance of marijuana use.

Folks, this is not an outrageous assertion. In fact, in figures released Wednesday, the University of Michigan‘s Monitoring the Future — the largest survey on teen drug abuse polling more than 46,000 8th, 10th and 12th graders — found that teens’ exposure to anti-drug messages has nosedived over the past seven years. This at a time when teens also reported finding such messages actually work.

That’s stretching it.  What the report found is that “Between 2003 and today, the proportion of 8th, 10th, 12th graders that agreed ‘the commercials made them, to a great extent, less favorable toward drugs’ remained fairly stable.”  There is less of the ONDCP’s anti-marijuana propaganda on television, because in 2006, the Government Accountability Office found that “Between 1998 and 2004, Congress appropriated over $1.2 billion to the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign” and that ”the campaign was not effective in reducing youth drug use, either during the entire period of the campaign or during the period from 2002 to 2004 when the campaign was redirected and focused on marijuana use.”

So kids today have the same reaction to the ineffective anti-pot commercials that they had in 2003.

Perhaps it’s not all that irrelevant then that, after a decade’s decline in pot-smoking, the same study also saw a spike in marijuana usage among teens last year, with more high school seniors lighting up joints than cigarettes.

The same percentage of high school seniors smoke pot each month in 2010 as they did in 2003.

Yet back in 2003, before “teens’ exposure to anti-drug messages has nosedived”, 21.2% of seniors used cannabis monthly.  This year, it’s 21.4%.  In 2006, three years into the nosedive, 18.3% were using monthly – why no column about how less exposure to ads caused teen use to plummet?= back then?

The numbers, and the trend, are not in dispute. What is up for debate, a heated one at that, is what to do about it.

Well, there is quite a dispute about your “trend” regarding cannabis use.  About one in five high school seniors has been using cannabis monthly, a trend that holds true back to 1995.  It’s never fluctuated more than around three percentage points one way or the other (23.7% in 1997, 18.3% in 2006) from today’s 21.4%.

The trend that is impressive is the decline in teen smoking.  In 1995, one in three high school seniors smoked cigarettes monthly, a figure that got as high as 36.5% in 1997.  Now less than one in five (19.2%) of seniors smoke cigarettes.  Yes, “more high school seniors [are] lighting up joints than cigarettes”, but that’s not because more kids smoke pot; it’s because much fewer kids smoke cigarettes.

But to suggest that legalizing marijuana is somehow an answer to society’s drug problems — that regulating its sale and distribution would actually lead to a reduction in usage, especially among youth — defies sober reasoning. Legalization proponents like to point out that the Netherlands, with its liberal drug policy, has a lower drug rate than America’s, but they neglect to tell you the country’s marijuana usage among 18- to 20-year-olds nearly tripled after legalization — at a time when usage among adolescents in the United States decreased steadily, according to the medical journal Pediatrics.

Wait, you mean the increase in 18- to 20-year-old adults choosing to visit 18-and-over legal coffee shops in the Netherlands is your argument that use among 16- to 17-year-old adolescent children will increase?  Especially when any American legalization scheme is likely to adopt an age limit of 21?

I find it funny that in that Pediatrics article you cite, you neglected to include their findings that “decriminalization of marijuana in a number of states from 1975 to 1980 apparently had no effect on high school students’ beliefs and attitudes about marijuana or on their use of the drug during those years.”

Or: “Several territories in Australia have decriminalized use of marijuana. Studies comparing use in these territories with use in those that did not reduce penalties found no appreciable differences in use.”

And why not just tell us what the rate of cannabis use is among Dutch adolescents?  The latest figures I can find from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction says 28% of Dutch youth aged 15- to 16-years old have tried cannabis in their lifetime, 15% used it within the last month, and 49% say it is “easy” or “fairly easy” to acquire cannabis.  In America, those numbers are all greater for 10th graders (14- to 15-years-old) and almost double for 12th graders (16- to 17-years-old).

Putting pot up for sale in convenience stores next to cigarettes and beer will only make it more accessible, and more acceptable, not to mention more affordable, creating more consumers, not less. Youth will be the most vulnerable, if Alaska’s experiment with legalization in the ’70s is any example. The state’s youth started smoking at twice the rate of those nationally, convincing Alaska to recriminalize marijuana in 1990, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

For the reefer mad prohibitionists, it’s either “lock people up for smoking pot” or it’s “pot up for sale in convenience stores next to cigarettes and beer”.  They can accept that “legal drugs” is a broad concept ranging from over-the-counter aspirin to tightly-controlled prescription morphine but for cannabis it has to be buds next to Bud and jazz cigarettes next to the regular ones at the 7-Eleven.  They criticize the Netherlands’ model of adults-only coffee houses without noticing they aren’t exactly convenience stores (in Dutch coffee houses, there are no menus displaying the buds and the prices – you have to push a button to have the menu display so that cannabis is never “passively” advertised.)  They can’t even make the connection to cannabis being vended at state-run or state-controlled adults-only stores like liquor in 19 states.

As for Alaska’s “legalization” (it wasn’t – the Supreme Court of Alaska decided that their constitution protected your privacy to smoke weed in your home – so call it “very limited decriminalization”) I’ve debunked that at length on the Stash.  As I wrote then, if Alaskan teen marijuana use went up from 1975-1979, I wouldn’t be surprised, since teen use of marijuana “skyrocketed” nationwide from 27.1% to 36.5% of high school seniors using marijuana monthly.  That’s an increase of over a third (34.6%), so Alaskan teen use would have to have increased by more than that for Alaskan decriminalization to even be considered as likely a cause as the overall nationwide increase in use.

Alaskans did vote 53%-47% for recriminalization in 1990, when nationwide support for marijuana legalization was at a nadir of 16%.  However, their courts invalidated that recriminalization in 2003 and they’ve had that “very limited decriminalization” since then.  Alaskan teen rates of use continued to decline after 2003′s “legalization” and they continue to roughly parallel the rise and fall in teen rates nationwide.

We’ve seen that with alcohol — ironically, the example legalization proponents keep going back to in pushing for reform. It’s a bad example. Suggesting that age limits will prove more effective than an all-out ban in keeping pot out of teens’ hands ignores the very real problem that alcohol poses for young people today. According to the Monitoring the Future study, alcohol is generally twice as popular among teens as marijuana. Don’t tell me being legal, and more widely available, isn’t instrumental in those statistics. This isn’t a model experiment in legalization we want to duplicate with another recreational substance.

Then why aren’t you pushing for a criminalization of alcohol for adults?  It’s as if prohibitionists understand the disaster that would unfold by criminalizing alcohol and tobacco and they’ve just accepted that those terribly addictive, dangerous, toxic drugs are here to stay, no matter how much they harm the children, because the alternative is criminal gangs, violence, police corruption, inflated prices, and misery for the adults who use will flout the law and use those substances anyway.

Yet that’s the situation they readily accept for dealing with the third most popular substance which is not terribly addictive, dangerous, or toxic.  30,000 slaughtered Mexicans, 850,000 arrested Americans, $15.5 billion in taxpayer dollars, billions more distributed to criminal gangs in over 300 American cities, and 25 million adults will flout that prohibition annually.

And saying pot isn’t as bad as alcohol isn’t by default the ringing endorsement some want to make it. Anyone who says marijuana isn’t harmful is just being dishonest. Studies have shown that long-term marijuana use may shrink parts of the brain and have lasting impacts on mental health.

Wrong.  This study is one I debunked in 2008 that consisted of 15 men who smoked an ounce a week or more.  This would be like supporting alcohol prohibition by noting that guys who drink a twelve-pack a day are likely to get cirrhosis.  Plus, the vast majority of cannabis consumers have nothing to fear about their mental health.

And despite efforts to pooh-pooh its reputation as a gateway drug, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reports that the younger someone is when using marijuana, the more likely he or she is to use other drugs in adulthood. In fact, according to the Center on and Substance Abuse at Columbia, children who use marijuana are 85 times more likely to use cocaine and 17 times more likely to be regular cocaine abusers. The numbers are equally troubling for heroin. (Think that’s why Holland’s heroin addiction rate has tripled since it legalized marijuana?)

No.  Between 1995 and now the monthly rate of heroin use in America has fluctuated between 119,000 and 338,000 users, averaging about 186,000 over that span and equaling about 230,000 now.  Meanwhile, the monthly rate of cannabis use has steadily increased from about 10 million to 15 million Americans.  Children who use alcohol are far more likely to use and abuse cocaine and heroin than those who use cannabis, yet you don’t advocate for alcohol prohibition, which is good because there is no causation in that correlation, either.

Sure, legalizing marijuana may mean a nice boost to the country’s revenue stream through regulation and taxation, but we don’t need to sell out our morals and public health for financial gain. We’ve done enough of that already.

And there we have it – selling out our morals.  It’s a moral issue.  It seems like the author even believes smoking and drinking are immoral.  That argument I can’t debunk because it is her personal belief.  However, I can note that when we criminalized alcohol out of morality, it was an abject failure.  I can note that we used to criminalize the lottery and slot machines – “playing the numbers” – yet many states have made that legal and turned those proceeds into useful public projects.

You can still believe cannabis use is immoral.  I believe locking up people for home gardening and punishing them for consuming something demonstrably safer to self and society than alcohol is immoral.  The question is whether the country and your fellow citizens are better off with your morality or mine.

(LA Times) Regardless of which candidate wins the race for California attorney general, voters expect that San Francisco Dist. Atty. Kamala Harris or Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley will respect the outcome of the election gracefully.

But they appear reluctant to extend that respect to Proposition 19, which would legalize the private, adult use of limited amounts of marijuana statewide and allow local governments to regulate commercial production and retail distribution. At their debate last week at UC Davis, neither Harris nor Cooley would state whether they would, as attorney general, enforce and defend Proposition 19.

Democrat Harris was ambiguous regarding what her actions as attorney general might be: “I believe that if it were to pass, it would be incumbent on the attorney general to convene her top lawyers and the experts on constitutional law to do a full analysis of the constitutionality of that measure … and what action, if any, should follow.”

Republican Cooley was more blunt: “I really am strongly opposed to Proposition 19 for many reasons. I would be inclined to advise that it is unconstitutional and preempted by federal law.”

Given that the attorney general is sworn to uphold all of the laws of the state, not just the ones he or she supports, the candidates’ responses were disconcerting. In both cases it appears that their personal biases against marijuana legalization could compromise their ability to objectively carry out their duties as attorney general.

Read the rest of the article at the Los Angeles Times…

Of course THAT marijuana is bad for you... in what Kansas ditch did that schwag grow?

LIVESTRONG, as most people know, is the foundation set up by cancer survivor and 7-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong. It boasts “Dare to Change Your Life”, but based on their article The Health Risks of Smoking Pot, it seems like they’re just recycling old material from D.A.R.E. (the program that brings cops into schools to introduce kids to drugs and encourage them to turn in their pot growing parents.)

The short-term health risks from smoking marijuana are well established. According to both the National Institute on DrugAbuse.com and DiscoveryHealth.com, short-term risks include memory loss, coordination problems, learning and problem solving difficulties, accelerated heart rate, anxiety, paranoia and panic attacks.

Memory “loss” is a bit much – it’s more that you have difficulty with short-term recall, learning, and problem-solving while high.  However, afterwards you suffer no ill-effects to memory and cognition, even with long-term, heavy use.  There are numerous studies backing this up.

When it comes to mood altering recreational substances, Lance endorses the one that CAUSES cancer.

You can become uncoordinated while high, which is why we don’t suggest driving or complicated physical tasks while high.  A minority of those who use cannabis experience anxiety, paranoia, and panic, which is why we suggest that marijuana may not be for everyone.  (Some people can die from exposure to peanut dust, but nobody advocates locking people up over a Snickers bar.  If marijuana makes you paranoid, don’t smoke it.)

An accelerated heart rate, which can last for up to three hours, may increase the risk of heart attack, although the evidence is inconclusive.

That accelerated heart rate is about equal to how much climbing a flight of stairs might cause your heart rate to increase.  The evidence that pot causes heart attacks is inconclusive because it isn’t there.

There is some evidence of a connection between pot and schizophrenia. The NIDA believes high doses of marijuana can produce acute psychotic reactions to trigger schizophrenia in vulnerable individuals.

The pot = schizophrenia claim is being debunked more and more every month.  A ten-year look at mental hospitals in the UK found no increase in schizophrenia and psychosis even as cannabis use skyrocketed.  Another study shows that schizophrenics who use cannabis have better cognitive functioning.  These supposed causal relationships between pot and schizophrenia are difficult to interpret, as you can’t tell whether pot caused the schizophrenia, or the schizophrenia caused someone to seek out pot to self-medicate.

Pot smoke contains carcinogens and irritates the lungs.

Stomach cancer +67%, rectal cancer +53%, lung cancer +46%... let's have another beer!

But does it cause cancer?  No, in fact, long-term pot smokers have lower incidence of head, neck, and lung cancers than non-smokers.  Previous preclinical studies assessing the anticancer properties of cannabinoids have shown that they inhibit the proliferation of a wide range of cancers, including brain cancer, prostate cancer, oral cancers, lung cancer, skin cancer,pancreatic cancer, biliary tract cancers, and lymphoma.

This is something a cancer survivor like Armstrong and his LIVESTRONG foundation should be promoting.  You know, instead of Michelob beer, use of which the Los Angeles Times reports causes cancer:

Compared with people who had less than one drink per week, those who drank daily were nearly three times as likely to get esophageal cancer. Moderate drinkers (who consumed between one and six drinks per week) were 67% more likely to get stomach cancer, according to results published in the new issue of Cancer Epidemiology.

Heavy beer drinkers had a 53% increased risk of developing rectal cancer and were 46% times more likely to get lung cancer. People who imbibed spirits daily had more than three times the risk of liver cancer, more than twice the risk of pancreatic cancer, and a 66% increased risk of rectal cancer. Despite mounting evidence of the benefits of drinking wine, moderate wine drinkers had elevated odds of rectal and bladder cancer.

Most tellingly, the researchers also found a dose-response relationship – that is, the heaviest drinkers were most at risk. Among people who consumed the most drinks for the most years, the risk of liver cancer was nearly eight times higher, and the risk of esophageal cancer was more than seven times as high. The biggest drinkers also had more than double the risk of pancreatic and rectal cancer and a more than 80% increased risk of prostate and colon cancer.

The LIVESTRONG website links to many other sets of mythology about marijuana.  Reasons to Stop Smoking Pot tells us that “Those who smoke pot daily operate at subpar levels at all times”.  (Wow, imagine how many more stories, podcasts, live shows, presentations, websites, and gigs I could produce if only I weren’t operating at a subpar level!  Imagine how much better the Cosmos series would have been if Carl Sagan hadn’t been operating at a subpar level at all times!)

What Are the Side Effects of Pot? warns us that “disruption in career, social and family functioning occurs because of a loss of interest in daily activities” and “reproductive problems may occur, including lower sperm count for men.”  (I’d tell that to Willie Nelson, but his career in country music, touring at age 77, and doting on his seven children and many grandchildren, makes contacting him difficult.)

What Are the Effects of Smoking Pot? tells us “it is possible to become physically dependent on marijuana.”  It’s so darn physically addicting that if you quit cold turkey, you “may experience cravings, insomnia and anxiety.”

Effects from Smoking Pot warns that “high doses of marijuana can lead to paranoia, image distortion or psychosis. Such effects may last several days or weeks….”  Where do I find me some of that pot?

Now it seems these articles are submitted to LIVESTRONG and perhaps not well-edited by their staff.  But Lance Armstrong endorsing alcohol is not an accident.  If he is going to endorse a recreational substance, shouldn’t he endorse one that doesn’t cause – and might even cure – cancer?

A completely ineffective deterrent to drug use

(Los Angeles Times) In many large state prison systems, a mix of inmate ingenuity, complicit visitors and corrupt staff has kept the level of inmate drug abuse constant over the past decade despite concerted efforts to reduce it. A recent boom in cell phone smuggling has complicated matters, with inmates sometimes using phones to arrange drug deliveries.

Roughly 1,000 “drug incidents” are reported annually at California prisons — seizures of marijuana, heroin and other drugs. Between 2006 and 2008, 44 inmates in the state died of drug overdose deaths.

Florida has implemented anti-contraband strategies that its legislative watchdog office says match or exceed those in other states — including drug-detecting dog teams, metal detector searches of staff and visitors at all prisons, and even random pat-down searches of staff, rarely done in other states.

Yet despite these efforts, 1,132 random drug tests of inmates in 2008-09 were positive — the same positive rate of 1.6 percent as 10 years earlier. Even more striking, officers seized 2,832 grams of marijuana and 92 grams of cocaine at the prisons during the year, by far the highest figures of the past decade.

So, let me get this straight: you have a large building surrounded by fences topped with razor-wire and impenetrably-thick walls, guarded by men with automatic weapons, revealed by surveillance cameras in every corner, and you can’t stop people who are locked in a 8′x10′ concrete cage with a steel-barred door with no Constitutional right to be free from search and seizure from doing drugs.

And yet, you want us to believe that 300 million Americans with strong Constitutional privacy rights living on 3.5 million square miles of open land with 1,969 miles of border to the south and 5,525 miles of border to the north (the longest non-militarized border in the world) can somehow create a “Drug-Free America”.

(Los Angeles Times) Dispensaries in Los Angeles could continue to accept cash for medical marijuana under a provision approved by the City Council on Tuesday, after it adopted language carefully crafted to maneuver past the city attorney’s adamant position that state law bars the sale of the drug.

The council, which avoided the word “sales” on the advice of its lawyers, decided that Los Angeles would allow “cash contributions, reimbursements and compensations” as long as they comply with state law.

City Atty. Carmen Trutanich and Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley had urged the council to explicitly ban the sale of marijuana.

Council members expressed a clear interest in caps, most likely distributed among the city’s 21 police divisions.

The council, though, remains unsure whether to give preference to the 186 dispensaries that registered with the city when the moratorium was adopted in 2007. Councilman Richard Alarcon said he saw nothing “magic” in the number, while Councilwoman Janice Hahn said it would be “fair and reasonable” to favor those who had followed the law.

The council also approved an amendment to limit operators to one dispensary and an amendment to limit patients and caregivers to membership in one collective, but allow for emergency purchases.

The restriction on membership drew protests from medical marijuana advocates. “If you go to your favorite dispensary, and they’re out of what you need, you have to go someplace else,” said Degé Coutee, the head of a patient group.

The council readily adopted a series of amendments, most of them … borrowed from West Hollywood, that added more protections for neighborhoods. Dispensaries would be required to have unarmed security guards who would patrol a two-block area, to provide a contact name to police and residents who live within 500 feet, and to deposit cash once a day.

The council also tangled over an amendment to put a $100,000 cap on salaries at dispensaries. It was offered by Alarcon, who said the dispensary downstairs from his office was making $12,000 a day.

The council decided to try to find another way to limit salaries, such as applying standards set by United Way.

Oh, what crazy hoops one must jump through to regulate legal sales of marijuana to just 5% of its customers while maintaining criminal sanctions for the other 95%.  Every single problem the council addresses is a result of marijuana prohibition.

• Why so many dispensaries so quickly?  Because people like marijuana and prohibition makes it hard to get, unless you can buy it at a dispensary.
• Why limit patients and caregivers to one collective?  Because people like marijuana and prefer to shop around for the best experience.
• Why require unarmed security guards?  Because prohibited marijuana is so expensive and most people can’t get it, which leads to theft and robbery.
• Why provide contacts to residents?  Because prohibited marijuana means no place for people to go smoke it and a chance at making a buck reselling it.
• Why put caps on salaries?  Because prohibited marijuana is worth so much that selling it can make you rich.

Patients and caregivers will always be subject to this sort of over-regulation so long as the majority of the market is prohibited.  Can you imagine someone requiring you to shop at only one pharmacy?  Have you ever heard of a liquor store required to give a contact name to all residents within 500 feet?  Do you know of any neighborhood taverns that clear $12,000 per day?  Let’s just regulate cannabis for all adults and we’ll see the prices drop along with the concomitant crime and patients and caregivers will have the greatest access to medicine possible.

The Mexican drug cartels feed on the marijuana prohibition, deriving two-thirds of their incomes from selling marijuana in the U.S.  The violence they use to protect this cash flow is among the most vicious, sadistic brutality committed in the world today.

Unable to convey the full horror of the acts being committed with normal words, the Mexican media invented new ones. This is their glossary (Los Angeles Times):

Levanton: the kidnapping of one or more members of a rival gang, or other enemy. Unlike traditional kidnappings, the point is not ransom, but to torture and kill a foe. Victims of a multiple levanton may end up fusilados.

Fusilados: from the Spanish for rifle, to be executed in the style of a firing squad, or with a shot to the head, known as a tiro de gracia. This occurred in an attack at a Ciudad Juarez drug-treatment clinic in early September.

Encajuelado: Based on the word for “trunk,” a body dumped in the trunk of a car. This is a common method of disposing of victims of a drug hit. Often, the bodies are bound and gagged with packing tape or are encobijados, wrapped in blankets. Sometimes they are accompanied by a handwritten narcomensaje.

Narcomensaje: A scrawled drug message, often rambling or peppered with misspellings. Such missives are typically meant to threaten rival drug cartels or government security forces. Messages sometimes take the form of banners, known as narcomantas, and hung from bridges or in other public places to demonstrate a gang’s audacity.

Plaza: Not the quaint public square you see in nearly every Mexican town, but rather any defined drug marketplace, such as a smuggling point. Much of the violence since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon declared war on drug cartels, is due to fighting among gangs over coveted plazas, or turf, including street-level sales taking place in tienditas.

Tiendita: Any place where drugs are sold in small quantities on the street — a house, apartment building or even a little store. Tienditas, or “little stores,” play a big role in what Mexican officials say is a worrisome increase in domestic drug use and addiction in Mexico, which once served mainly as a pipeline to the United States with little local consumption.

Halcones: To guard strongholds, trafficking groups rely on a network of street-level informants — taxi drivers, fruit vendors, teen boys — known as halcones, or falcons. Halcones provide early warning of the arrival of federal police or soldiers that have been dispatched around Mexico as part of Calderon’s drug war.

Cuerno de chivo: “Goat horn,” nickname for the AK-47 assault rifle, a favorite of cartel gunmen. The name refers to the curved shape of the magazine. Hit men are increasingly making use of even more powerful weapons, including .50-caliber machine guns and 40-millimeter grenade launchers. Authorities also report a rise in the use of potent pistols, able to fire through body armor, that are known here as matapolicias, or cop killers.

Narco-(anything): It’s handy for headline writers and coiners of terms that narco combines with almost any noun. Alone, narco can refer to a trafficker or the entire illegal drug trade, as in, “The government’s war against el narco.”

A little creativity yields narco-fiestas (opulent, drug-laden parties featuring foreign dancers or big-name musical groups), narco-zoologicos (narco-zoos, collections of exotic animals that, for some reason, are collectors’ items for traffickers) and narco-candidatos (politicians reputed to be in cahoots with drug gangs).

Attorneys who defend suspected capos are narco-abogados, or narco-lawyers.

Narco-policias are cops on the take.

And representing the drug war’s next generation: Narcojuniors, the well-heeled children of traffickers accused of helping run the criminal enterprises.

(Los Angeles Times) With its moratorium on new medical marijuana dispensaries declared unlawful, the Los Angeles City Council is now poised to act quickly on a strict ordinance that it has struggled with fitfully for more than two years.

On Tuesday, the city attorney’s office delivered a draft that some members want the council to take up within a week. The sudden acceleration stems from a Superior Court ruling Monday that left the city unable to enforce its ban and derailed its four-month-old drive to shut down new dispensaries.

Under the latest proposal, most dispensaries would be required to close immediately and could not apply to reopen for six months. The 186 dispensaries that registered with the city when it passed its moratorium in 2007 would be allowed to remain open for six months, but then would have to meet the ordinance’s requirements.

You’re going to immediately shutter some 600+ medical marijuana storefronts?  The illegal marijuana dealers of the Los Angeles Basin couldn’t have asked for a better windfall.  The Mexican drug gangs sure have to like this change of events.  What, you didn’t think the Los Angelenos who have been keeping those storefronts in business were just going to stop smoking pot, did you?

The ordinance could effectively outlaw most dispensaries in the city by prohibiting sales of medical marijuana. Both City Atty. Carmen Trutanich and Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley maintain that state law does not allow over-the-counter sales, though they say collectives owned by the members are allowed to recoup their expenses. Dispensary operators say the sales, usually in 1/8 -ounce increments, are meant to cover their operating costs.

The ordinance requires collectives to keep records on members and suppliers and to make them available to police, which operators fear could leave them vulnerable to federal prosecution even though the Justice Department on Monday formally told its prosecutors not to pursue medical marijuana users and dispensaries that follow state law.

The draft ordinance also adds a provision that requires collectives to notify council members and neighborhood councils of their plans to open, and another that bars anyone who was convicted of a felony within the previous 10 years or who is on parole or probation from managing a collective.

So, like, if you were growing medical marijuana for patients and providing it to them in a collective way, like, say, Eddy Lepp, and the feds prosecute you and make you a felon, then you, one of the most experienced people for the job, are not eligible.

In addition, the ordinance would limit the number of dispensaries by requiring them to be at least 1,000 feet from schools, parks, libraries, religious institutions, child care facilities, youth centers, hospitals, medical facilities, substance abuse rehabilitation centers and other collectives.

In a dense urban environment like Los Angeles, I doubt there are very many properties that aren’t within 1,000 feet from one of those institutions.  Can we at least open dispensaries next to liquor stores; I always seem to see them within 1,000 feet of those institutions.

The ordinance also would restrict the dispensaries’ operations. They could be open only between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. They could have no more than 5 pounds of marijuana or 100 plants on hand, and marijuana could not be consumed on site. They also would not be allowed to sell or manufacture edible marijuana products.

I don’t think Carmen Trutanich and Steve Cooley have ever seen Star Wars: A New Hope. Like Darth Vader battling Obi-Wan Kenobi in a lightsaber duel, they don’t realize that killing the Jedi master only makes him a stronger agent of The Force.  For over a decade now, people in Los Angeles have grown accustomed to buying quality marijuana in many varieties and forms from business establishments.  They have seen a hint on the promised land and will not appreciate returning to the “call my guy and wait and hope and take whatever weed I can get” world.

This action by the LA City Council will backfire in the worst way possible in their eyes: it will galvanize the majority that already believes marijuana should be legal for all and taxed with distribution through regulated business outlets.  There is no putting this genie back in the bottle.  Californians have seen semi-legalized marijuana and they like it.

(Los Angeles Times) A Superior Court judge concluded today that Los Angeles’ moratorium on new medical marijuana dispensaries is invalid and granted a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the ban sought by a dispensary that had sued the city.

Judge James C. Chalfant determined that the city failed to follow state law when it extended its initial moratorium. “The city cannot rely on an expired ordinance,” he said.

Green Oasis and a number of other medical marijuana collectives sued the city last month, challenging its efforts to control the dispensaries. The lawsuit argued that the City Council violated state law when it extended the ban until mid-March and that it is unconstitutionally vague.

Although the injunction applies only to Green Oasis, the judge’s ruling calls into question the city’s power to enforce the moratorium against hundreds of dispensaries that have opened in the last two years. The ruling could inspire other dispensaries to join the lawsuit or file similar actions.

Robert A. Kahn, an attorney for Green Oasis, argued that the dispensary did nothing wrong, noting that, under state law, the moratorium expired 45 days after it was first enacted. “The did not believe they were violating the law,” he said.

You see, Californians decide to pass Prop 215 thirteen years ago.  The language left open the possibility of opening up dispensaries.  The people turned to California and said, “Oh, somewhat wise and kinda benevolent state government, what are the rules regarding dispensaries?”  The state replied, “Uh, homina homina homina, er, federal law, eh… well, it’s up to the cities and counties.”

So the people then turned to the cities and counties and said, “Can you tell us what the rules are regarding dispensaries?”  Oakland looked about and saw there were no rules, so they set about crafting some, working with the stakeholders in the process, and ended up with clearly-defined rules, rules that have led to world-class dispensary operations that restored blighted neighborhoods and approval by the dispensaries and the public of steep taxes on the dispensaries that improve the city’s fiscal status.

But other cities, like Los Angeles, said, “We don’t have any rules for it… but we don’t have any rules against it…” and refused to promulgate any guidance to the fledgling dispensary industry.  Some people honorably worked with officials and neighborhoods and businesses to create world-class dispensary operations, but far too many other people jumped into the dispensary business to thinly veil their marijuana dealing in the cloak of medical legitimacy.  As the number of dispensaries closed in on 200, Los Angeles said, “Whoa, hold up until we can figure out how to regulate this mess!” and issued a 45-day moratorium on any new dispensaries.

But since many of the dispensaries are lawfully operating under Prop 215, Los Angeles couldn’t just issue a blanket denial of all applications for new dispensaries, so they created a loophole on the moratorium called a “hardship exemption”, a loophole large enough to drive Cheech & Chong’s Nice Dreams van through it.  For two years Los Angeles sat on its thumbs, failing to craft any rules to govern the exploding dispensary industry.  Thus the industry is closing in on one thousand outlets, and as this judge wisely decided, Los Angeles can’t just ban them by relying on an expired 45-day moratorium with a huge loophole.

This is not the fault of the dispensary industry.  The good guys have always been interested in reasonable regulations and the carpetbagging weed dealers, well, they’re doing what entrepreneurs do in the absence of regulations (see also: AIG, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Goldman-Sachs, etc.)  This is a failure of local government to do its job in protecting the public and governing business, even with thirteen years and obvious licensing issues staring at them from Los Angeles Times headlines month after month.  Now the headlines generated by the “bad apples” (especially as DA Cooley gears up to bust them all) will paint a negative picture of medical marijuana and sully the reputations of the good guys out there in LA, when it’s really the local government’s fault for letting it get so out of hand.

On the bright side, Los Angeles’ ineptitude in allowing so many retail marijuana outlets may just make this all a moot point.  There may be so many of them and so many people accustomed to their convenience that closure of any of them will lead to enough popular backlash to pass outright legalization in 2010.