In this Sunday’s Doonesbury comic strip, Zonker decides to head for Oaksterdam
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By Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilsen, 17 Virginial Journal of Law and Public Policy 45 (2009)
FULL ARTICLE AVAILABLE AT: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1366422
ABSTRACT: This article presents a critique of marijuana prohibition and suggests some alternative regulatory approaches that would be more productive and consonant with justice. Part I relies on a forty-year empirical record to demonstrate that (1) reliance on a law enforcement approach has aggravated rather than mitigated the risks involved with marijuana use, and (2) criminalization, which results in the arrest of more than 700,000 Americans annually for possession of any amount of marijuana, is an inhumane and destructive response to an act that almost 100 million Americans have committed. Part II assesses the relative merits of several alternative reform policies, including both decriminalization and legalization under a regulatory scheme.
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By Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilsen, 85 Indiana Law Journal 279 (2010)
FULL ARTICLE AVAILABLE AT: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1366426
ABSTRACT: Marijuana policy analyses typically focus on the relative costs and benefits of present policy and its feasible alternatives. This essay addresses a prior, threshold issue: whether marijuana criminal laws abridge fundamental individual rights, and if so, whether there are grounds that justify doing so.
Over 700,000 people are arrested annually for simple marijuana possession, a small but significant proportion of the one hundred million Americans who have committed the same crime. In this essay, we present a civil libertarian case for repealing marijuana possession crimes. We put forward two arguments, corresponding to the two distinct liberty concerns implicated by laws that both ban marijuana use and punish its users. The first argument opposes criminalization, demonstrating that marijuana use does not constitute the kind of wrongful conduct that is a prerequisite for just punishment. The second argument demonstrates that even in the absence of criminal penalties, prohibition of marijuana use violates a moral right to exercise autonomy in personal matters – a corollary to Mill’s harm principle in the utilitarian tradition, or, in the non-consequentialist tradition, to the respect for personhood that was well described by the Supreme Court in its recent Lawrence v. Texas opinion. Both arguments are based on principles of justice that are uncontroversial in other contexts.
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Californians will vote this fall on whether to legalize marijuana – and the measure has a real shot at passing
By Ari Berman
In 1996, California became the first state in the nation to legalize marijuana for medical use. Now, with a ballot initiative up for a vote in November, it could become the first to ratify an even more striking landmark: the legalization of pot for recreational use. Proposition 19 — the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010 — treats pot much like alcohol after the repeal of Prohibition, allowing each city and county to decide whether it wants to approve and tax commercial sales of the drug. And regardless of what local jurisdictions do, any Californian over 21 could possess up to an ounce of marijuana, smoke it in private or at licensed establishments, and grow a small amount for personal consumption. “We’re not requiring anyone to do anything,” says Jim Wheaton, a prominent First Amendment lawyer who drafted the ballot initiative. “We’re just repealing the laws that prevent it.”
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Drug Policy Question of the Week – 8-17-10
As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 8-17-10. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3022
Question of the Week: Is marijuana a gateway to hard drug use?
The hypothesis that marijuana is a “pipeline” to heroin and other drugs is called the “Gateway Theory.” It asserts that marijuana use leads directly to hard drug abuse.
This concept was questioned in the 1999 Institute of Medicine Report, Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base, which stated,
“There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.”
In 2002, British Home Office Research Study 253 looked at the presumed progression of drug use arrived at the same conclusion,
“there is very little remaining evidence of any causal gateway effect.”
The 2006 study “Predictors of Marijuana Use in Adolescents Before and After Licit Drug Use: Examination of the Gateway Hypothesis,” was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and concluded that
“Evidence supporting ‘causal linkages between stages,’ as specified by the gateway hypothesis, was not obtained.”
Finally, consider numbers from the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. In 2008, more than 102 million Americans were estimated to have tried marijuana, with 15.2 million of them said to be “past-month” users. There were an estimated 1.8 million “past-month” users of cocaine and 213,000 “past-month” users of heroin. These “past month” cocaine and heroin use numbers are respectively 11.8% and 1.4% of “past month” marijuana users and 1.8% and 0.2% of lifetime marijuana users. If cannabis were a pipeline to hard drugs, wouldn’t these percentages be significantly higher?
These facts and others like them can be found in the Gateway Theory chapter of Drug War Facts at http://www.drugwarfacts.org.
Questions concerning these or other facts concerning drug policy can be e-mailed to [email protected].
These facts and others like them can be found in the Gateway Theory and Marijuana chapters of Drug War Facts at www.drugwarfacts.org.
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Medical marijuana will be available in Germany soon, with the centre-right coalition preparing to make groundbreaking changes to drug laws, a government health spokeswoman said this week.
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By Paul Elam
O.K., so you found some weed in your teen-agers room.
Depending on the kind of parent you are, your reaction to that can range from mild amusement to thermonuclear. But assuming you are not going to smoke the stuff yourself, you are confronted with making some decisions on what to do about it. Perhaps you think it is time to call a counselor, or maybe even the thought of a treatment center for young people with drug problems crosses your mind.
As someone who worked in the chemical dependency treatment field for two decades, and who wrote and directed several treatment programs, let me make a suggestion about that.
Don’t.
Don’t even think about it.
To clarify, let me tell you some things you won’t hear from the staff at treatment programs, or anyone else interested in making a buck off your child’s “problem.”
First, there‘s this funny thing about teenage drug addicts. There aren’t any. Or at least they are so far and few between that I can count the ones I have seen on two fingers. So for your benefit, an understanding of addiction is in order.
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A conversation with author Christopher Fichtner, M.D.
Christopher Fichtner is a psychiatrist and the former mental health director for the state of Illinois. In his new book, Cannabinomics: The Marijuana Policy Tipping Point, Fichtner predicts that marijuana policy is about to change radically. As Fichtner points out, three public policy trajectories converging. The medical marijuana movement is gaining momentum. People are increasingly wakening up to the fact that drug prohibition creates more public health problems than it solves. And, in the same way that the Great Depression caused people to reprioritize how we spend our public dollars, the current economic crisis has got people thinking that bringing the biggest cash crop in the US out into the open might not be such a bad idea.
Reason.tv‘s Paul Feine sat down with Dr. Fichtner to learn more about the imminent marijuana policy tipping point.
Approximately 10 minutes. Produced by Paul Feine and Alex Manning.