• Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    Drug Courts Are Not the Answer

    Drug Courts are Not the Answer finds that drug courts are an ineffective and inappropriate response to drug law violations. Many, all the way up to the Obama administration, consider the continued proliferation of drug courts to be a viable solution to the problem of mass arrests and incarceration of people who use drugs. Yet this report finds that drug courts do not reduce incarceration, do not improve public safety, and do not save money when compared to the wholly punitive model they seek to replace. The report calls for reducing the role of the criminal justice system in responding to drug use by expanding demonstrated health approaches, including harm reduction and drug treatment, and by working toward the removal of criminal penalties for drug use.

    Drug Courts Are Not the Answer: Toward a Health-Centered Approach to Drug Use. Drug Policy Alliance; March 2011.

  • Drug Policy - Question of the Week

    Can people with a drug conviction vote?

    Drug Policy Question of the Week – 3-22-11

    As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 3-22-11. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3304

    Question of the Week: Can people with a drug conviction vote?

    Just before the election last fall, the Sentencing Project reported,

    “… more than 5 million citizens will be ineligible to vote in the midterm elections in November [2010], including nearly 4 million who reside in the 35 states that still prohibit some combination of persons on probation, parole, and/or people who have completed their sentence from voting.”

    The Bureau of Justice Statistics “Prisoners in 2009” report found that by year end 2008, 251,400 inmates were housed in state facilities as a result of a drug conviction. For 95,079 federal prisoners, a drug offense was the most serious offense.

    The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ “Probation and Parole in theUnited States, 2008” calculated a total of 646,493 probationers for which a drug offense was the most serious offense. Similarly, there were 265,634 adults on parole as a result of a drug conviction.

    Totaling all of the above numbers computes whopping 1,258,606  adults subject to disenfranchisement or the loss of voting rights for drug convictions in 2008.

    The Sentencing Project’s 2011 report Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States states that

    “48 states and the District of Columbia prohibit inmates from voting while incarcerated for a felony offense.  Only two states – Maine and Vermont – permit inmates to vote. … Two states deny the right to vote to all persons with felony convictions, even after they have completed their sentences.”

    Those states are Iowa and Kentucky. Please check the report to find out where your state stands.

    These facts and others like them can be found in the Civil Rights and Prisons and Jails Chapter of Drug War Facts at www.drugwarfacts.org

    .

    1,258,606
  • Cannabis & Hemp - Drug Policy - Question of the Week

    What is dronabinol?

    Drug Policy Question of the Week – 3-12-11

    As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 3-12-11. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3302

    Question of the Week: What is dronabinol?

    A November 2010 Federal Register posting by the Drug Enforcement Administration defined dronabinol as,

    “the United States Adopted Name (USAN) for [Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol or THC], which is believed to be the major psychoactive component of the cannabis plant [aka] (marijuana).”

    Bantam Medical Dictionary defines, a “United States Adopted Name” as the

    “US generic name for any compound to be used as a drug.”

    Dronabinol is generic for tetrahydrocannabinol or THC.

    Abbott Laboratories markets the pharmaceutical drug Marinol®, containing, using the DEA’s definition,

    “dronabinol in sesame oil and encapsulated in both hard gelatin or soft gelatin capsules.”

    Because Abbott lists dronabinol as the only active ingredient of Marinol®, sesame oil is inactive. Abbott states that dronabinol

    “is also a naturally occurring component of Cannabis sativa L. (Marijuana)”

    and that Marinol is

    “controlled [Schedule III] under the Controlled Substances Act,”

    The naturally occurring Cannabis sativa L, is a tightly restricted and highly illegal plant under Schedule I.

    The Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis argued in its 2002 Petition to Reschedule Cannabis,”

    Cannabis is a natural source of dronabinol (THC), the ingredient of Marinol, a Schedule III drug. There are no grounds to schedule cannabis in a more restrictive schedule than Marinol”.

    Minus the inactive sesame oil, the DEA seemed to agree with the petition by stating in the Federal Register that,

    “dronabinol products, both naturally-derived or synthetically produced, … meet the criteria for placement in schedule III.”

    If they do, then shouldn’t the source of “naturally-derived” dronabinol (THC) – the tightly restricted and highly illegal Cannabis sativa L plant – be a legal Schedule III as well?

    These facts and others like them can be found in the Medical Marijuana Chapter of Drug War Facts at www.drugwarfacts.org.

  • Cannabis & Hemp - Drug Policy - Question of the Week

    What can hemp be used for?

    Drug Policy Question of the Week – 3-2-11

    As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 3-2-11. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3289

    Question of the Week: What can hemp be used for?

    A 2010 report from the Congressional Research Service defines,

    “Hemp, also called “industrial hemp,”3 [as] cannabis varieties that are primarily grown as an agricultural crop (such as seeds and fiber, and byproducts such as oil, seed cake, hurds) …”

    According to the 2008 National Hemp Strategy from the Manitoba Agriculture,

    “The hemp plant has three primary components: bast fibre, hurd, and seed / oil.”

    The report goes on to describe the uses of each,

    “Hemp bast fibres are among the strongest and most durable of natural fibres, with high tensile strength, wet strength, and other characteristics favourable for various industrial products …including cordage (rope, twine, etc.), specialty papers, fabrics for clothing and other applications, and industrial textiles such as geotextiles and carpeting. The strength of hemp fibre also makes it ideal for use in a range of composites for applications such as moulded car parts and fibreboard for construction.”

    “The whole hemp stalk can also be used to produce various biofuels such as bio-oil (or pyrolytic liquid), cellulosic ethanol, (synthetic gas) and methane. … The processes by which hemp is converted to biofuels may also produce valuable chemicals and other materials as bi-products.”

    “Hemp oil is extremely nutritious, and is used in foods and nutraceutical products for humans and animals, as well as in personal care products. Hemp oil is also suitable for use in industrial products such as paints, varnishes, inks and industrial lubricants, and can be used to produce biodiesel. The crushed seed meal left over from oil production is frequently used for animal feed.”

    These facts and others like them can be found in the recently updated Hemp Chapter of Drug War Facts at www.drugwarfacts.org.

  • Drug Policy

    Mandatory Sentencing for Drug Users: A F…

    By Ernest Drucker

    Bill S-10 currently being considered by the House of Commons calls for the introduction of mandatory sentences as deterrents to organized crime and large scale drug dealing in Canada. There are serious doubts about the value of this strategy , and many of the country’s health, research, and academic leaders have objected , aware of the many hazards of this approach . But there is also a body of evidence from the US that can inform Canada’s decision on S -10 and help avoid the disastrous mistake that mandatory drug sentencing has been for the US – in effect launching a 35 year epidemic of mass incarceration and collateral harms to million of Americans.

    During the first 20 years of mandatory drug sentencing I ran a large drug treatment program in the Bronx. Under our Rockefeller drug laws ( the model for mandatory drug sentencing laws in the US ) I watched New York State’s prison system grow from 12,000 to 73,000 – as drug offenders rose from 10% to over 40% of the prison population. Since their passage in 1973 over 150,000 drug users were sentenced to prison under these laws. After release most returned to drugs and related crime – with 1/3 back behind bars in 12 months and 2/3 by 3 years after release. Under such laws the US prison population exploded, reaching 2.5 million by 2009 – the highest incarceration rate in US history and in the world today – six times Canada’s imprisonment rate. Today, as a direct result of mandatory drug sentencing , there are more drug offenders in US prisons (over 600,000) than in all of the prisons of the EU for all offenses. Is this an experiment that Canada really wants to repeat?

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net - International

    Mexico Drug War a Lost Cause as Presently Fought

    By Sandy Goodman

    There’s a powerful new piece of evidence that, the way it is being fought, the war on drugs on the Mexican-American border is a lost cause. It comes in a report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations, a highly-respected foreign policy think tank, that recommends that, as an experiment, the federal government allow states “to legalize the production, sale, taxation and consumption of marijuana.” The report says authorities should redirect scarce law enforcement resources to stopping the importation of more dangerous drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine.

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    The Wire producer: War on drugs is ‘a war on the underclass’

    By Eric W. Dolan
    Thursday, March 10th, 2011 — 7:04 pm

    David Simon, the creator and executive producer of HBO’s The Wire, said the war on drugs had devolved into a war on the underclass after actress Felicia Pearson was arrested in Baltimore on drug charges.

    Thirty-year-old Pearson had served a prison sentence for murder before join the cast of The Wire, an television drama series about inner-city life in Baltimore that premiered in 2002 and ended five seasons later in 2008.

    Pearson and over sixty others were arrested on Thursday as part of a five-month investigation by the DEA and Baltimore police, The Baltimore Sun [1] reported.

    “In places like West and East Baltimore, where the drug economy is now the only factory still hiring and where the educational system is so crippled that the vast majority of children are trained only for the corners, a legal campaign to imprison our most vulnerable and damaged citizens is little more than amoral,” Simon told Slate [2].

    “Both our Constitution and our common law guarantee that we will be judged by our peers,” he continued. “But in truth, there are now two Americas, politically and economically distinct. I, for one, do not qualify as a peer to Felicia Pearson. The opportunities and experiences of her life do not correspond in any way with my own, and her America is different from my own. I am therefore ill-equipped to be her judge in this matter.”

    In an essay published by TIME [3]magazine in 2008, Simon and other writers for The Wire said the war on drugs caused more harm to society than the drugs it sought to eliminate.

    “What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has,” they wrote. “And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass… All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.”

    The writers called on juries deliberating on non-violent violations of drug laws to acquit despite the evidence, a legal tactic known as jury nullification.

    Although jury nullification may seem like a far-fetched tactic to stop the drug war, in December 2010 potential jurors refused to convict a Montana man for having a 1/16 of an ounce of marijuana regardless of the evidence.

    “I think it’s going to become increasingly difficult to seat a jury in marijuana cases, at least the ones involving a small amount,” District Judge Dusty Deschamps said at the time. He later decided he could not seat a jury and the prosecutor and defense attorney worked out a plea bargain.

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    Harper’s Faith-Based Drug War

    We should not pretend that Bill S-10 has anything to do with evidence – or with making our country a safer place in which to live.

    by Neil Boyd Associate Director, Criminology, Simon Fraser University.

    The Harper Conservatives are under fire for their extraordinarily expensive legislative initiative, Bill S-10. Among other things, the bill seeks to spend at least hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on prison building, in order to impose a mandatory minimum term of six months in jail for anyone who grows more than six marijuana plants. Most Canadians, experts and non-experts alike, have criticized the proposal as costly and counter-productive, noting that it will imprison individuals who are mostly non-violent and who sell to willing adult consumers.