As Mike Riggs noted this morning, the Obama administration last Friday night finally got around to addressing the “We the People” online petitions urging repeal of marijuana prohibition. First it had to deal with the clamor for excising “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance (a cause that attracted 20,328 signatures) and removing the slogan “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency (12,273). By comparison, the eight petitions recommending some form of marijuana legalization totaled more than 150,000 (possibly overlapping) signatures; the most popular one, “Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol,” by itself attracted more than 74,000. If you bother to read drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s embarrassingly weak response, you can see why the White House buried it in the weekend news graveyard.
Coalition of BC Law Enforcement, Health and Academic Experts Call for Marijuana Legalization and Regulation to Reduce Gang Violence
New Polls Shows 87% of British Columbians Link Gang Violence to Organized Crime’s Control of Marijuana Trade
October 27, 2011 [Vancouver, Canada] – In the wake of high-profile gang violence related to the illegal marijuana industry in BC, a new coalition of academic, legal and health experts has released the first of a series of reports and polling results aimed at pressuring politicians to legally regulate marijuana sales under a public health framework.
The Angus Reid poll says 87% of BC respondents link gang violence to organized crime’s efforts to control the province’s massive illegal cannabis trade while the report, called Breaking the Silence, clearly demonstrates that cannabis prohibition in BC has been ineffective and caused significant social harms and public safety issues.
“From a scientific and public health perspective we know that making marijuana illegal has not achieved its stated objectives of limiting marijuana supply or rates of use,” said Dr. Evan Wood, a coalition member and Director of the Urban Health Research Initiative at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. “Given that marijuana prohibition has created a massive financial windfall for violent organized crime groups in BC, we must discuss alternatives to today’s failed laws with a focus on how to decrease violence, remove the illicit industry’s profit motive and improve public health and safety.”
The new coalition, Stop the Violence BC, released the report in tandem with results from an Angus Reid poll that overwhelmingly demonstrates that lawmakers lag far behind public opinion on revamping marijuana laws in BC.
PROHIBITION is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed
Premieres October 2nd, 3rd & 4th, 2011 at 8 PM on PBS
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PROHIBITION is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed.
Prohibition was intended to improve, even to ennoble, the lives of all Americans, to protect individuals, families, and society at large from the devastating effects of alcohol abuse. But the enshrining of a faith-driven moral code in the Constitution paradoxically caused millions of Americans to rethink their definition of morality.
An Online Library About Marijuana Possession Arrests, Race And Police Policy In New York City And Beyond
U.S. government studies consistently find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young blacks or Latinos. Yet, in large cities and counties throughout the United States, young blacks and Latinos are arrested and jailed for marijuana possession at much higher rates than young whites.
In New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, police arrest blacks for marijuana possession at seven times the rate of whites. Usually, the people arrested were not smoking in public. Police typically found the small amount of marijuana when they stopped, frisked, and searched the young people, often in their own neighborhoods.
Marijuana-Arrests.com is an on line library of materials about the huge numbers of racially-biased marijuana possession arrests, their consequences, and the law enforcement policies and operations which produce them.
For Donovan Mahoney, the Insite facility in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside was more than just a safe place to turn to for drugs.
Since 2004, he’s checked in at the clinic about 1,000 times for heroine, cocaine and morphine injections but he credits the controversial site for helping him get to treatment when he was ready and for housing him while he works on transitioning from life on the street.
He was sitting in a Maple Ridge, B.C., jail for petty crime when he called on the people he’d met at Insite for help.
“By then, I kind of burnt a lot of bridges so the people I had to turn to when I was in jail (were) these guys,” he said.
“They went all the way out to Maple Ridge and drove me out to Miracle Valley (Treatment Centre). It was my first real crack at treatment.”
On Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada will announce its landmark decision on whether North America’s first supervised injection site for addicts, will be allowed to operate without a federal government legal exemption from drug laws.
Should the Supreme Court not rule in Insite’s favour, the organization would need to continue to rely on a federal government exemption to remain open.
My column on making Naloxone available over-the-counter to reverse overdoses drew many plaudits and two main strands of criticism. One group argued that addicts aren’t worth saving and we need to cut the drug supply; the other said that Naloxone, also known by its brand name, Narcan, is too risky to be available without a prescription.
Let me address the second argument first. More than 50,000 Naloxone kits have already been distributed to drug users, pain patients and their loved ones in the United States and 10,000 successful overdose reversals have been reported.
The health advocacy group Public Citizen has asked the Food and Drug Administration to authorize over-the-counter sales and has received a response that details the agency’s requirements for reclassification. A meeting on the topic of how best to expand access is expected to be held by the agency next May: according to its letter, the F.D.A. would probably want expensive clinical trials before granting over-the-counter status. It is not clear how that would be funded or whether it would allow alternative approaches
‘Children of the Drug War’ is a unique collection of original essays that investigates the impacts of the war on drugs on children, young people and their families. With contributions from around the world, providing different perspectives and utilizing a wide range of styles and approaches including ethnographic studies, personal accounts and interviews, the book asks fundamental questions of national and international drug control systems:
What have been the costs to children and young people of the war on drugs?
Is the protection of children from drugs a solid justification for current policies?
What kinds of public fears and preconceptions exist in relation to drugs and the drug trade?
How can children and young people be placed at the forefront of drug policies?
Increased rates of marijuana use drive increase, especially among young adults
The use of illicit drugs among Americans increased between 2008 and 2010 according to a national survey conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) shows that 22.6 million Americans 12 or older (8.9-percent of the population) were current illicit drug users. The rate of use in 2010 was similar to the rate in 2009 (8.7-percent), but remained above the 2008 rate (8- percent).
An increased rate in the current use of marijuana seems to be one of the prime factors in the overall rise in illicit drug use. In 2010, 17.4 million Americans were current users of marijuana – compared to 14.4 million in 2007. This represents an increase in the rate of current marijuana use in the population 12 and older from 5.8-percent in 2007 to 6.9-percent in 2010.
Another disturbing trend is the continuing rise in the rate of current illicit drug use among young adults aged 18 to 25 — from 19.6-percent in 2008 to 21.2-percent in 2009 and 21.5-percent in 2010. This increase was also driven in large part by a rise in the rate of current marijuana use among this population.
The annual NSDUH survey, released by SAMHSA at the kickoff of the 22nd annual National Recovery Month (Recovery Month) observance also shows that use rates for nonmedical use of prescription drugs, hallucinogens and inhalants have remained at approximately the same levels as 2009, and are also similar to rates in 2002.
As Mike Riggs noted this morning, the Obama administration last Friday night finally got around to addressing the “We the People” online petitions urging repeal of marijuana prohibition. First it had to deal with the clamor for excising “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance (a cause that attracted 20,328 signatures) and removing the slogan “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency (12,273). By comparison, the eight petitions recommending some form of marijuana legalization totaled more than 150,000 (possibly overlapping) signatures; the most popular one, “Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol,” by itself attracted more than 74,000. If you bother to read drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s embarrassingly weak response, you can see why the White House buried it in the weekend news graveyard.