• Cannabis & Hemp - Hot Off The 'Net

    The Link Between Marijuana and Schizophrenia

    By Maia Szalavitz

    Since the days of Reefer Madness, scientists have sought to understand the complex connection between marijuana and psychosis. Cannabis can cause short-term psychotic experiences, such as hallucinations and paranoia, even in healthy people, but researchers have also long noted a link between marijuana use and the chronic psychotic disorder, schizophrenia.

    Repeatedly, studies have found that people with schizophrenia are about twice as likely to smoke pot as those who are unaffected. Conversely, data suggest that those who smoke cannabis are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as nonsmokers. One widely publicized 2007 review of the research even concluded that trying marijuana just once was associated with a 40% increase in risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

  • Drug Policy - Question of the Week

    Is alcohol a dangerous drug?

    Drug Policy Question of the Week – 7-19-10

    As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 7-19-10. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/2984

    Question of the Week: Is alcohol a dangerous drug?

    Let’s look at some statistics.

    A 2009 report from the National Center for Health Statistics estimated that about 22,000 people died of alcohol-induced causes in 2006.

    Numbers from 1993 quoted in a 2009 study from the Journal of Psychopharmacology stated,

    “Four per cent of the global burden of disease is attributable to alcohol (about as much as that to tobacco and hypertension) and causally related to more than 60 medical conditions.”

    An editorial in the New Zealand Journal of Medicine calculated that

    “The lethal dose of alcohol divided by a typical recreational dose [in other words, its safety ratio] is 10, which places it closer to heroin [safety ratio – 6), and GHB [safety ratio – 8] in terms of danger from overdose”

    The editorial further asserted that alcohol is considerably more dangerous than LSD [with a safety ratio of 1000] or cannabis, whose safety ratio is greater than 1,000.

    A 1998 Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis found that,

    “Federal statistics show that a large percentage of criminal offenders were under the influence of alcohol alone when they committed their crimes (36.3%, or a total of [1.9 million] offenders). Federal research also shows for more than 40% of convicted murderers being held in either jail or State prison, alcohol use was a factor in the crime.”

    That Journal of Psychopharmacology study compared alcohol to GHB and concluded,

    “the degree of danger to public health caused by ethanol is similar to that caused by GHB.”

    In the United States, GHB is a Schedule 1 drug, the same classification as heroin.

    These facts and others like them can be found in the Alcohol chapter of Drug War Facts.org.

    Questions concerning these or other facts concerning drug policy can be e-mailed to [email protected].

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

    Hemp History

    Drug Policy Question of the Week – 7-17-10

    As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 7-17-10. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/2982

    Question of the Week: What is hemp’s history in United States?

    A 2000 report from the United States Department of Agriculture recounted,

    “The first records of hemp cultivation and use are from China, where the species most likely originated. Migrating peoples likely brought hemp to Europe where, by the 16th century, it was widely distributed, cultivated for fiber, and the seed cooked with barley or other grains and eaten.”

    “The Puritans brought hemp to New England in 1645 as a fiber source for household spinning and weaving … Cultivation spread to Virginia and, in 1775, to Kentucky, where the crop grew so well a commercial cordage industry developed. The hemp industry flourished in Kentucky, Missouri, and Illinois between 1840 and 1860 because of strong demand for sailcloth and cordage by the U.S. Navy.”

    For her article in the 2009 UCLA Law Review, Christine Kolosov, reported,

    “So important was hemp to the earliest settlers that in 1619, the Jamestown colony passed a law making it illegal not to grow the crop. Colonies in Massachusetts and Connecticut passed similar laws in 1631 and 1632. The first drafts of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were both penned on hemp paper, and hemp cultivation continued well into the twentieth century as patriotic farmers responded to the government’s call by drastically increasing production during World War I and World War II.”

    But according to the USDA,

    “Production peaked in 1943 and 1944. After the war, production rapidly declined as imports resumed and legal restrictions were reimposed. A small hemp fiber industry continued in Wisconsin until 1958.”

    These facts and others like them can be found in the Hemp chapter of Drug War Facts.org.

    Questions concerning these or other facts concerning drug policy can be e-mailed to [email protected].

  • Focus Alerts

    #442 Battle Of Words In The War On Drugs

    Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010
    Subject: #442 Battle Of Words In The War On Drugs

    BATTLE OF WORDS IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

    **********************************************************************

    DrugSense FOCUS Alert #442 – Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

    The Miami Herald’s syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts column below has
    been printed in various newspapers as you may see at
    http://www.mapinc.org/author/Leonard+Pitts

    All are appropriate targets for you letters to the
    editor.

    An anonymous donor has challenged DrugSense and MAP to raise $25,000
    in new donations and/or increases in current periodic donations. Once
    the goal is achieved the donor will provide us with $25,000. Today we
    are about four fifths of the way to this important goal. Please help
    us meet the challenge! http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm

    **********************************************************************

    BATTLE OF WORDS IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

    Bishop Ron Allen probably thinks Alice Huffman has been smoking
    something.

    Huffman, president of the California Conference of the NAACP, recently
    declared support for an initiative that, if passed by voters in
    November, will decriminalize the use and possession of marijuana.
    Huffman sees it as a civil rights issue.

    In response, Allen, founder of the International Faith-Based
    Coalition, a religious social activism group, has come out swinging.
    “Why would the state NAACP advocate for blacks to stay high?” he
    demanded this month at a news conference in Sacramento. “It’s going to
    cause crime to go up. There will be more drug babies.” Allen wants
    Huffman to resign.

    But Huffman is standing firm, both in resisting calls for her head and
    in framing this as an issue of racial justice. There is, she notes, a
    pronounced racial disparity in the enforcement of marijuana laws.
    She’s right, of course. For that matter, there is a disparity in the
    enforcement of drug laws, period.

    In 2007, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, 9.5
    percent of blacks (about 3.6 million people) and 8.2 percent of whites
    (about 16 million) older than 12 reported using some form of illicit
    drug in the previous month. Yet though there are more than “four
    times” as many white drug users as black ones, blacks represent better
    than half those in state prison on drug charges, according to The
    Sentencing Project. The same source says that though two-thirds of
    regular crack users are white or Latino, 82 percent of those sentenced
    in federal court for crack crimes are black. In some states, black men
    are jailed on drug charges at a rate 50 times higher than whites.

    And so on.

    So while the bishop hyperventilates about blacks “staying” high (?),
    he ignores a clearer and more present danger. As Michelle Alexander
    argues in her book The New Jim Crow, those absurd sentencing rates,
    combined with laws making it legal to discriminate against even
    nonviolent former felons in hiring, housing and education, constitute
    nothing less than a new racial caste system.

    Allen worries about a baby being born addicted to pot, but the
    likelier scenario is that she will be born to a father unable to
    secure a job so he can support her, an apartment for her to live in or
    an education so he can better himself for her — all because he got
    caught with a joint 10 years ago.

    It is a cruel and ludicrous predicament.

    And apparently Huffman, like a growing number of cops, judges, DEA
    agents, pundits and even conservative icons like the late William F.
    Buckley Jr. and Milton Friedman, has decided to call the war on drugs
    what it is: a failure. It is time to find a better way, preferably one
    that emphasizes treatment over incarceration.

    You’d think that would be a no-brainer.

    We have spent untold billions of dollars, ruined untold millions of
    lives and racked up the highest incarceration rate in the world to
    fight drug use. Yet we saw casual drug use “rise” by 2,300 percent
    between 1970 and 2003, according to Law Enforcement Against
    Prohibition, an advocacy group. And as drug use skyrocketed, we find
    that we have moved the needle on “addiction” not even an inch, up or
    down.

    All we have managed, and at a ruinous cost, is to relearn the lesson
    of 1933, when alcohol Prohibition ended: You cannot jail or punish
    people out of wanting what they want.

    I’ve never used drugs. I share Allen’s antipathy toward them. But it
    seems silly and self-defeating to allow that reflexive antipathy to
    bind us to the same strategy that has failed for 30 years.

    By now, one thing should be obvious about our war on
    drugs.

    Drugs won.

    **********************************************************************

    Suggestions for writing letters are at our Media Activism Center
    http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides

    Over thirty thousand published letters provide examples at
    http://www.mapinc.org/lte/

    **********************************************************************

    Prepared by: Richard Lake www.mapinc.org

    =.

  • Cannabis & Hemp

    US CA: OPED: Decriminalize Marijuana: It’s Far Less Harmful

    Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
    Pubdate: Fri, 16 Jul 2010
    Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
    Webpage: http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_15525522
    Copyright: 2010 San Jose Mercury News
    Contact: [email protected]
    Author: Larry A. Bedard, MD
    Note: Larry A. Bedard, MD, is past president of the American College
    of Emergency Medicine and is a California Medical Association
    delegate. He wrote this article for this newspaper.
    Cited: Proposition 19 http://www.taxcannabis.org/
    Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Proposition+19

    DECRIMINALIZE MARIJUANA: IT’S FAR LESS HARMFUL THAN ALCOHOL

    The California Medical Association in October declared the
    criminalization of marijuana to be a failed public health policy. Its
    assessment is appropriate.

    Marijuana prohibition is a classic case of the so-called cure
    (criminalization) being worse than the disease (the private
    recreational use of marijuana).

    Consider the questionable efficacy of our present policy. Forty-three
    percent of Americans over the age of 12 admit to having used
    marijuana, and nearly one in 10 Californians use it now. At an
    estimated $15 billion, marijuana is California’s largest cash crop.

    Now let’s consider the costs of prohibition. In the Golden State,
    taxpayers spend $300 million annually to arrest and prosecute 60,000
    people — largely Latinos and African-Americans — for possessing
    minor, recreational amounts of marijuana. Prohibition is also
    empowering drug cartels, particularly criminal enterprises in Mexico,
    which now reap between 60 percent and 70 percent of their total
    revenue from the exportation of marijuana to America and threaten to
    turn Mexico into a “narco” state.

    [snip]

    Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10.n561.a06.html

  • Cannabis & Hemp - Drug Policy

    US OR: Crime, Medical Marijuana Initiatives Qualify for Ballot

    Pubdate: Sat, 17 Jul 2010
    Source: Statesman Journal (Salem, OR)
    Webpage: http://mapinc.org/url/YNoZGytL
    Copyright: 2010 Statesman Journal
    Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/QEzJupzz
    Author: Peter Wong, Statesman Journal
    Cited: http://www.coalitionforpatientsrights2010.com/
    Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?253 (Cannabis – Medicinal – U.S.)
    Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/dispensaries

    CRIME, MEDICAL MARIJUANA INITIATIVES QUALIFY FOR BALLOT

    Both Receive Enough Signatures for Voters’consideration Nov. 2

    Oregonians will vote Nov. 2 on mandatory prison time for repeat
    felony sex offenders and drunken drivers, and state licensing of
    dispensaries for purchases of medical marijuana.

    Secretary of State Kate Brown announced Friday that both had obtained
    more than the 82,769 signatures required to qualify them for the ballot.

    Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10.n560.a04.html

  • Hot Off The 'Net - International

    ‘Plan Colombia’ Turns 10

    Looking at the Effects of Bill Clinton’s Signature Drug War Project

    By Phillip S. Smith, Drug War Chronicle

    The United States has been trying to suppress Colombian coca production and cocaine trafficking since at least the time of Ronald Reagan, but the contemporary phase of US intervention in Colombia in the name of the war on drugs celebrated its 10th anniversary this week. As Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) security analyst Adam Isaacson pointed out Wednesday in a cogent essay, “Colombia: Don’t Call It A Model,” it was on July 13, 2000, that President Bill Clinton signed into law a $1.3 billion package of mainly military assistance known as Plan Colombia.

  • Drug Policy - Letter of the Week

    Web: Letter Of The Week – Prohibition of Drugs Sows Violence

    Newshawk: Published Letters Awards www.mapinc.org/lteaward.htm

    LETTER OF THE WEEK

    PROHIBITION OF DRUGS SOWS VIOLENCE

    The story about the havoc wrought by Craig Petties (June 27 and July
    4 special report, “Blood trade”) was tragic, but it could have been
    avoided. Violence is the predictable and tragic consequence of drug
    prohibition. People continue to demand drugs in large quantities,
    drug suppliers have to resort to violence to settle disputes because
    they are barred from formal legal channels, and the conditions
    created by prohibition itself make it more profitable to be a
    criminal. The same factors that produced the horrors of alcohol
    prohibition have also produced the horrors of drug prohibition.

    Blood and violence are the price we pay for prohibition. It’s a
    price that’s far too high.

    Art Carden

    Memphis

    Pubdate: Wed, 7 Jul 2010

    Source: Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)

    Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n503/a11.html,
    http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n504/a01.html,
    http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n519/a09.html and
    http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n520/a01.html