“It’s the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy,” says Martin Woods, director of Wachovia’s anti-money-laundering unit in London from 2006 to 2009. Woods says he quit the bank in disgust after executives ignored his documentation that drug dealers were funneling money through Wachovia’s branch network.

“If you don’t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you’re missing the point,” Woods says.

With our drug policy, guns, and even our bankers, we’re killing Mexico.

• Article: Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal
• Video: Banks Financing Mexico Drug Gangs Admitted in Wells Deal
• Video: Martin Woods (whistle-blower in Wachovia) on Drug Money Laundering
• Video: Smith (article author) Discusses Drug Money Laundering by U.S. Banks

The Good:

• Could greatly reduce the prevalence of violent raids on private homes
• Would keep otherwise-law-abiding adults out of the criminal justice system
• Would reduce the wasteful use of treatment facilities on individuals just choosing treatment over jail
• Would restore more respect for law enforcement
• Home growing might greatly reduce the market value of cannabis, which might keep cannabis selling industries smaller, less able to lobby for looser regulations, and less able to afford expensive advertising campaigns. Ironically this act might make large-scale dispensaries—who funded the signature drive—less likely to exist.
• The legitimization of cannabis could result in safer usage practices becoming the standard of use.
• Local governments could add regulations to force sellers to provide safety information (e.g. how long impairment could last, how to recognize signs of trouble, recommending the use of vaporizers, harm research results)
• Users who medically benefit from the drug (a small but non-zero percentage of CA’s current users) would have less trouble obtaining it.
• Could significantly shrink black markets, including those that will continue to serve minors. E.g. A teen who can more easily steal pot from adult siblings or friends is less likely to seek out a dealer who may sell other drugs.
• Could reduce alcohol use and associated violence and overdose deaths.
• Could nudge Congress toward more reasonable cannabis laws and more federal research of cannabis (not just limited to harms).

The Bad:

• Commercialization and legitimization will yield increases in the number of users (though in many parts of the state there are plenty of adult users).
• Would make some law enforcement activities more difficult. E.g. users and sellers of harder drugs are often caught due to possession of marijuana, which is generally harder to conceal.
• Home growing doesn’t nudge users toward safer delivery methods or place users in contact with someone who could theoretically provide helpful education/intervention. I say “theoretically” because California’s current policy creates too much incentive for doctors to be “pot docs”, who do little more than sell handwritten licenses.
• Many users will simply combine pot use with alcohol use.
• Even though it would remain illegal, driving under the influence of pot will probably rise. This is concerning, but the best available research is still pretty weak on the notion that casual usage creates significant danger. Pot users appear to be more aware of their impairment.
• Will probably not yield of windfall of tax revenue for California
• More people smoking things. Learning to smoke pot lessons the difficulty and foreignness of trying other smoked substances, which are generally more harmful than pot, including tobacco. If “spliffs”—cannabis with tobacco—became popular, this could lead to more tobacco smoking (which is proven to be carcinogenic) and more complicated addiction.

I still think the good outweighs the bad. Bring on the great democratic experiment!

The desire to use the law to impose one’s morality has to be a human thing because it seems to have been pretty universal. Some have well-meaning reasoned intentions, but many want prohibitions simply because it’s wrong to let gays marry, use “drugs”, watch dirty movies, gamble, use alcohol, be gay, allow women to vote, marry out of race, education your slave… How morality shifts.

What if instead you had law based on the unchanging principle of positive personal liberty? Would society collapse in an orgy of sex, drugs, and Adult Swim marathons? We kinda tried this. The U.S. Constitution was radical in that it mostly limited the behavior of the government rather than of the individual, not that the Good Old Days of the U.S. were the golden age of personal liberty.

As the author of Last Call noted on Fresh Air, Prohibition was the first Amendment really limiting personal conduct, and we later got rid of it. I don’t drink, but I’ll have a sugary rum drink in celebration when DOMA falls.

This writer is obviously on fire about this issue, and while I appreciate the fact that it will expose more people to the wider effects and history of our drug policy, it’s simply unfair to claim that the drug war has met no goals. If the goal of drug prohibition was to completely wipe out drug usage, then sure, complete failure, but many people support prohibitions to keep prevalence of usage below a certain threshold, and they do work for that. The data in Drug War Heresies pretty clearly suggests that commercialization increases use, and illegality provides a non-zero deterrent to purchase and to use for a large part of the population. In that aspect, prohibitions very much likely have kept usage down.

That said, there are a lot of goals to public policy, and in the grand scheme of things, basing a drug policy mostly on reducing the prevalence of mainly marijuana use has had some horrible outcomes that have gone mostly unmeasured and unreported. Thankfully that’s starting to change.

I hope to give my thoughts on the White House’s new “strategy” soon. The Good: some real improvements in goal-setting, promotion of  proven ideas in parole/probation reform. The Bad: More federal dollars towards drug law enforcement; no explicit goals of measuring/reducing the use of militaristic SWAT-style policing; more, more, more foreign meddling shown mostly to cause a lot of harm to foreigners with little evidence of utility in the U.S.

In February, I wrote the following about a drug raid in Missouri:

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.

They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.

Just so we’re clear.

Now there’s video, which you can watch below. It’s horrifying, but I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid…

…There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.

But Jonathan Whitworth won’t be smoking that pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.

The former drug czar, John Walters, said the researchers gravely misinterpret drug violence. He said spikes of attacks and killings after law enforcement crackdowns are almost entirely between criminals, and therefore may, in a horrible, paradoxical way, reflect success.

If only we could regulate more behaviors with so much bloodshed.

[via Pete Guither]

I see this situation as definitive proof that our current drug policies are immoral. At the very least the federal government should not strong arm other countries into fighting the supply of drugs into the U.S. We have no business imposing these harms outside our borders.

Mexicans would be wise to boot their “wage war on the cartels” politicians and try to regulate the supply chain, or return to the good old days when suppliers to the U.S. market were quietly ignored by law enforcement.

Walter McKay provides ongoing coverage on the LEAP blog.

Recently I wrote about the potential e-cigarettes hold for harm reduction, so when the University of Florida proposed a regulation that would expand its tobacco use ban to explicitly include e-cigarettes, I decided to speak up. Today I sent the following e-mail to Paula Fussell, Vice President for Human Resources.

Ms. Fussell,

I applaud the University’s steps to eliminate tobacco usage on campus and to make cessation programs available, but I urge you to reconsider the language in proposed Regulation UF 2.022 (1)(c) that defines the use of an “electronic cigarette or any other device intended to simulate smoking” as “tobacco use”.

I have never smoked, but having many family members who have struggled many years to quit, I find the principle of harm reduction to be an essential part of the public campaign to reduce tobacco-related harms. With 14 million active smokers in the U.S., compelling even a small portion of those to at least partially switch to non-smoking nicotine delivery systems would undoubtedly yield dramatic public health gains.

While extensive research is forthcoming, preliminary studies in several countries suggest that e-cigarettes are a safe delivery device for vaporized nicotine–by itself unlikely to pose significant risk–without the known harmful elements of smoking. The University should certainly not “promote” any product without a conclusive record of safety, but permitting the very discreet use of e-cigarettes by individuals who’ve found great difficulty in quitting smoking would be humane and likely cause harm to no one.

I would hope our goal is not to harm employees through administrative punishment simply because such e-cigarette usage appears similar to smoking. One way to avoid this harm would be to simply exclude the language I mentioned from the proposed regulation and allow state and local laws to apply. Another pragmatic solution would be to maintain a policy (official or unofficial) of ignoring very discreet e-cigarette usage by employees who have demonstrated attempts at smoking cessation. Anecdotally, I’ve yet to encounter a single e-cigarette user on campus, but if visibility is a problem, an effort to reduce that aspect might be more helpful than punishment.

As a University, we should let evidence guide our policies. I’ve yet to see significant evidence that such e-cigarette usage (1) involves “tobacco use”, (2) would harm the user or individuals nearby, (3) would encourage non-smokers to take up tobacco use, (4) would prevent the user from reducing his/her tobacco use, or (5) constitutes a significant problem for the University. We should consider that solving problems that may not exist can have negative consequences.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Stephen Clay

Ms. Fussell kindly replied:

Thank you for your comments. The university has and will be offering free smoking cessation classes to help people stop smoking. The intention is to eliminate all tobacco product on campus.. There is not enough information about any of the new products to ensure that there would not be any long-term negative effects. Enforcement will start with peer pressure and so far there is significant support for the changes. Paula

Sounds like a done deal.

A few organizations have spent enormous amounts of money going through the formal petition process in good faith to reschedule cannabis, and each petition has been met with blatant obstructionism; lengthy delays, arbitrary dismissals, last-minute over-rulings. The current petition hasn’t been acted on since its submission seven and a half years ago.

Two signs suggest we may soon see a relaxation of the unjustified limitations imposed on researchers.

1. One of the last influential and independent voices claiming that the drug had no medicinal properties (ignoring an absurd amount of evidence) was the American Medical Association. Today they finally fixed that. They make a very reasonable request:

Our American Medical Association (AMA) urges that marijuana’s status as a federal Schedule I controlled substance be reviewed with the goal of facilitating the conduct of clinical research and development of cannabinoid-based medicines. This should not be viewed as an endorsement of state-based medical cannabis programs, the legalization of marijuana, or that scientific evidence on the therapeutic use of cannabis meets the current standards for a prescription drug product. [AMA statement pdf]

2. Sativex is an oral spray pharmaceutical made from the whole cannabis plant; it should look suspiciously familiar to these medicinal extracts used around the turn of the century. Already approved in Canada, it’s breezing through U.S. phase III clinical trials for M.S. treatment, with FDA approval potentially a couple years away (barring political shenanigans). Upon approval, whole-plant cannabinoids–not just the isolated THC in dronabinol–can finally be easily studied for the treatment of other ailments.

If a cannabis extract proves to be as effective and safe as many scientists expect, I think it’s likely the public will demand more research in this area via some alteration of the Controlled Substances Act. My bet is that politics will keep marijuana in Schedule I, and (a generic name for) Sativex will be placed in Schedule III. This would ease research considerably while ensuring GW Pharmaceuticals enjoyed a healthy monopoly for years to come.

As for why cannabinoid research is so damned important, see GW Pharm’s site.

The hope is that e-cig use wouldn’t be more harmful than downing a few espressos, but the research to confirm that absolutely needs to be done. In the meantime, we should allow adult smokers to try them. Taking them off the market would be ironic and cruel to today’s smokers and their families, who are absolutely certain that their–now FDA approved–smoking habit is leading them to an early grave.

We should also carefully regulate e-cigs, answering some hard questions. Should we restrict use to places where smoking is allowed? I’m not so sure that’s wise. An e-cig user is obviously taking an expensive step to reduce the harm to herself and others; should we punish her and force her to be around smoke, or use tolerance of e-cigs to encourage other smokers to also switch?

If a bit of vaporized nicotine turns out to be completely benign to bystanders, the public should concede that e-cig use just isn’t smoking (and we should rename it). We coffee and soda addicts enjoy the privilege (burden) of being able to catch our fix nearly anywhere, so we should consider being more accommodating for the sake of public health. We’re often talking about our parents and relatives.

Now it looks like Philip Morris may buy exclusive rights to e-cigs in the U.S. If their intent is to kill e-cigs, it would be consistent with their evil. On the other hand, PM would likely have the resources to get e-cigs through FDA approval, so literally the lives of many nicotine addicts could be saved if we allow PM to use its marketing muscle to turn smokers into e-cig users. Do we hate Philip Morris more than we care for the well-being of smokers?

Update: Great info on this topic at TobaccoHarmReduction.org, run by Dr. Carl Phillips, Associate Professor in the University of Alberta Department of Public Health Sciences.

Groups that are truly anti-smoking should embrace any alternative, but those that are more interested in making life difficult for smokers or nicotine users do not like these products because they could make nicotine users more comfortable.

One of the site’s headings: “Smokers have more choices than just quitting or dying.” Can’t agree more.