CJ Trowbridge

2020-06-16

Drugs and Society

Reaction Paper – Section 6

• Illegal drugs and how they got that way: marijuana
  • Most drugs were previously legal and later banned
  • 20 million Americans have been incarcerated for marijuana since it was banned
    • At the time, Marijuana was growing all over the country as a weed and had been enjoyed for centuries by all kinds of people dating back to ancient India, Greece, and China.
  • Marijuana grows everywhere in the world since ancient times.
    • Napoleon brought it to Europe
    • It came to the new world with the conquistadors
  • All drugs are banned not because they are harmful but because they are associated with a particular group seen as deviant
  • Marijuana took off in America at the same time as the religious right was trying to ban alcohol
    • This led to lots of new interest in marijuana
      • This is closely related to the rise in jazz music at the same time
    • This also led to the religious right seeing marijuana as bad
  • Entrepreneurial journalists wrote false and sensationalist stories connecting marijuana use by black people to violence and crime
  • Banning marijuana in the south was seen as banning black violence
  • Throughout the south, marijuana bans were used to mass incarcerate people of color for decades or even life sentences
  • Federal politics adopted these policies nationwide, leading to the war on drugs and widespread mass incarceration of minorities under the false pretense of fighting crime and deviance
  • Marijuana became connected with immigration politics. The idea was that finding a way to ban Mexican immigrants so they would leave white communities and states.
  • The federal ban on machine guns was used as a framework to ban marijuana nationwide
    • Federal marijuana stamps were required for possession though none were printed
  • Dissenting opinions were presented by many experts at the time including a four-year study commissioned by the city of New York which found;
    • Marijuana is not addictive
    • Marijuana use is not widespread among children
    • Marijuana is not a determining factor in major crimes
    • Public statements about the purported social problems caused by marijuana are unfounded
  • Ansligner, the Caesar of the early drug war, bans further research on marijuana
    • He also starts targeting celebrities for arrest and incarceration to make headlines about his crusade against marijuana
  • Hitler’s Blitzkrieg was a quick tank invasion across all of Europe
    • Running tank crews 24/7 was powered by methamphetamine
  • Hitler injected meth at least five times a day
  • Japanese military had similar use of meth
  • Meth was widely adopted as a way to improve many of the virtues that were seen as core values of America
    • Truck drivers could drive all night
    • Writers could write all night
    • Artists could make art all night
    • Soldiers work longer and harder
    • Etc
  • Meth became the most prescribed drug in history
  • Elvis Pressley was famously introduced to meth by the army
  • Physicians developed 39 common reasons to prescribe amphetamines
    • Everything from hiccups to depression
  • Timothy Leary got the federal marijuana ban overturned in the supreme court
  • The Controlled substances act was then passed which banned many drugs
• Can Drug Policy Prevent Reefer Madness
  • Do strict alcohol and marijuana laws actually prevent their use?
    • although strict alcohol laws may prevent kids from drinking, strict marijuana laws don’t do much at all to curb use.
  • The [US] treats alcoholic beverage purchase, possession and, in some states, consumption as criminal offenses. It also has the strictest marijuana laws: Purchase and possession (in some states) of marijuana are criminal misdemeanors, and 23 of the 50 states require mandatory sentencing for possession of relatively small amounts.
  • Canada has a more moderate stance on alcohol and drug use. The legal drinking age is 19 in most of Canada, but only 18 in three of its provinces. Marijuana possession and use in Canada is treated as a statutory offense (in most cases), resulting in a fine but not a criminal record or incarceration.
  • The Dutch have no minimum drinking age, but 16 is the minimum age to purchase alcohol. Regulated sales of small amounts of cannabis in “coffee shops” are legal for anyone over the age of 18. Although it is technically illegal to grow and sell the plant, police don’t make drug enforcement a priority.
  • The data provide no evidence that strict cannabis laws in the United States provide protective effects compared to the similarly restrictive but less vigorously enforced laws in Canada, and the regulated access approach in the Netherlands
• new age of marijuana regulation
  • Although international drug treaties prohibit the production, distribution, and possession of cannabis for non-medical and non-scientific purposes, several jurisdictions have implemented new laws and policies, including some that remove criminal penalties for possession of small doses of cannabis
  • In Spain, Cannabis Social Clubs (CSCs) have been operating since the early 1990s. These clubs produce and share cannabis among their members, both for medical and non-medical purposes.
  • the first Belgian CSC was established in 2006.
    • cultivation of cannabis is currently still illegal under Belgian drug law.
  • the first cannabis retail stores in Colorado opened following the legalisation of cannabis in this state in 2012.
  • Stores in Washington are expected to open in mid 2014.
  • Uruguay has recently become the first country to legalise and regulate production and sale of cannabis for nonmedical and non-scientific purposes, following intense debate and attended by critique from the INCB
  • The review of these four countries’ cannabis production and distribution regimes for non-medical and nonscientific purposes allowed us to identify a number of distinguishing features.
    • in Belgium and Spain there is covert distribution within CSCs
    • in Colorado, Washington, and Uruguay this will take the form of an overt marketplace, with Uruguay allowing cannabis clubs as well.
  • It’s time for a new discussion of marijuana’s risks
    • The benefits and harms of medical marijuana can be debated, but more states are legalizing pot, even for recreational use. A new evaluation of marijuana’s risks is overdue.
    • The greatest concern with tobacco smoking is cancer, so it’s reasonable to start there with pot smoking.
      • A 2005 systematic review in the International Journal of Cancer pooled the results of six case-control studies. No association was found between smoking marijuana and lung cancer
      • There’s no evidence, or not enough to say, of a link between pot use and esophageal cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, penile cancer or bladder cancer.
      • There’s also no evidence, or not enough to say, that pot has any effect on sperm or eggs that could increase the risk of cancer in any children of pot smokers.
    • Driving while impaired is a major cause of injury and death in the United States. Six systematic reviews were considered of fair or good quality by the national academies, and the most recent one pooled three of the others. It contained evidence from 21 studies in 13 countries representing almost 240,000 participants.
      • For people who reported marijuana use, or had THC detected through testing, their odds of being involved in a motor vehicle accident increased by 20 to 30 percent, the study found. This is, of course, a relative increase, and shouldn’t be confused with the overall percentage chance of getting in an accident, which is much smaller.
    • There’s moderate evidence, from many studies, that learning, memory and attention can be impaired in the 24 hours after marijuana use. There’s limited evidence, however, that this translates into worse outcomes in academic achievement, employment, income or social functioning, or that these effects linger after the pot has “worn off.”
    • Are people who smoke pot more likely to develop mental health problems? Or are people with mental health problems more likely to smoke pot? It’s complicated.
    • risk of a “contact high,” the amount of THC detectable in secondhand smoke is negligible.
    • Almost all the harms the medical literature focuses on involve smoked cannabis. We know little to nothing about edibles and other means of administration. Nor do we have any consistent manner of measuring the level of exposure.
    • it’s important to note that the harms we know about now are practically nil compared with that of many other drugs, and that marijuana’s effects are clearly less harmful than those associated with tobacco or alcohol abuse.
  • cannabis capitalism
    • Two hours north of San Francisco, in Mendocino county, orderly roadside vineyards give way to the rugged forests and misty coast of the Emerald Triangle, America’s most celebrated marijuana growing region.
    • In California alone, tens of thousands of farms grow the plant, which is increasingly processed into gorgeously packaged vape pens and edibles marketed to customers outside the core stoner demographic of young men.
    • since Colorado opened the world’s first regulated recreational marijuana market, the business climate for weed companies has proven immensely difficult for a range of reasons, including high taxes, rapidly changing regulations and a still robust illicit market.
    • While white Americans use marijuana and other drugs at roughly equal rates to African Americans and Latinos, in virtually every respect, racial minorities have been disproportionately incarcerated and otherwise punished for involvement with drugs, including selling marijuana.
    • One company, Acreage Holdings, which closed on $119m in investment capital this summer, has enlisted the former Republican speaker of the House John Boehner to help it navigate the market. Boehner has never smoked pot – “he hasn’t felt the need or inclination”, according to a spokesperson – and he declared himself “unalterably opposed” to legalization when he was in office. With legal marijuana now one of the country’s fastest-growing industries, who profits is as much of a civil rights question as who gets punished.
    • The industry’s moral challenge is to ensure the groups who have suffered the most under the drug war can participate in the green rush and enjoy the spoils of legalization.
    • Oakland’s equity program had been laboriously developed over years to maximize not just jobs for Oaklanders but local ownership of marijuana companies.
    • Marijuana farming in California has never been easy. Those who succeed are skilled, cunning and well-versed in the law.
  • A billion dollar industry, a racist legacy
    • Three years ago, Jesce Horton, a former engineer in his early 30s, quit his corporate job to set up his own small, family-owned cannabis cultivation business in Portland, Oregon.
    • the young entrepreneur sees the partial legalization of cannabis as an opportunity not just for business, but to acknowledge past wrongdoing and seek economic justice.
    • There is an obvious chasm between the number of people of color who have been jailed for simple possession during the “war on drugs” and the number of white men who are starting to make millions in profit from the industry.
    • Last year, an investigation by Buzzfeed estimated that less than 1% of cannabis dispensary owners across the country were black.
    • Solutions are now being explored through reparations – mainly in the form of measures addressing this imbalance. For the first time, policy and local pieces of concrete legislation in cities including Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon, encourage participation in the regulated marijuana industry by communities of color, or reinvestment into these communities.
    • Cannabis culture may be open in ethos, but so far, with few exceptions, the industry has proven itself glacier white. Horton and fellow advocates offer three reasons for this.
      • most states have barred anyone with a criminal record from entering the industry. The US is home to an 70 million Americans with criminal records, and a  number of those are men of color (according to a Pew Research Center  in 2013, black men were six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men).
      • depending on the state, the economic barriers to entering the industry (application fees, license fees and startup fees) are extortionately high.
      • even where there are funds to be sourced, communities of color are often loath to take a chance on openly doing business with a drug they have seen too many of their kin targeted, criminalized and locked up over.
    • “Unless measures are taken to recognize and reconcile the harm done by the war on drugs, unless we reach out to communities of color to include them, communities will see legal cannabis as a slap in the face and won’t use it,” Horton says.
    • the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that over the course of the first decade of the 21st century, even as cannabis legalization was beginning to take hold, cannabis arrests increased, rather than the opposite. The study recorded 8m marijuana arrests across the country, 88% of which were for possession alone.
    • Oakland, California, has offered perhaps the most groundbreaking laws to date addressing the issue.
      • Under new rules, at least half of new cannabis business permit holders, issued by the city at a maximum rate of eight a year, will have to go to “equity applicants”. Applicants must earn less than 80% of the city’s median income; and they must either have been residents of police beats disproportionately targeted by law enforcement in recent decades, or they must have been sent to prison on cannabis charges within the last 20 years.
    • The Dirty Secret of California’s Cannabis, It’s Dirty
      • Someone’s gotta grow it, and in Northern California, that often means rogue farmers squatting on public lands, tainting the ecosystem with pesticides and other chemicals, then harvesting their goods and leaving behind what is essentially a mini superfund site. Plenty of growers run legit, organic operations—but cannabis can be a dirty, dirty game.
      • As cannabis use goes recreational in California, producers are facing a reckoning: They’ll either have to clean up their act, or get out of the legal market. Until the federal prohibition on marijuana ends, growers here can skip the legit marketplace and ship to black markets in the many states where the drug is still illegal. That’s bad news for public health, and even worse news for the wildlife of California.
      • Labs are checking marijuana products for contaminants as well as toxic agricultural chemicals
    • there was less crime in border states after medical weed was legalized
      • Medical marijuana has proven indispensable for many people, from autistic children to veterans with PTSD. There’s even a case to be made that, used as a painkiller, marijuana could help solve the country’s opioid problem.
      • A new study suggests that medical marijuana laws (now on the books in 29 states and Washington, DC) have led to a decrease in violent crime in states that border Mexico. Areas closest to the border saw the most pronounced drop overall, as well as in crimes related to drug trafficking, which suggests that legalizing the production and distribution of marijuana in the United States is hurting Mexican drug trafficking organizations.
      • To see how changes in state laws affected traffickers, researchers used data from Uniform Crime Reporting Program, an FBI-maintained database. They found that MMLs were linked to a 12.5 percent decrease in violent crime—homicides, aggravated assaults, and robberies—in states bordering Mexico. Using data from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, they attributed the decrease in homicides largely to a drop in drug-related killings.
      • drug markets are, after all, markets. They’re violent, but defined by rules of supply and demand; illegal, but not beyond the law of competition. High-tech fences haven’t kept out drugs or deterred the violence associated with their distribution, but legal, non-violent competitors just might.
    • getting worse, not better
      • In the forests of Northern California, raids by law enforcement officials continue to uncover illicit marijuana farms.
      • In Southern California, hundreds of illegal delivery services and pot dispensaries, some of them registered as churches, serve a steady stream of customers.
      • In Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, the sheriff’s office recently raided an illegal cannabis production facility that was processing 500 pounds of marijuana a day.
      • the unlicensed, illegal market is still thriving and in some areas has even expanded
      • “We are the taxpayers — no one else should be operating,” said Robert Taft Jr., whose licensed cannabis business in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, has seen sales drop in recent months.
      • Only 620 cannabis shops have been licensed in California so far. Colorado, with a population one-sixth the size of California, has 562 licensed recreational marijuana stores.
      • many cannabis businesses are reluctant to go through the cumbersome and costly process to obtain the licenses that became mandatory last year
      • roughly 14 million pounds of marijuana is grown in California annually
        • less than 20 percent is consumed in California
      • criminal enforcement in the past had disproportionately targeted people of color.
      • “We can’t do Drug War 2.0,” she said.
      • Licensed dispensaries pay a cumulative state and local tax rate of 32.25 percent. Unlicensed shops pay no tax.