NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR THE REFORM OF MARIJUANA LAWS
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. . . a weekly service on news related to marijuana prohibition.

November 21, 1996

(Meanwhile) Drug Czar's Office Refuses NORML Meeting

Supreme Court Overturns Ohio Traffic Stop Decision

German State Plans To Sell Marijuana Over The Counter

The state Health Minister, Heide Moser, said authorities were losing credibility by treating marijuana as if it were as a dangerous as other "harder" drugs such as cocaine and heroin. "General warnings about the dangers of drugs are no longer being taken seriously," she said.

The idea drew criticism from the German federal government whose spokesman said that, "Schleswig-Holstein's stance has little to do with reality."

The state, which is governed by a coalition of Social Democrats and environmentalist Greens, said it had not yet decided precisely where and how much cannabis would be available if its project wins approval.

Marijuana is technically illegal in Germany, but the Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that possession of small amounts of cannabis for personal use should no longer be punished.

-END-

MORE THAN 10 MILLION MARIJUANA ARRESTS SINCE 1965...ANOTHER EVERY 54 SECONDS!

Regional and other news

Correction On Corrections

According to "Kitzhaber vows to help if Measure 47 passes" in the Nov. 8, 1996 Oregonian (pp. A1 & A17), "Measure 47 cuts property taxes by about $500 million the first year, or about 20 percent." That would mean the state's annual budget would be about $2.5 billion a year, or about $5 billion biennially. According to the same report, the state's budget for corrections "could reach $953 million in the next biennium," almost $500 million a year - one-quarter of projected state revenue under Measure 47.

If The Oregonian printed a correction to its Nov. 8 story, the editor missed it. Assuming the Nov. 20 figures are accurate however, that would mean an increase of $4 billion for Oregon's biennial budget, from $5 billion to $9 billion. Consequently, a state corrections budget of $953 in the next biennium would amount to only 10.58 percent of the budget.

However, the editor did leave himself some room for error. As noted in the Nov. 7 Portland NORML news item, "Just a few months ago, the state was predicting a 158% increase in prisoners over the next 10 years." That estimate has been reduced somewhat in recent months - the report is not handy - but clearly state officials still anticipate an increase of well more than 100 percent in the next decade. That should bring the figure up from 10.58 percent to 25 percent within a decade, instead of immediately. Of course, the figures will look better if Oregon's economic boom continues for the next decade. But they will also look much worse if a recession occurs.

There have been no reports to suggest that state officials will re-examine exactly how many pot smokers and drug offenders they are wasting money on, or whether reforming Oregon's drug laws or enforcement policies might have a significant impact on state or county budgets. Apparently the party line will continue to be that the need for new prisons is driven by the mandatory minimums established for violent offenders by voters who passed Measure 11 in 1994.

23 Percent Of Portlanders' Cars Prowled, 5 Percent Of Portlanders Burglarized

Perhaps more resources would be available to fight real criminals if the city and Multnomah County weren't spending more than half of their public-safety budgets arresting and prosecuting at most 13.8 percent of all drug offenders (according to estimates based on government statistics, cited in "Oregon and Multnomah County Arrests For Drug Offenses, 1986-1995 - 13.80 Percent of Multnomah County's Estimated 1995 Illegal Drug Consumers Busted," in the Sept. 5, 1996 Portland NORML Weekly News Release at http://www.pdxnorml.org/090596.html#oam). According to the district attorney's office, this is the highest rate in the region. "Imprisoned marijuana growers get a break," from the Oct. 13, 1995 Oregonian, posted at http://www.pdxnorml.org/O_Imprisoned_101395.html, as well as arrest statistics from the DEA and Portland Police Drugs and Vice Division, cited parenthetically in the article "America's No. 1 Crop - Marijuana Tops The Charts," posted at http://www.pdxnorml.org/No1_Crop_0486.html, suggest that the Portland area and Oregon in general must have the highest or close to the highest rate of prosecutions in the country for marijuana cultivation, if not for other drug offenses.

With so many police out chasing flower growers, rapists and other real criminals continue to enjoy an enforcement holiday. As noted in "Despite police effort, serial rapist slips away," in the Nov. 15, 1996 Oregonian (pp. E1 & E10), "In Portland, police make arrests in about 30 percent of reported rape cases. That is consistent with the clearance rate of other violent crimes in Portland. ... According to the state's Law Enforcement Data System statistics, only about 30 percent of crimes such as murder, robbery and aggravated assault are resolved. Last year, Portland police cleared 114 of 372 reported rape cases by arrest. [30.64 percent - ed.] Portland police have a better rate of arrest for rape cases than the state as a whole. Last year in Oregon, police arrested 351 people on rape charges, which is 26 percent of the 1,312 rapes reported."

If, as suggested by the article, "Only half of rapes are reported to police," Portland and Oregon police could be arresting about the same proportion of drug offenders as rapists.

There's just one problem. If 1,312 rapes were reported, and twice that many, or 2,624 really happened, there would be no more than about 2,600 rapists out there. The state and counties have that many jail beds, with plenty to spare. But according to the most conservative government statistics, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, there are at least 194,858 illegal-drug users in Oregon and 30,873 illegal-drug users in Portland (as documented in "Let's Do The Numbers," in the Aug. 29, 1996 Portland NORML Weekly News Release, posted at http://www.pdxnorml.org/082996.html#ldt). Neither the state, with about 9,000 beds - including those out-of-state - nor Portland (or Multnomah County), with about 1,500 beds, has that much room. Not a single public official in Portland or Oregon has addressed the fact that the emperor has no clothes - that there will never be enough money to arrest or prosecute so many illegal-drug users, or even illegal-drug traffickers. Virtually every public official in Oregon is thus complicit in a de facto policy that strengthens the most clever and most ruthless and most efficient segments of the illegal-drug market, while weeding out the most stupid, weak and incompetent.

That is not a policy likely to make anyone feel safer, on reflection.

Marijuana, they say, helps control nausea and muscle spasms, ease eye pressure and pain and stimulate appitites. Pot patients insist it works better than other drugs, including the highly expensive Marinol, a pill form of marijuana that has the same active ingredient, THC. [Natural marijuana has dozens of varying cannabinoids, any or all of which might be of varying help with different maladies. The particular THC molecule synthetically produced as Marinol is only the most prevalent cannabinoid found in most marijuana. - ed.]

"We are sick people. We are desperate people," says Elvy Musikka of Florida, who has glaucoma and carries her daily ration of marijuana "brownies" in her pocket-book. She bakes them from the 300 joints the National Institute on Drug Abuse sends her every month.

"This medicine gives us quality of life." The government crop is harvested on a 7.5-acre pot farm at the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences aat the University of Mississippi. From there, the marijuana is shipped by airplane to Raleigh, N.C., where the cigarettes are rolled by machine, packed in canisters and delivered to medical centers for the eight patients to pick up.

The entire operation costs about $200,000 a year.

Some say the government position reflects the hypocrisy of a political war on drugs that denies many seriously ill people a cheap medicine whose benefits are so obvious the government supplies it. They point out that more than 20 states have laws allowing the medical use of marijuana, but they are ineffective as long as the federal ban remains.

"US Drug Czar Calls State Marijuana Measure 'Tragedy'"

Health:
But he will not say whether federal officials will try to block the initiative or prosecute doctors who recommend the drug.

By Faye Fiore, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON--Calling the state's passage of Proposition 215 a "tremendous tragedy," White House drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey said Friday the administration will step up its efforts to discourage other states from following California's lead in legalizing marijuana for medicinal use.

But perhaps more significant was what McCaffrey would not say. After two days of meetings with California and federal law enforcement officials, he refused to comment on whether the federal government will work to nullify the just-passed initiative or move in to prosecute doctors who recommend marijuana to their patients.

"There could not be a worse message to young people," McCaffrey said, referring to Proposition 215 and an even broader initiative passed in Arizona last week. "Just when the nation is trying its hardest to educate teenagers not to use psychoactive drugs, now they are being told that marijuana and other drugs are good, they are medicine."

McCaffrey said the Clinton administration has made no decision on whether to take legal action to block the initiatives, which permit doctors to recommend marijuana for use by patients with cancer, AIDS and a variety of other illnesses. "The attorney general and lawyers will have to sort through what is involved. I don't think there is an obvious answer," McCaffrey said. "What is not at stake is federal law. Federal law is not jeopardized."

The strategy for now will be to track trends in both states, looking for increases in drug-related accidents, teen pregnancy, work absences and hospital emergency cases, he said.

"By our judgment, increased drug abuse in every category will be the inevitable result of the referenda," McCaffrey said. "We will ensure that the rest of the country sees clearly what happened in these two states."

Bert Brandenburg, chief spokesman at the U.S. Justice Department, said federal prosecutors have not decided whether to become involved in trying to strike down the marijuana measure. "I think everybody is still mulling over what to do," he said.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, speaking two days after the election, said that individual incidents of illegal marijuana trafficking or possession that may arise out of the new measure will still be prosecuted. "We're going to enforce federal law and we're going to do it on a case-by-case basis," she said. But California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren and Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates--both vocal critics of the measure--wasted no time moving to block it. Terming the proposition's passage "legal anarchy" and "an unprecedented mess," they initiated the meetings with McCaffrey, Drug Enforcement Administration chief Thomas Constantine and other federal officials.

Supporters of Proposition 215 asserted that it is virtually unprecedented for state and local officials to lobby the federal government against a proposition that was clearly the will of the voters--passing easily with 56%.

"This is the approach you would expect from George III when the colonists raised issues about how they want to be governed," said Eric E. Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a small Washington think tank. "There is an arrogance and contempt for the voters who have supported Proposition 215. The power to write the laws flows from the people, not from the top."

While cocaine and opium have been approved for restricted medicinal use, federal law classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, a category reserved for the most dangerous of substances that "lack an accepted medical use."

Backers of California's initiative have vowed to promote their cause nationally and try to persuade every state to approve marijuana for medical use, a trend they said law enforcement will be unable to stop.

"They are trying to put fingers in a dam that is crumbling," said Dr. Lester Grinspoon, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Marijuana is a remarkable medicine and that news cannot be withheld anymore. This is going to happen. California has led the way."

Arizona's Proposition 200, an even broader measure, legalizes medical use of marijuana and other drugs now beyond the reach of doctors. It also specified that nonviolent drug users convicted of first- and second-time use of recreational drugs be given probation and rehabilitation instead of prison time.

But McCaffrey said voters in both states were duped by advertising campaigns that exploited the needs of the terminally ill.

"This was a hoax. A lot of people heard terminally ill and pot and figured so what? Never mind that this authorized people to grow pot in their backyard," he said.

While predicting that only bad could come from the initiative's passage, McCaffrey said he had "great faith" that large numbers of doctors would not recommend marijuana "when there are clearly better treatments."

And eventually, he said, the nation will come to the right conclusion about marijuana as medicine.

"Over time, the American people will make the right judgments," he said. "The overwhelming majority of people in California and Arizona won't make use of marijuana and don't want their children to use it. . . . They don't want stoned behavior."

Times staff writers Richard A. Serrano and Marlene Cimons contributed to this story.

A Physician Writes To The Wall Street Journal

Smoking pot in Vietnam did not kill nearly as many soldiers as the ill-conceived campaign to suppress marijuana smoking, resulting in the substitution of heroin undetectably smoked in cigarettes.

Since meaningful drug education was absent in the military ("Just say no to drugs" has been around for a long time), these vets first realized they were addicted when they began to withdraw on the way home.

It is true that marijuana smoke extracts painted on guinea pig abdomens is more carcinogenic than tobacco extracts. However, studies in Jamaica have shown no difference in lung cancer incidence between tobacco-only and tobacco-plus-marijuana smokers. Further, the literature shows no significant incidence of lung cancer in marijuana-only smokers.

The comment about the danger of bypassing the FDA in drug introduction is well taken. There have been several protocols approved by the FDA to test the safety and effectiveness of medical marijuana in AIDS Wasting Syndrome and other diseases. These have all been stopped by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which must sign off on the protocols before the DEA will supply the marijuana.

William B. Wenner, M.D.
Volcano. Hawaii

Heavy marijuana smokers show less evidence of lung injury than heavy tobacco smokers, and it may be cannabinoids that are protecting them from developing a condition like emphysema. -- UCLA researcher Dr. Donald Tashkin in "Marijuana Less Harmful to Lungs Than Cigarettes," by Louise Gagnon, Medical Post, Sept. 6, 1994.

[including Cocaine (1988) ..... 2,000 - ed.]

Marijuana............................0

Marijuana users also have the same or lower incidence of murders and highway deaths and accidents than the non-marijuana using population as a whole (Crancer Study, UCLA; U.S. funded, $6 million; first & second Jamaican Studies, 1968 to 1974; Costa Rican Studies, 1980 to 1982; et al.). - from The Emperor Wears No Clothes, by Jack Herer, back cover, 10th edition, 1995. Prove him wrong and collect $30,000.

NORML's Latest Letter To General McCaffrey

JAMA Criticizes Crack/Cocaine Racial Sentencing Disparities

'Less Disparity Urged In Cocaine Sentencing'

By Christopher S. Wren

On the assumption that crack cocaine creates more addicts and promotes more violence than powdered cocaine, federal law for a decade has dealt far more harshly with crack dealers and users than with others caught with more traditional forms of the illicit drug.

Now, two psychologists specializing in drug addiction have determined that the physiological and psychoactive effects of different forms of cocaine are so similar as to make the existing discrepancy in punishment "excessive."

The study, by Dorothy K. Hatsukami at the University of Minnesota and Marian W. Fischman at Columbia University, appears in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. It breaks new ground by posing a medical challenge to the federal sentencing guidelines, which have been criticized over the last decade primarily for jailing more black offenders than white ones.

"The important issue is when possible to try to have science inform policy," Dr. Fischman said in an interview, explaining why the researchers undertook the project. "Cocaine is cocaine. Regardless of whether you shoot it up or smoke it or snort it, it has the same stimulant effect."

In their study, in which they examined laboratory experiments and other published studies on cocaine going back 20 years, Dr. Fischman and Dr. Hatsukami suggest sharply reducing the disparities in cocaine sentencing. But they stopped short of proposing that it be eliminated altogether.

An outbreak of crack-related crime in the 1980s prompted Congress to enact legislation in 1986 that punishes a first-time offender with five years in prison for possessing 5 grams of crack cocaine. To receive the same sentence, a first-time offender caught with powdered cocaine would have to possess 500 grams, or more than a pound.

The researchers proposed reducing this 100-to-1 ratio to as little as 2 to 1. That would translate into the same penalty for possessing twice as much powdered cocaine as crack cocaine.

When cocaine was smoked in crack form, the researchers said, it still gave a faster, more intense high than powdered cocaine that was snorted, and therefore has greater potential for abuse.

"Crack cocaine is a lot easier to use, and it is more accessible to a broader population," Dr. Hatsukami said in an interview, explaining why she and her colleague believed there should be some difference in sentencing. "We felt that crack cocaine does lead to more use."

Dr. Fischman added, "I feel that it is more dangerous because of its availability, not because of the drug."

Cocaine hydrochloride, the scientific name for powdered cocaine, is refined from an alkaloid leached from coca leaves. It can be converted into crack by cooking the powder with baking soda and water in a microwave or conventional oven.

Dr. Hatsukami and Dr. Fischman also concluded that treating offenders made more sense than locking them up.

"Although crack cocaine has been linked with crime to a greater extent than cocaine hydrochloride, many of these crimes are associated with addiction to cocaine," they wrote. "Therefore, those addicted individuals who are incarcerated for the sale or possession of cocaine are better served by treatment than prison."

Because most offenders jailed for crack have been black, the disparity has been attacked largely on racial grounds. According to a government study of illicit drug use nationwide, in 1993, 88.3 percent of federal defendants convicted of selling crack were black. By contrast, blacks accounted for only 27 percent of those convicted of selling powdered cocaine.

In February 1995 the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a group of experts that draws up guidelines for federal courts, called the 100-to-1 ratio in crack sentences "a primary cause of the growing disparity between sentences for black and white federal defendants."

The commission recommended all but eliminating this gap. But Congress, with President Clinton's acquiescence, rejected the recommendation.

The issue of the sentencing disparity has reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 8-1 last May 13 that statistics showing a predominance of black defendants for crack-related offenses did not constitute sufficient proof that the government selectively prosecuted African-Americans.

"It's a continuing problem," said Lloyd Epstein, a criminal lawyer in New York City who often represents defendants in drug cases. "You find that black adolescents are arrested for crack on a daily basis and their sentences are more severe than whites or Hispanics arrested for powder."

Under the current sentencing guidelines, Epstein said, a wholesale distributor of cocaine powder could receive a lighter punishment than his customer who bought a small amount of the powder and converted it into crack.

"The issue is not whether crack should be punished," Epstein said, "but whenever you're dealing with justice, you're looking for some kind of parity."

Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group in Washington that opposes mandatory sentences for drug offenses, said, "It's purely politics that prevents the right thing from being done on crack and powder."

There is no sign that Congress plans to reconsider its tough stance against crack, particularly since there has been no public pressure to do so.

"When you mention crack cocaine," Ms. Stewart said, "their minds immediately jump to an image of a young black man with gold chains and a gun in his pocket."

The federal guidelines do not apply to cases tried in state and local courts. Only 13 states and the District of Columbia distinguish between crack and powdered cocaine in their own statutes, and these tend to involve larger amounts of drugs.

The states are Alabama, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin.

'Drugs Are Bad - The Drug War Is Worse'

Here's an excerpt:

Like any lasting crusade, the drug war has at times used fear, hype, half-truths, and well-crafted mythology to sustain itself. For the past decade, its mythmaking machinery has been conveniently sustained by crack. Here was a drug so addictive and destructive that, like a tornado, it wiped out everything in its path. Everyone it touched was damaged, and every neighborhood it went into was ruined. Mothers had no interest in their kids; fathers couldn't work; teenagers beat up and stole from their grandparents; horrible, depraved, and unimaginably violent crimes were committed because of the drug's mind-altering effects.

The drug-war hawks couldn't have invented a better menace than crack. As it happens, they did invent it - some of it, anyway. "You had this disgusting pandering of the media," says Dr. John Morgan, a pharmacologist and a professor at City College. "If you look back to '85, '86, '87, you see these astonishing stories. You know, '48 Hours on Crack Street' in Time and Newsweek and on the television magazine shows, all depicting this drug that was destroying a generation of young people in the city. But all those stories were done before there were any data about crack's biology and its actual harm."

Now that some time has passed, the truth is a little easier to see. To begin with, crack is not instantly addictive. Its "discontinuation rate" is about the same as cocaine's, which makes sense since they are more or less identical pharmacologically. "The claims of instant addiction all came from the treatment people," says Morgan, who is considered a radical among the reformers. His credentials to analyze drugs, however, are unimpeachable: He writes the drug-dependency sections of the Merck Manual, the widely used medication textbook. The primary difference between the two drugs is that crack is a quicker, more intense high. Cocaine is a comparatively longer, smoother experience.

Most of the havoc created by the drug had little to do with its pharmacology but a lot to do with the economic and demographic vagaries of the illegal-drug market. It was the very fact that cocaine became so expensive that created the market niche for crack in the first place - another example of the sausage effect. And because crack was sold so cheaply - a couple of rocks cost $5 - and its effects were so brief, people needed to use it again and again during a single day. Low cost was also responsible for crack's reach and the explosion of low-level street crime. A pocketbook, even if it had only a few bucks in it, was enough to get high.

"Crack emerged during the eighties, when there was a lot of interest in cocaine but it was too expensive for a lot of people," says Morgan. "But it's important to understand that in the context of poverty, a disruptive drug war, the loss of 400,000 low-level jobs in this city, and the continuing ravages of the Reagan years, the drug was given powers and blamed for things for which it was not responsible."

Probably the most compelling piece of crack agitprop was the crack baby: the indelible, heart-wrenching image of that tiny, scrawny, newborn infant crying inconsolably because of its hunger for drugs. According to a number of academic medical studies, this image is misleading. "All these kids who are supposedly damaged because their mothers smoked crack? Well," says Morgan, "it turns out not to be true. Yet everyone in America talked about it. It became a war cry, didn't it? But even people who first published papers about low birth weight and low head circumference have now decided that if you control for everything else, it wasn't the crack. It was multiple drug exposure, bad prenatal care, bad nutrition, and, more important, exposure to alcohol and cigarettes."

There is a lot more worth reading in the article. The author, Craig Horowitz, also goes into the direct costs of the drug war, and puts it at $100 billion a year - and "many times" more than that in indirect costs.

Snohomish County Cuts DARE

'Seattle Dares To Seek DARE Alternatives'

Los Angeles Times, Nov. 19, 1996
By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer

SEATTLE--This is a city whose young minds often seem fond of dispatching themselves somewhere else. People speculate about whether it's the relentless drizzle or the dark aura of the music clubs or the mystique of Seattle rock stars fallen dead under the needle.

Whatever it is, heroin fatalities here rose 294% from 1985 to 1995. A survey showed 88% of high school students had tried alcohol or other drugs.

What's a city to do? In Seattle this fall, the Police Department canceled its primary drug education program in the schools, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). Spokane had pulled out a few weeks earlier.

The two cancellations are the latest and most prominent in a trickle of defections from the popular Los Angeles-founded program that sends uniformed officers into three-fourths of the nation's school districts to teach youngsters how to say no to drugs, gangs and violence. Communities in Colorado, Florida, Texas, Massachusetts and elsewhere have joined the search for alternative drug education programs.

In many cases, there's talk about budgets and the need to free up officers for crime-fighting duties. There is criticism in conservative circles about parental responsibility and, from the graying liberals, fears that DARE is turning kids into family snitches. In Seattle's case, it came down to a budget cut and a growing conviction that DARE didn't work.

"What the research really shows is that the relationship that has developed between children and police officers is very important and very laudable, but the long-term effects on reducing drug and alcohol abuse is unknown and hasn't been substantiated," said Nancy McPherson, director of Seattle's community policing bureau.

A spate of recent studies pointing to a sharp upward curve in teenage drug use (marijuana use climbed 141% from 1992 to 1995, the Department of Health and Human Services disclosed) has made it painfully clear that nobody has figured out what to do about it.

There's a lot of head-scratching going on: We did such a good job, a remarkable job, really, of bringing down teenage drug abuse in the late 1970s and 1980s. What happened? Does it mean we have to bring Nancy Reagan back?

In some ways, many drug education analysts say, we have been victims of our own success. Substantial reductions over the last 15 years mean today's youngsters didn't grow up seeing the street-corner junkies their parents came to know and regret. What do many teenagers have now, these analysts say, except an officer in the classroom telling them drugs are bad for their health?

"In 22 years, I've seen the whole thing become a big circle. There's a generation out there that thinks they invented marijuana," said Spokane police Sgt. Mike Prim, who is developing an alternative to DARE that will involve a wide range of patrol officers and focus on safety in general.

"Things that I was taught, and things my parents and other people in authority told me, didn't kick in till I was in my 30s," Prim says. "We're expecting after this thing has run out of L.A. for 12 years, and out of here for six years, we want the nation to change?"

Glenn Levant, DARE America's president, points out that for the slow leak of cities no longer in the program, 275 others have joined this year, including New York City and Washington, expanding the number of cities to 10,000 in 49 nations worldwide.

Most studies critical of DARE's effectiveness, he says, evaluated an older curriculum, in use before DARE expanded to the junior high and high school level and adopted new interactive techniques for teaching kids, among other things, to resist peer pressure.

Teenagers in surveys generally say their DARE training was beneficial. But what good is it, some wonder, to be told not to use drugs when all the reasons for using drugs are still there?

"The program is kind of like, 'Don't do drugs,' but on the other hand, they don't give any alternative," said Miguel Bocanegra, 17. "Like programs where you can actually go to get treatment . . . so there's things for youth to do besides drugs to begin with."

Cities like Seattle are trawling for other solutions. The Seattle school district is arming teachers with drug education curricula for every grade level. Some cities are looking at programs like Life Skills Training, developed at Cornell University, which tries to develop a broad range of social skills that can be used to resist drugs.

Bringing more programs into the arsenal is precisely what's needed, says Lloyd Johnston, a researcher at the University of Michigan, which conducts the annual adolescent drug use survey for the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

"I think everyone wants to believe DARE works," Johnston said. "But if in fact it doesn't, then the real cost is not the wasted program monies; the real cost is the opportunity costs, that all those children grew up without an effective prevention program at the time they really needed one." ...

Drug Use Dilemma

Percentage of those age 12 to 17 who reported using marijuana within the last month:

1990: 4.4%
1991: 3.6%
1992: 3.4%
1993: 4.0%
1994: 6.0%
1995: 8.2%

Researched by Paul Singleton, Los Angeles Times

Drug Reform Coordination Network Publishes New Edition of The Activist Guide

Join DRCNet! Visit our world-wide-web registration form at http://www.drcnet.org/drcreg.html (complete with credit card billing and encryption for your protection), or send e-mail to drcinfo@drcnet.org for more information. To subscribe to the rapid response team, send e-mail to listproc@drcnet.org with the line "subscribe drc-natl "your name" in the message. We need your help to survive!

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Washington, DC 20008
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'US Study Suggests Smokers May Be Smarter'

'Prop. 215 Backer's Idea Of 'Caregivers' Draws Opposition Of Erstwhile Ally'

San Francisco Examiner, Tuesday, Nov. 19, 1996, p. A3
By Eric Brazil of The Examiner staff

A move by one of the originators of Proposition 215 to establish a legal framework for marijuana cultivation and distribution is creating a split between backers of legalized pot.

"There's no sense in having a law if you're not going to implement it," said Dennis Peron. "We are fulfilling the spirit of the law."

Prop. 215, approved on Nov. 5 by the California electorate, legalized marijuana for medical purposes but was written in broad strokes, and how it will be implemented is unclear.

Peron and his associates are in the process of organizing the San Francisco Caregiver Cultivation Co-Op, which would furnish members with high-grade, organically grown marijuana.

Under Peron's proposal now being circulated, the co-op would provide "mold-free, pesticide-free, chemical-free" marijuana, low prices, "lawyers, should you be arrested," a social club atmosphere, nurse on duty and "cultivation of hybrid strains for your ailment."

"This will be high-quality, medical-grade marijuana, not Mexican on-the-street stuff," Peron said.

Sample "caregiver's contracts," "physician's recommendation" cards for members and a list of requirements for membership have been sent to cannabis buyers clubs throughout California - and to Attorney General Dan Lungren, Peron said Monday.

Prospective co-op members must have a letter of diagnosis and a physician's recommendation of marijuana for treatment, and pay a still-to-be-determined fee. Purchases will be limited to 1 ounce or less, Peron said.

Members must also sign the caregiver's contract, authorizing the co-op "to provide for me cultivation of marijuana for my medical use."

Under Prop. 215, a patient or "patient's primary care giver" can cultivate marijuana for the patient's personal use.

Dave Fratello, a spokesman for Santa Monica-based Americans for Medical Rights, who did some of the heavy lifting for Prop. 215, said Peron's move is "pushing the envelope. They're creating a criminal risk for themselves and anybody who joins in running that operation, as well as giving false hope to patients."

By defining a person who cultivates marijuana for medical purposes and supplies it via a co-op as a primary care giver, Peron is being "a little too cute," Fratello said.

"The problem is that until federal law changes, we cannot address the question of supply," he said.

Peron said he's certain that there will be a legal test of the co-op, for which "we've signed up a lot of people already . . . and when we win, then we'll sue for damages."

Maybe a test case can be won, Fratello responded, "but there's a cost to even trying, which is that two weeks after the election you're suggesting to millions of voters that 215 was in fact a wolf in sheep's clothing. It was promoted as one thing and in practice it's going to be something else. That's the surest way to turn off the 6 percent of the voters who gave us a majority."

Lungren spokesman Steve Telliano declined comment on the proposal.

'German State Plans To Legalise Sale Of Cannabis'

'February 7 Court Date Set For NBA Trailblazer'

'Rx - Marijuana'

One of the scariest legacies of the War on Drugs is the deliberate narrowing of the national debate about drug use. Beginning with Jimmy Carter"s second drug czar, it has been the openly admitted goal of that office to forbid certain terms and concepts. "Recreational drug use" is one, a distinction between "hard" and "soft" drugs another. Science and nuanced discussion have been sacrificed to "just say no" orthodoxy to the point where we can"t rationally define our real drug problems, let alone debate our way toward solutions. Just ask Joycelyn Elders.

The War on Drugs and its disparate political agendas depend on marijuana prohibition. The war on marijuana keeps the full fury of the War on Drugs -- with its urine testing, mandatory sentences and asset forfeiture -- aimed at the widest possible segment of the population. Without marijuana prohibition, our 12-million-person "drug problem" shrinks to about 2 million at most; drug policy shrinks from Cabinet-level jihad to sideshow.

Marijuana prohibition depends in turn on the drug's demonization. In the name of sustaining the drug war, we are taught that marijuana is lethal, carcinogenic and addictive. While marijuana has its risks, especially for children, none of this is true. Neither is it true that marijuana has no accepted medical use; in 1991, almost half the oncologists who answered a Harvard Medical School survey said they would prescribe marijuana for relief of chemotherapy side effects were it legal, and most had already recommended it to their patients. Now come the citizens of California and Arizona, who on November 5 voted to allow patients to use a physician"s recommendation that they smoke pot as an element of their defense if prosecuted in state marijuana cases.

The initiatives put the federal government in an excruciating bind. The Feds are the only legal owners of marijuana in the country, which means Washington has three options: It can dispense the marijuana; it can turn a blind eye; or it can send the D.E.A. into Arizona and California to arrest patients and their physicians on federal marijuana charges. Before the votes, drug czar Barry McCaffrey said he would send in the federal antidrug cops.

Don't bet on it. Televised images of skeletal patients arrested for using a state-sanctioned, doctor-recommended medicine would be explosive. If anything, such images would likely widen acceptance of medical marijuana. And if Washington takes either of the other two paths -- complying with the initiatives or ignoring them -- the walls start tumbling down. Marijuana will no longer be an instrument of the Antichrist; it will be a medicine. The absurdity of confiscating houses and sending users to prison for five years in nonmedical cases will be thrown into sharper relief. The initiatives' opponents argue that medical marijuana is the narrow edge of the legalization wedge, and they may be right.

Will an increase in recreational use follow the acceptance of medical marijuana? Recent history suggests not. Back in the seventies, California joined ten other states in decriminalizing marijuana possession. From 1976 possession of less than an ounce was a parking-ticket-type offense in California, and marijuana use went up zero percent (and the state saved more than $950 million in police and prison costs).

The medical marijuana initiatives are an important step. But these measures had billionaire backers; the next might not. And the initiatives will certainly galvanize the formidable interests dependent on keeping the drug war alive. So the long-term significance of the medical marijuana votes depends on the ability of drug-policy reformers to seize the moment. The War on Drugs hasn't suffered a hit this big in two decades. Let's see what the reform movement can do with it.

Dan Baum

Dan Baum is the author of Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, published this year by Little, Brown. Support for this editorial provided by the Shafer Fund of The Nation Institute.

If You Can't Enforce A Prohibition On Rhino Horns, How About Marijuana?

Joe,

I saw something on CNN last you should hear about.

The facts as I recall are:

(a 5min. piece on the African rhino) Years ago faced with a declining rhino population the governments of the world got together and banned all trade of rhino horn. Now South Africa [I believe it was Kenya or Zimbabwe. JZ.] has legalized the trade and has the only growing rhino population.

The CNN reporter said "the leading conservationist is now saying things that would have been heresy a few years ago" cut to the conservationist he says "We really can't blame the consumers of the potions containing rhino horn. We can't blame the local poachers. and we can't blame the traders in the middle. When the trade of rhino horn was made illegal the price doubled and there was no money for the protection of the animal. Because the price has risen so much the poachers are more desperate and dangerous. If the animal is to survive we must treat it as an economic resource."

He went on to explain that they want all countries to legalize trade in rhino horn so the price will come down. Cut to a black South African in green fatigues. He says "the rhino has provided me a job money from the rhino has built us a school and a well for water." Then the CNN reporter says " The conclusion is clear if one species becomes extinct all species suffer." How he could miss the obvious conclusion that it is impossible to regulate the law of supply and demand I don't know.

This may be something to watch. If this works for the rhino it could become a model for the preservation of many endangered species, and if it works for animals maybe it could be applied to lands as well.

Patrick Hughes

By Craig Reinarman

The election campaign made it clear that drug-baiting is replacing red-baiting in American politics. Bob Dole pounced on a survey showing increased drug use among teenagers as if it were an end-zone fumble. He used it to paint Bill Clinton as a draft dodger in the drug war.

Sadly, Dole's charge is false. There is no longer a dime's worth of difference between the president's drug policy and the failed drug wars of Bush, Reagan and Nixon, and even Nixon expanded treatment and convened a national commission to review drug policy. After relentless attacks by conservative drug warriors, Clinton abandoned his early attempts at reform, moving beyond his usual centrism to embrace their hard line.

He raised federal drug spending above the extraordinary heights of the Bush years, increasing the Drug Enforcement Administration's budget 18 percent since 1992. Like his Republican predecessors, he devoted two-thirds of anti-drug funding to police and prisons, leaving only one-third for prevention, education, treatment, social services and research.

To appear "tough," the president has rejected the U.S. Sentencing Commission's recommendation to correct the gaping disparity between long, mandatory sentences for crack cocaine (used primarily by blacks) and those for powder cocaine (used primarily by whites). He suppressed for over a year a definitive scientific review, sponsored by his own department of Health and Human Services, which showed that needle exchange programs successfully prevent the spread of AIDS among injection drug users without encouraging drug use. He refused to allow even research on the medicinal potentials of marijuana, despite medical evidence that it provides relief to many patients suffering from cancer, AIDS, glaucoma and other diseases.

At the start of election season, the President appointed a military general as drug czar - a man with no expertise on abuse or addiction but who does symbolize "toughness." Near the end of the campaign, he proposed drug testing all teenagers as a condition for obtaining a driver's license, even though the vast majority do not use illicit drugs.

Thus, the president can honestly claim that he has been as "tough" as his Republican critics - and that is the pity. Under the banner of getting "tough on drugs" we have squandered billions of tax dollars, trampled civil liberties, diverted police from chasing violent criminals, clogged the justice system, given the U.S. the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, and in the bargain reduced job prospects for millions of youth by giving them criminal records. And after all this our real drug problems - hardcore abuse and addiction - remain largely untouched.

But politicians seem to suffer from historical amnesia on drug issues. Since 1914, they have scapegoated one chemical bogeyman after another and then made promiscuous promises about each "tough" new drug law they pass.

While drug prohibition has grown increasingly punitive and costly, it has never been any more effective than alcohol prohibition was. In effect, politicians are saying that when an expensive medicine has been found to fail and have nasty side effects, the solution is to have the patient take a double dose. American drug policy is a fully bipartisan failure. We need new solutions, not the simplistic scapegoats and sound bites of yesteryear.

For starters, the president should convene a fully independent national commission on drug policy-with members from all points of view. Its charge should be to conduct a rigorous cost-benefit analysis comparing existing policy with the full range of alternatives. It should study the public health-based drug policies developed by other nations, many of which more effectively reduce the harms associated with drug use and are far less repressive and costly. Then the commission should disseminate its findings directly to the public to spur the truly democratic debate on drug policy we've never had.

Drug problems are too serious to be left to partisan politics. Members of both parties are addicted to the drug war approach. None of them wants to admit publicly that all those "tough" laws and fat drug war budgets they pass every year haven't helped. In the current climate, only an independent commission is capable of telling the complicated truth about what works and what doesn't and considering all policy options. With the election over, maybe the president can muster the courage to "just say no" to continued drug-baiting and "yes" to a full and fair review of the evidence.

Craig Reinarman is a professor of sociology and legal studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Dutch Will Not Accept EU Intervention On Drugs

'Drug Czar' Barry McCaffrey's Thugs Assault Marijuana Policy Project At News Conference

I went to the news conference intending to ask McCaffrey if he would be willing to work with the Marijuana Policy Project to discourage children from abusing marijuana, explaining that it is a medicine -- not a plaything -- that should only be used under a doctor's supervision. I had obtained a valid press pass from the ONDCP's front desk woman after showing her a copy of our newsletter, the "Marijuana Policy Report," and explaining that I write articles on marijuana policy developments.

As my colleague Rob Kampia stood in the hall by the elevators patiently waiting to distribute information to the media, one ONDCP staffer berated the front desk woman for letting me in because the MPP is an "arm of Soros." As Kampia tried to correct them, other staffers were already escorting me out of the conference room and ripping my press pass off of my jacket.

Once out in the hall with Kampia, I was surrounded by ONDCP staffers telling me that I had to leave this "private" property (the ONDCP office suite). I politely but firmly reminded them that ONDCP is a government entity, paid for by the taxpayers -- including me. I asked why I was being escorted out of the conference area before McCaffrey even approached the podium, despite my valid press pass. I asked to see some written rules regarding public access to the hallways. I asked if it was a criminal offense to wait by the elevator to speak to reporters on their way out.

In the meantime, one of the ONDCP staffers told Kampia that she couldn't believe I was behaving this way, considering they "have guns." She said she was authorized to use her gun against people who were trespassing.

My questions went unanswered.

Instead, I was grabbed, yanked, shoved, twisted, and forcefully ejected from the building (750 - 17th Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20500).

Kampia followed on his own accord, and distributed our press packets to the media as they left the building.

I am planning to press assault charges against Mr. Hicks, write an op-ed piece about how this incident typifies the ONDCP's handling of our nation's drug situation and medicinal marijuana in particular, and investigate the possibility of suing the ONDCP.

Apparently, this assault was reported on in the Arizona Republic the day after the event.

Any thoughts or ideas on any of this?

We Shall Overcome,

Chuck Thomas
Director of Communications

Marijuana Policy Project (MPP)
P.O. Box 77492
Capitol Hill
Washington, D.C. 20013-8492
202-462-5747 (phone)
202-232-0442 (fax)
ChuckMPP@AOL.COM
http://www.mpp.org

More Abuse From The Authorities

A Strategy To Think About

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