Why the war on drugs has been made redundant
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
By definition, redundant describes something that is not necessary, that can be removed without loss. That is definitively not the case in fighting substances abuse. We need to worry about the abuse of drugs in the same way we need to worry about the abuse of alcohol and tobacco. Would someone call "redundant" the fight against teenage alcoholism? Would someone say that we should stop paying attention the epidemics of obesity? Worrying about these issues is not redundant and worrying about drugs also isn't so.
There are things society must forbid (e.g. murder), there are things that it must discourage (e.g. driving without safety belts) and others that it shouldn't bother. I can accept that we move dangerous drugs use from the first to the second category. It is irresponsible to move it to the 3rd.
The proper term should be ineffective, not redundant.
The war on drugs is not even remotely similar to the regulation of alcohol and tobacco. Soldiers do not invade your house because you are suspected of growing tobacco.
What is needed is for the war on drugs to end, for the DEA to be disbanded, and for a system that regulates quality to be introduced. If an adult wants to buy recreational drugs, nothing should prevent them from doing so. Mixing public health and paramilitary police is far more dangerous than any drugs people might consume (my Godwin senses are tingling...).
Yes, we should. I don't see any indication that program to fight about those things are helping. In fact, this whole forbid culture is part of the problem. If alcohol is a forbidden product, then using means abusing and that's exactly what happens in practice. Reasonable consumption loses ground to abusive consumption because of the cultural label attached to alcohol.
But this approach is like solving teenage alcoholism by sewing their mouths closed until age 18 (21?), and only permitting specially authorised containers of nutrients to be attached to their nasal feeding tubes.
The solution to these problems is to identify and handle the root causes of them, rather than criminalising what are probably the symptoms.
It's possible the author thinks (as I do) that it could be removed without loss, and in fact could gain us a lot because it is counterproductive and causes more harm than it prevents.
Journalists don't usually write their own headlines in newspapers. That's usually the job of editors. The author used the word "obsolete" which makes more sense when understood as "it's changing the rules so radically and fast that the old way of fighting the war on drugs doesn't work any more".
Unless you want to do that but still call it a war. Which would seem odd, but then again there is apparently already a war against obesity according to the press, which seems unfair on the face of it and just sounds like the army bullying fat kids. Perhaps that's what it is, I haven't checked.
But anyway, the war on drugs is definitely a shooting war at this point, so perhaps we could say that we need a cold war on drugs. Although I think we recently had one of those and everybody nearly got nuked from what I hear, so perhaps that is a bad idea as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoactive_Substances_Bill
It will basically set up a regulatory regime whereby any recreational drug which can be proven "low risk" can be sold to anyone over the age of 18. Not really all that different from how "regular" pharmaceutical drugs are tested and approved, actually.
http://popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/why-its-so-hard-sc...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analog_Act
There are questions about its Constitutionality due to vagueness but so far it's been upheld.
But it's dangerous to think that the law cannot attempt to make whole classes of chemicals illegal and so we don't need to worry about the war on drugs any more. The law can do that, and cause even more massive damage when it does so. Designer drugs are also likely to kill a whole lot of people, bolstering politicians who want to keep the status quo.
Anything can bolster these schmucks. More deaths? We need to fight this scourge. Less deaths? Policy is working. Also at the moment the main causes of drug deaths in the UK are -
> Drinking alcohol
> Smoking tobacco
> Heroin related (could be largely mitigated)
> Mislabelled substances (PMA sold as MDMA, could be completely mitigated)
Does the UK not have the prescription drug abuse we see in the US?
Codeine is available over the counter from a pharmacist with no prescription (in limited, usually adulterated quantities), people who need more painkilling tend to get prescribed higher doses of codeine, or if it's more extreme they get morphine but are highly supervised and expected to account for their usage.
I don't think we've ever been as easy about prescribing oxycodone et al. as I get the impression has happened in the US.
--edit-- I am well prepared to be shown to be wrong about this, but nothing I've read has indicated it's such an issue here.
--edit 2-- Also they seem to like to prescribe NSAIDS here, which (AFAICT) don't have much abuse potential.
Yeah, you don't need to worry about the qualifiers. http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/editorial/gazette-op...
Maybe it's just that level of background exposure that set my expectations, but I'm (pleasantly) surprised that the problem might not be universal.
They're safe and of high quality, though they might still feed a criminal underbelly.
Of course, people who get addicted to synthetic opiates often have their lives ravaged to the same degree as people who get addicted to regular old street heroin, despite the safety and quality of the drugs.
Then you have the new "anti-abuse" formulations, which contain specific ingredients designed to be uncrushable, unpleasant if injected, or insoluble/gel-forming to prevent IV use. Given junkie creativity (and suppressed self-preservation instinct), there are various methods of bypassing these obstacles, but in doing so could affect the potency of the extracted remains by a factor of 2-10x. So now you have no idea how much you're dosing, as well as what's still along for the ride.
At least heroin dealers would typically only cut with toxic adulterants by negligence, rather than intent.
[not an opiate (ab)user, known a few]
Nobody is claiming that there will not be issues with dependence or abuse of these drugs. The point is that people should not have to deal with dangerous criminals, nor should they be afraid of jail time for admitting their drug use.
We could make space in society for people to explore the parallel worlds. Maybe a week per year research period. Many users I know of all types of drugs take them just to tolerate their jobs. We could somehow make work more tolerable.
We could make everyday life more fulfilling and have less stigma attached to exploring alternate states of mind. We need to find a way to fit or shoehorn this stuff into our lives because we can't eradicate it. Perhaps this is the skill of the shamanic ritual and modern day music festivals... to put boundaries of time and space around the exploration of this alternate states of mind. We need to protect and shepherd people into safe places while they're experimenting and keep them away from responsible areas like driving and machinery while they're temporarily intoxicated. We need to keep them productive even if they're using.
http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/tfrs/v11i4.pdf
In that corner, Pfizer, Merck, Bayer, Dow.
Somehow, my money's on Big Pharma. Especially if they get to spend money on security contractors.
The basic reasoning here is that once you flood the markets with cheap, awesome, solid product the operating funds of the cartels go away. Destroy the market and you can't afford to be evil.
[1] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Drug_War/Monsanto_DrugWar....
All of a sudden they won't have hundreds of millions of people clamouring to give them money all the time.
Less profit means less money to spend on weapons, bribes and hiring goons. Sounds good to me!
tl;dr They aren't voting for DiFi based her civil horrible liberties (constitutional issues, WoD, NSA spying, etc...) stances: they're voting against republicans based on that party (vs. the individual candidate’s) based on the republican party's civil rights stances (women's rights, protection against discrimination, immigration, gay rights, etc...).
If, on the other hand, the choice is between two "liberal" democrats, the electorate will not feel that they're risking much.
I think steps are:
1) Find anyone with strong civil libertarian and general liberal credentials: one approach may be to convince liberal-leaning republicans with great degree of California popularity -- e.g., Richard Riordan or Tom Campbell -- to switch over, the other may be convincing a house representative to do the same (other approaches could be prominent attorneys, business leaders, etc...)
2) Exert grass-roots pressure on corporate and wealthy donors to support that candidate. Seek endorsements from national political figures. One (controversial) approach may be to have senators Manchin or Toomey speak in a campaign slot about how Feinstein's early push for an assault weapons ban sunk any chances of Machin Toomey passing ("Feinstein put the horse before the cart, rather than helping us get our foot in the door, she alienated moderate gun owners from the cause of gun safety" -- which is literally what happened).
3) At the mean time, promote a popular, liberal republican in the republican primaries as well. Likewise, sponsor a third party liberal (e.g., green) challenger. In other words, democratic donors and national democratic party leadership should begin to think that there's a likelihood of Feinstein losing, and that a candidate with more fresh appeal would be required to win.
4) Increase voter registration in the 18-29 group: they strongly oppose NSA spying, drug war, and support gun ownership more strongly than any other age group (in all of these issues, Feinstein stands diametrically opposed to them). They also vote the least, especially in primaries (many many not be aware such exist).
I am not saying this will be easy or that this strategy will succeed in 2016. Most likely, such a campaign will still fail, but not without giving Feinstein and the democratic establishment a great scare. It will certainly have an impact in 2022: the coalition will come back together in that year's democratic primary and either field an candidate that will be elected or get the establishment candidate to sway in a more civil libertarian direction.
tl;dr Stir up the existing consensus, form a new coalition around a candidate that goes against the Chumer/Feinstein wing of democratic party: the wing that was elected on a "tough on crime" platform as a result of political conditions -- consensus view between dems and republicans on economic issues, high crime rates, cold war winding down, etc... -- that no longer exist.
Republican party did this: Barry Goldwater overwhelming lost the election, but the coalition of pundits, donors, politicians, and special interest groups that formed around him helped Reagan get elected.
It's going to be much more interesting if she doesn't anoint a successor, and if there's a genuinely open primary.
MDPV, in particular, has lead to a range of terrible effects, including psychotic states leading to cannibalistic attacks.
Even the strong and broad legalization proposals, in which I can see the wisdom, acknowledge the need to control substances which regularly cause users to behave violently toward persons or property. To me, the designer MDPV and PCP would be the poster drugs for this category.
Can you cite more than anecdotes to support this? For what it's worth caffeine can also induce psychosis, like any other stimulant (which is what MDPV is).
"Even the strong and broad legalization proposals, in which I can see the wisdom, acknowledge the need to control substances which regularly cause users to behave violently toward persons or property."
We already have a model for that: alcohol.
Let's start with the biochemistry. MDPV is both a norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitor and a dopamine releaser. For most users, it provides a short and intense cocaine-like high lasting several hours before abating.
However, in a significant minority of users, the dopamine receptors seem to get stuck in the "on" position. The resulting flood overwhelms lower behavioral centers and results in intense hallucinations of danger, psychomotor agitation, and uncontrolled aggression. See http://www.pbs.org/newshour/multimedia/bath-salts/
As to the attacks, here's a few, just from my hometown:
"Man Who Stabbed Priest Was High on Bath Salts" http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/police-man-who-stabbed-prie...
"Bath Salts Suspected in Head Gnawing Attack" http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/da-bath-salts-suspected-in-...
"Scranton police have witnessed several incidents in recent months, however, and found that abuse of the disguised salts leaves a user with feelings of constant and extreme paranoia, imminent danger including threats on their lives, and hallucinations that have kept some hospitalized for up to five days.
In one case, a man in a third story apartment believed to be using bath salts heard a knock on his door, according to Klein. He thought he was under attack, jumped out the window and shattered his ankle.
“Previously, we had a guy that was injecting it at his house (on West Elm Street) in West Side, and he had his elderly mother and father locked in a bathroom,” Duffy said. “We had to have our negotiators come out, and he was actually injecting it as he was coming out of the door to talk to police.”
“Two days ago, a complainant asked officers, ‘Can you see the two males across the street?’” Scranton Police Capt. Carl Graziano said Thursday. “He’s seeing them, and there’s nobody there.”
On Wednesday, March 9, alleged bath salts abuser Ryan Foley, 25, of Scranton, was charged with breaking into St. Ann’s Basilica and stabbing and bludgeoning the Rev. Francis Landry. In a message to parishioners dated March 13, Landry wrote that he suffered “12 stab wounds and lacerations and at least six bruises” in the attack."
Obviously those other drugs are still harmful, but at least we have the benefit of research into their nature and specific harms.
And DARE classes would probably be a lot more effective if they focused on which were the least bad.
IIRC most of the so-called cannibalistic attacks that were attributed to bath salts turned out not to be. For instance the famous Miami face-eating attack turned up no evidence of anything but pot in the guy's system - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal_attack
The Miami incident was unrelated, but a casual googling will give you plenty of bath salts horror stories.
In the town where I grew up, bath salts became a large problem. At one point, a man on a two day binge broke into a local monastery, got into bed with one of the priests, and held him at knife point until morning. Just a month ago, the federal government busted a producer in a nearby house holding seven kilos of the stuff.
From work with community outreach and through relatives in law enforcement, I can tell you that one minor shift in the drug market radically altered the enforcement landscape. It was getting very bad for a while before the drugs were banned.
I don't know whether our experience was unique or rare as a community. I suspect our experience was simply an accelerated version of what would have happened elsewhere. For some reason, we had little enforcement, wide distribution, and a burgeoning market in the stuff. We were among the first areas in the country to pass a municipal ordinance to ban the substances, and request help from the Federal government.
I suspect that, as an area with harsh drug laws and strict enforcement of marijuana and cocaine, the balloon effect drove up interest in the designer chemicals. But that's just a hunch.
I think you're probably right.
Imagine what we could do in a non-prohibitionist atmosphere, where mainstream labs could research into stuff that gives people a buzz without being addictive or harmful...
Synthetic marijuana, properly made, could mitigate the unpleasant side effects such as apathy and paranoia through optimizing the cannabinoid balance. Hopefully, we'd even find the holy grail: anti-pain and anti-anxiety drugs that aren't physically addictive.
One great side effect is that research into palliative care would be greatly expanded. The military applications of new pain and anxiety medications would be massive as well.
The harm that we could prevent, not only from ending the narco-wars that are funding our enemies and tearing apart our neighbors to the south, but from a flood of new research and investment is staggering.
Addiction and habituation are not just down to this effect either. I know a variety of people who have been both daily pot smokers and daily tobacco users. The tobacco use was far harder to stop. (I'm not going to pretend pot doesn't have some addiction potential, and in fact it does seem to have minor withdrawals, just not anywhere near the level of tobacco, opiates etc). Receptors also recover after varying amounts of time.
So I don't see why we couldn't research things that are fun, don't compel people to chronic use, have minimal impact with occasional use, etc etc. It may not be possible to make the 'perfect' drug, but it may be possible to eliminate many of the harms. Particularly where some drugs are toxic over and above their primary effect, have toxic metabolic products etc
However, there are many ways of affecting receptors further up the metabolic chain. For example, recent research has focused on neurohormones are alternatives to benzodiazepines for anxiety treatment.
Some of these may be, in theory, less addictive or entirely non-addictive. Unfortunately, the current drugs are very effective for short duration courses, the most common medical use.
A less restricted market would incentive drug companies to find less harmful substances for recreational use. In a regulated market, you could even use the tax burden to further shape the public's preferences.
Not avoiding being overtly political: In my opinion the House is similar to the kids table at a big thanksgiving dinner. Representatives and children are Every now and then the kids get too rambunctious and noisy and the adults (i.e. the senate) have to step in and tell the little brats to behave. If I could choose any elected office I would pick being a senator. The House "is teh suk."
(of course, I'd rather be a Supreme Court justice; one middling President actually became Chief Justice later)
Wyoming and Alaska can get a few billion dollars in waste and abuse money from senior senators and spread it across half a million people. That makes for a lot of fun for anyone who's in on the windfall of bridges to nowhere, local culture grants, "national security" slush funds, and the like.
On the other hand, I don't think that this finding will change drug policy. Too much has been invested in the war on drugs, there is not going to be a 180° turn anytime soon. Especially not when the upturn in designer drugs does not come with an increased mortality...
There is actually quite a lot of "flexibility" in terms of chemical structure for most drugs. You can replace a methyl with an ethyl, propyl, i-propyl and the activity is usually comparable. Aromatic rings can be replaced with other variants. There are probably several thousand different structures that would acceptable psychotropic effects, if not tens of thousands.
Wouldn't it be possible to offer kits or services for chemical manufacturers, to test the level of binding of their chemicals, and define that above a certain level of binding , you're chemical have to be regulated in some way?
I think. My understanding of the legal changes may be lacking here.
This is essentially the 'drug-discovery pipeline' that big pharma spends hundreds of millions on when developing new medications.
But if metabolism can transform said chemical , then sure, you've got to take it into account. But many of those drugs can be detected by pre-metabolism binding, i think.
This matters because it's not really appropriate to schedule chemicals which happen to trigger a response in a test-kit, but are not plausibly drugs of abuse due to side-effects, or lack of any reasonable mechanism of getting to the sites where they'd be active.
The "intended for consumption" is a convenient fiction for the head-shops and dodgy websites that sell such things, but actually having to test things which aren't intended for use in certain ways would be a massive imposition on, well, everything that uses chemicals[2].
There are heuristics that cover a lot of ground, and that's basically what the Analog Act tries to preempt, but there are still huge numbers of potentially active compounds we have no idea about. In-vitro binding studies are perhaps the next filtering step, but you still ought to have to demonstrate actual demonstrable plausibility of action for it to be a crime[3]. In addition, if you have something that feels like cocaine, but rapidly metabolises into a lethal neurotoxin or whatever in the same dose, it's not going to be a drug of abuse, except perhaps in suicides.
In terms of banning/restricting sale of things, maybe binding data would be sufficient, but I'm not sure just what the implications for testing & compliance for everyone involved would be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodrug
[2] Despite some TV adverts to the contrary, this would be everything.
[3] Leading to (IMO) the utterly bizarre world of fakes/illegal placebos, for which in many places you can be convicted for the same degree crime as the drug you purported to be selling, rather than say, fraud.
I've been following this lately but not from the beginning. AFAICT the number of cannabinoids that were created in labs, tested in-vitro and documented in research papers is in the hundreds. Most/all of these are now illegal in places like the UK where they ban chemicals, and may already be illegal in the US due to analog laws.
In response to this the cannabinoid producers have now gone totally off the map and are creating previously unknown variants of these. It's hard to say if these are more dangerous than previously studied chemicals because we've been in the realm of "somebody once made this and looked at what it did to some animal neurons" for a couple of years now.
>> Can the producers just run out of possible drugs? Or is that limit too high?
It's really, really hard to know. But there always seems to be a new one on the horizon.
They're sold as "bath salts" or "incense" for plausible deniability. Actually banning any abusable chemical in any form would have a massive impact on a whole range of industries. Even heavy regulation of precursors and otherwise important chemicals hasn't stopped novel ways of doing without them.
So you're still playing catch-up, even if you make sure your analytic lab gets the sample on day 1, and presents you with firm evidence of both (a) what's actually in the thing, GC/MS/NMR etc, and (b) how & why you think it's "mind-altering". Sample $z acts as a dopamine releasing agent in the homogenized rat neural tissue[1]" is enough to publish a pre-clinical study on it, but I'd at least hope it could be challenged if it came to a court.
And of course, it doesn't have any impact whatsoever on abuse of pharmaceuticals, which is already on track to beat out most other drugs in terms of accidents & fatalities in the (near) future. According to [2], it may even have happened already to the USA.
[1] brain soup.
[2] http://www.pewhealth.org/uploadedFiles/PHG/Content_Level_Pag...
(not read it yet, although there's a press release/summary at https://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/prescripti... )
Can we kinda stay away from jailing people for thinking? I want to delay 1984 or Minority Report a few more years.
So after 30 years we have replaced stuff with known effects that we knew how to cope with, with stuff that is more dangerous with lots of side effects, untested and people are getting high all the same.
Where should we put the "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" banner?
I'm uncertain whether this could be successfully passed, though. Support for the War on Drugs is on the bubble as it is.
A whitelist law violates the requirement that the statute must be on its face clear enough that a defendant could know whether his conduct was in violation of the law. Most such blanket prohibitions are ruled void for vagueness.
Other statutes that run up against this problem frequently are the low level but extremely broad harassment and terroristic threat statutes.
The real shame is, many of those synthetic drugs are actually more dangerous than the real thing.
> The real shame is, many of those synthetic drugs are actually more dangerous than the real thing.
That, to me, is the real tragedy. These drugs are dangerous, and only going to get more dangerous as the "good" compounds are quickly banned, leading chemists to use less tested and more unusual compounds.
That seems both authoritarian and highly ambitious.
(http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/Grandmother-s-nightma...)
Some things that aren't obvious from that article: Her shop sells a wide variety of drug paraphernalia (scales, pipes, bongs, cannabis seeds, items with cannabis logos, cannabis magazines and books, etc etc.)
There already exist several ways to handle derivatives and analogues in drug prohibitions and restricted compound sales. Quoting from Wikipedia: "This then led the Health Committee of the League of Nations to pass several resolutions attempting to bring these new drugs under control, ultimately leading in 1930 to the first broad analogues provisions extending legal control to all esters of morphine, oxycodone, and hydromorphone."
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-terrifying-reasons-you-shouldn...
If you smoke it when driving you are an asshole.
Whether it's legal or not, whether it's real weed or not. Get off the road, get baked in your living room and stay there you dangerous, selfish prick. Also his 'hell' experience? Oh My God he took an unfamiliar substance along with TWICE his usual dose of dextromethorphan. I'm not f*cking surprised he had a hard time.
Most of the other reasons he gives there are to do with people purchasing 'blends' of unknown amounts of unknown chemicals on unknown plant matter. People who want to know what they're dosing themselves with buy the pure powders and measure carefully.
That all said, it's true that there's far more known about the safety profile of the 'real' stuff, and you probably shouldn't touch the synthetics. But not because of that huge pile of toss.
I'm not sure how much this would fly now, as it all seems to have been debated 100 years ago.