Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Actually Sensible Pot Policies
Somewhere in Argentina, a man is growing marijuana on his balcony, with the blessing of the Camara Federal, a court of appeals. They overturned his conviction, calling it unconstitutional.
In Italy, the Court of Cassation (think Supreme Court) overturned a local ruling that sentenced a reggae musician to 16 months in prison for possessing enough cannabis to roll 70 joints. They recognized the plant as a Rastafarian sacrament, and given the great quantity of weed smoked by members of this religion ... well, it seemed a plausible stash for personal consumption.
Austria does even better. There, 22 pounds can be understood as an amount for personal use - a public prosecutor recently dismissed a case against a man who'd harvested that much, in light of a new law decriminalizing cannabis for personal use, regardless of quantity.
The Swiss are voting on a similar initiative in late November.
So when Massachusettians (well, why not? It's better than calling them Massholes, a moniker I heard more than a few times living in Vermont last year) get to vote on a marijuana penalty reduction initiative on their ballots this November, let's hope they take their cues from our neighbors to the west and south, and not from the drug warmongers.
Labels: international drug policy comparison, marijuana, Massholes
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Digg it.Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Science isn't fair, whines ONDCP spokesman
Jim Anthony, Chair of Epidemiology at Michigan State University, recently released results from an ongoing study: Toward a Global View of Alcohol, Tobacco, Cannabis and Cocaine Use: Findings from the WHO World Mental Health Surveys. Sarah Lynch discusses the study - and its 'expert' critics - for Time Magazine, in An American Pastime: Smoking Pot. Far and above the rates discovered in other societies, the rate at which Americans try marijuana and cocaine is staggering - often (much) more than twice rates found in other countries. The study's authors sum it up in the conclusion: "drug use is related to income, but does not appear to be simply related to drug policy, since countries with more stringent policies towards illegal drug use did not have lower levels of such drug use than countries with more liberal policies."
It's funny how the authors of the peer-reviewed study are referred to as 'researchers' and the spokesman for the US Office of National Drug Control Policy as 'experts.'
Lynch reports that 'experts' criticize the study for only looking at lifetime incidence, not habitual drug use. ONDCP spokesman Tom Riley (aka the 'experts') is quoted as saying, "for drug policy, what you look at is regular use."
Oh, ok. Well, let's have a look at regular drug use, shall we? Let's consider: maybe the 42% of Americans who have tried marijuana (in contrast to the 20% of Dutch folks) really were just experimenting, and the draconian, racist drug policies enforced by our government have cut the rates of habitual pot smoking far below those found in, say, a country such as the Netherlands, where regulation and harm reduction prevail in the struggle for sensible drug policy. What does the 2008 World Drug Report say? Well ... maybe these researchers, too, were unfair. They published a chart, for Cannabis, showing Annual Prevalence of Abuse (let's not get into whether that's even possible in regards to pot), and the United States, at 12.2% of the population aged 15-64, is again more than twice the Netherlands (at 5.4%).
Maybe it's time to stop looking to government spokespeople as experts, and - at the very least - listen to scientists who spend their entire careers researching drug use and public health. Dr. Anthony also commented in Lynch's article. In light of this research, he questions, "whether Americans will want to continue supporting the incarceration of young people who use small amounts of marijuana." I, for one, do not. Do you?
It's funny how the authors of the peer-reviewed study are referred to as 'researchers' and the spokesman for the US Office of National Drug Control Policy as 'experts.'
Lynch reports that 'experts' criticize the study for only looking at lifetime incidence, not habitual drug use. ONDCP spokesman Tom Riley (aka the 'experts') is quoted as saying, "for drug policy, what you look at is regular use."
Oh, ok. Well, let's have a look at regular drug use, shall we? Let's consider: maybe the 42% of Americans who have tried marijuana (in contrast to the 20% of Dutch folks) really were just experimenting, and the draconian, racist drug policies enforced by our government have cut the rates of habitual pot smoking far below those found in, say, a country such as the Netherlands, where regulation and harm reduction prevail in the struggle for sensible drug policy. What does the 2008 World Drug Report say? Well ... maybe these researchers, too, were unfair. They published a chart, for Cannabis, showing Annual Prevalence of Abuse (let's not get into whether that's even possible in regards to pot), and the United States, at 12.2% of the population aged 15-64, is again more than twice the Netherlands (at 5.4%).
Maybe it's time to stop looking to government spokespeople as experts, and - at the very least - listen to scientists who spend their entire careers researching drug use and public health. Dr. Anthony also commented in Lynch's article. In light of this research, he questions, "whether Americans will want to continue supporting the incarceration of young people who use small amounts of marijuana." I, for one, do not. Do you?
Labels: drug use study, international drug policy comparison, science