Drugs Archive

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For the reading

By
Ben Nolan
– April 20, 2012

Meant to post this about a week ago, but what’r ya gonna do? The piece we were all waiting for narrating the creative and charismatic tension between Jay and Kanye through the Watch the Throne tour as a redemption story for the Jackass. Read it (you too, Tom!).

The Up series should be in the core 9th-grade humanities curriculum. Even if it meant bumping, like, Lord of the Flies (which I loved), I’d still think so. It’s fucking LIFE, man! Wish I’d seen it at 14. (For the uninitiated, it’s a documentary series that has been revisiting the same cross-class group of individuals from age 7, every 7 years, and ongoing– the next one’s 56-Up — testing the “give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man” iea). Here’s an interview with one of the subjects (the one who kindof jumped class to became a scientists at UW@Madison) (ty, Kottke!). Teaser:

While committed to the project, he says confessing all in front of the camera has never been easy. “It’s always very disturbing. It’s the fact that they don’t show you the way you want to be shown – but that’s not the main thing. They ask you some really disturbing questions. They stick a camera under your nose and ask – ‘Why did you choose your wife?’ – and then it’s shown to gazillions of people. I’ve learnt that the stupider the thing I say, the more likely it is to get in. You’re asked to discuss every intimate part of your life. You feel like you’re just a specimen pinned on the board. It’s totally dehumanising.”

This excerpt from a speech to J-Street by former Palestinian politician and non-violent activist Mustafa Barghouti about nails the problem of the West Bank for Israel:

What is apartheid? Apartheid is a system where you have two laws, two different laws, for two people living in the same area. If you don’t like the word apartheid, give me an alternative to a situation where a Palestinian citizen is allowed to use no more than 50 cubic meters of water per capital year, while an Israeli illegal settler from the West Bank is allowed to use 2400. How would you classify a situation where the Israeli gdp per capita is about $30,000 while a Palestinian’s gdp per capita is less than $1400?

Yet we are obliged to pay the same prices for products as Israelis do. More than that: We are obliged to pay double the price for electricity and water that Israelis do though they make 30 times more than we do.

Segregation of roads is another issue. This is the last place on earth, actually the first place on earth where people have been segregated with roads. I’m talking about roads in the West Bank, major roads are exclusive to Israeli settlers or army or Israeli citizens.

I cannot describe to you to the level of violation of human rights.. we’ve left to see Israeli army using dogs against our nonviolent settlers in the most vicious way. Which reminds us of what happened during the Segregation system here in the United States.

So the problem is very clear. Of course it is either two states or one state. But the reality is, What we are witnessing today with the passage of time is that people will be [left] with one or two alternatives. Either it’s a segregation apartheid system, or one democratic state system,. This is the choice we will all face unless some kind of a miracle happens and I don’t know what that miracle is.

Psychology may be about to debase its credibility as a scientific discipline. Some dude at the University of Virginia’s about to try to replicate every study published in three major psychology journals back in 2008. The popcorn’s in the microwave. Opening salvo:

“Ultimately it’s a waste of everyone’s time if I can’t replicate the effects,” he says. “Otherwise, what are we working on?

I feel like everyone’s been <3ing this TNC post on the opposition to racism as a rhetorical pose versus as an actual value (DeLong, Sullivan, LG&M among others), and it’s for good reason. Read it. And at least watch James Baldwin’s section of the video that kicks it off (starts at about 13 minutes in, and runs about 20, if I remember). Right now it seems to me to be the most powerful speech I’ve ever heard.

This NYT piece about the real-time socio-cultural dynamics resulting from the commodification of African tribal practices is provocative in what’s probably a good way. Even if not, it’s interesting and the writing is vivid. Teaser:

In the West we have a particular definition of authenticity and a mania for it as a standard for art, especially art that we envision as elemental, unmodern, unspoiled. We gauge genuineness in terms of age, rarity, uniqueness, history of use, motives for creation. But in Africa, as often as not, authentic is simply what works, socially and spiritually: for example, the way each Dogon tourist dance keeps a larger dance, and Dogon identity, alive.

What accounts for the more ambiguous outcomes of decriminalizing prostitution versus the unambiguously positive outcomes of decriminalizing drugs? In the case of prostitution, the legitimated commodity can suddenly demand expensive rights, supported by the power of the state, driving up the price of doing business compared to the still illegitimate competing commodities trafficked in illegally from abroad. At the same time, if you can decouple the sale from the identifiable-as-legit-or-not body of the prostitute (using the Internet), you’re a lot safer as a trafficker in the decriminalized jurisdiction — police investigators are disempowered as they need to procure some substantive reason that a given operation isn’t legit in an information void. This makes the decriminalized market an attractive hub for illegal traffickers with whose wears the legit, empowered, and fairly-paid prostitutes have to compete and often can’t. Here’s an NYT discussion of the topic.

Still, I think it’s a progressive step in a system in flux. Thoughts?

That’s all I got for now.

Happy friday, everyone!

Here’s another comic from the archives you may not find funny:

PS – Maybe the Red Sox just aren’t very good? (H-t Matt Eckel)

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In which Andrew Sullivan goes full hippy

By
Tom OHare
– February 13, 2012

Do you want to know what Andrew Sullivan thinks about dropping mushrooms? Here you go.

tl;dw: Jesus.

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Video of the Day

By
Tom OHare
– November 2, 2011

Below is a cautionary tale for anyone trying to smuggle illicit materials out of Brazil. The police will chase your plane as it attempts to take off, smash into the wing, and pull their guns on you.

You’ve been warned.

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Bestest Living Ex-Justice (JP Stevens) Reviews the American Criminal Justice System

By
Ben Nolan
– October 24, 2011

…via a review of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J. Stuntz. Sample:

Rather than focus on particular criminal laws, the book emphasizes the importance of the parts that different decision-makers play in the administration of criminal justice. Stuntz laments the fact that criminal statutes have limited the discretionary power of judges and juries to reach just decisions in individual cases, while the proliferation and breadth of criminal statutes have given prosecutors and the police so much enforcement discretion that they effectively define the law on the street.

Delves into the history of race and criminal justice in the US, tracing Stuntz’ historical narrative. Interesting stuff.

Particularly interesting: Stevens takes up Stuntz critical comparison of Prohibition with the War on Drugs:

While “the law of Prohibition may have been foolish,” it was also far less severe than the modern war against drugs. It did not prohibit the mere possession or consumption of alcoholic beverages, only their manufacture, sale, and transport; it exempted use in private homes and service to “bona fide guests”; and doctors were expressly permitted to prescribe the use of alcoholic drinks for therapeutic purposes. Today prison sentences are imposed for simple possession of marijuana and a long list of other controlled substances, and federal law (as upheld by the Court in a 2005 opinion that I wrote, Gonzales v. Raich) even bars possession of home-grown marijuana prescribed to combat the nausea that attends most cancer treatments.

Stuntz describes some harms of alcohol consumption and criticizes Prohibition, but he does not address facts about Prohibition’s enforcement costs or the consequences of its repeal. Those consequences obviously included the replacement of significant litigation and imprisonment costs with generous tax revenues, and expansion of profitable commerce in the production and marketing of alcoholic beverages. On the other hand, as Stuntz’s own reasoning suggests, those consequences also likely included an increase in alcohol consumption, which continues to have serious adverse social effects today.

Such a discussion of the pluses and minuses of the repeal of Prohibition might have provided information relevant to a debate on the wisdom of current drug enforcement policies. As Stuntz mentions, the absence of developed debate among present-day political leaders about drug policies is striking in light of the openness of the debate among political leaders in the 1920s and early 1930s—such as Al Smith, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1928—about the wisdom of prohibiting alcohol. In short, while Stuntz’s discussion of Prohibition is interesting and informative, it omits a potentially valuable assessment of how the lessons from Prohibition’s repeal might bear upon, and inform political debate about, the current war on drugs.

I bolded the parenthetical because I think its a funny contrast to the faith Stevens goes on in the same paragraph to express that there is a serious political debate to “bear upon, and inform.” Leaving Stuntz off the table, there’s plenty out there to inform just such a debate were it to start existing. Not least, the recent Canadian Supreme Court decision regarding InSite (a Vancouver safe-injection clinic)’s exemption from enforcement of criminal drug possession laws and the mountain of sociological, criminological, and medical research that was drawn upon both in the decision and in the clinic’s legal team’s factum, or the research that’s been done in Portugal studying the social, criminal and medical consequences of their decision in the early aughts to decriminalize all narcotics (e.g. Greenwald’s Cato report).

It is striking that there isn’t a debate to contribute to, but it’s a problem of democracy, not of lack of potential content and reasoning. On one side anyway.

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Things That Would Never Happen In America: Supreme Court unanimity in support of safe-injection clinics

By
Ben Nolan
– September 30, 2011

Insite is a supervised-injection clinic in Vancouver’s most famously drug-blighted neighbourhood that operates through a medical-facility exemption from the Controlled Drug and Substance Act.

In places without such an exemption (read: everywhere else), doing something like injecting heroin would make a person subject to arrest and criminal charges.

Essentially, Insite is a de jure Hamsterdam. And because it’s de jure, it’s a lot more orderly / sanitary. Here’s what it looks like:

insite-8040563-584.jpg

And here’s a dude using the facility:

It’s the first of its kind in North America and has been extremely successful by metrics like the number of addicts moving into detox facilities (a 30 per cent increase in the number of addicts who enter detox), the number of overdose deaths (overdose deaths have declined by 35 per cent in the area of Insite)… I’m just gonna give you the whole Wikipedia summary of the evaluative research that’s been done on the clinic:

When founded, Insite acquired legal exemption under the condition that its impacts be thoroughly evaluated.[10] Consequently, the site has been the focus of more than thirty studies,[11] published in 15 peer-reviewed journals.[12] The research indicates an array of benefits, including reductions in public injecting and syringe sharing and increases in the use of detoxification services and addiction treatment among patients. In addition, studies assessing the potential harms of the site have not observed any adverse effects.[13][14] Preliminary observations published in 2004 in the journal Harm Reduction indicate that the site successfully attracted injecting drug users and thus decreased public drug use. However, the researchers cautioned that a full assessment of the site will take several years.[10]

Additional research in the Canadian Medical Association Journal suggests that the site has reduced public injections, neighbourhood litter, and needle sharing.[15] A study in the journal Addictionindicates that patients at the site have increased their use of detoxification services and long-term addiction treatment.[16] A study in the New England Journal of Medicine echoed this finding.[17]Furthermore, research in The Lancet indicates that the site substantially reduces the sharing of syringes.[18] A study in the journal Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy revealed that local police facilitate use of Insite, especially among high-risk users. The researchers concluded that the site “provides an opportunity to… resolve some of the existing tensions between public order and health initiatives.”[19]

A 2008 cost-benefit analysis of the site in the Canadian Medical Association Journal observed net-savings of $18 million and an increase of 1175 life-years over ten years.[20] Another cost-benefit analysis published in the International Journal of Drug Policy in 2010 determined that the site prevents 35 cases of HIV and about 3 deaths per year, indicating a yearly net-societal benefit of more than $6 million.[21] A 2011 study in The Lancet found overdose deaths have dropped 35% in the Insite area since it opened, much more than 9% drop elsewhere in Vancouver.[22] An editorial in theCanadian Medical Association Journal noted that after three years of research “a remarkable consensus that the facility reduces harm to users and the public developed among scientists, criminologists and even the Vancouver Police Department.”[12]

Conservatives do not care for Insite. In fact, the Conservative federal government has worked very hard to have the exemption that allows Insite to operate revoked.

How’d that go?

CBC:

In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that not allowing the clinic to operate under an exemption from drug laws would be a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The court ordered the federal minister of health to grant an immediate exemption to allow Insite to operate.

“Insite saves lives. Its benefits have been proven. There has been no discernable negative impact on the public safety and health objectives of Canada during its eight years of operation,” the ruling said, written by chief justice Beverly McLachlin.

The court ruled that withdrawing the exemption undermines the purpose of federal drug laws, which include public health and safety.

Here’s the decision in full. Highlights:

  • “There is no reason to conclude that the deprivation the claimants would suffer was due to personal choice rather than government action. The ability to make some choices does not negate the trial judge’s findings that addiction is a disease in which the central feature is impaired control over the use of the addictive substance.“
  • “The effect of denying the services of Insite to the population it serves and the correlative increase in the risk of death and disease to injection drug users is grossly disproportionate to any benefit that Canada might derive from presenting a uniform stance on the possession of narcotics.”
  • “Where, as here, a supervised injection site will decrease the risk of death and disease, and there is little or no evidence that it will have a negative impact on public safety, the Minister should generally grant an exemption.”
UNANIMITY on these statements from the highest court in the land.
It’s a proud day for this Canadian.
Update: Law-student/friend Jay Potter makes a good point on FB (requesting that I stipulate that this is a personal opinion and doesn’t represent the views of, like, the Law Society or the Church of Scientology or anything):
A victory for Insite, but recall the judgment still requires each case of future safe injection sites to be litigated separately to determine whether the Minister has exercised his discretion in conformance with the Charter – also note that the court at para. 153 allows the Minister to consider “community support or opposition” in reaching this decision. It’s a win for harm reduction, but hardly a slam dunk.
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Don’t. Do. Drugs.

By
Tom OHare
– June 27, 2011

Cocaine edition:

Cocaine cut with the veterinary drug levamisole could be the culprit in a flurry of flesh-eating disease in New York and Los Angeles.

The drug, used to deworm cattle, pigs and sheep, can rot the skin off noses, ears and cheeks. And over 80 percent of the country’s coke supply contains it.

“It’s probably quite a big problem, and we just don’t know yet how big a problem it really is,” said Dr. Noah Craft, a dermatologist with Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute.

In a case study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, Craft describes six cocaine users recently plagued by the dark purple patches of dying flesh. And while they happened to hail from the country’s coastlines, the problem is national.

“It’s important for people to know it’s not just in New York and L.A. It’s in the cocaine supply of the entire U.S.,” Craft said.

This is just one of those times we experience in life when we realize that we’re really glad we’re not cokeheads.

But sure, I’ll have another cigarette.

(via Dave Noon)

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Because Your Undying Love Doesn’t Pay the Bills, and We’ve Developed One Hell of a Coke Habit

By
Tom OHare
– June 23, 2011

Those of you who are regular visitors to this blog (Hi, Mom!) know that last week, in a move that will go down in Internet history, we rejected $20 in advertising from a creepy online education mill. It was legendary, it was epic, and it showcased the majesty of our ideals in action. Apparently, so majestic is our Internet Ethic, that at least one anonymous commenter felt that it merited its own reward. Here I quote one HPG:

Please add a PayPal “Donate” button to your blog. I don’t have very much money right now, but I would like to contribute $5 in support of your attentiveness, integrity, and eloquence plus $1 for Ben’s tasty icing.

Email me when you get it set up and I will follow through.

While we haven’t yet emailed the good madam, we very much intend to. $5 is $5, and Ben deserves an extra loony for good measure (He’s Canadian: that’s what they call dollars up there). And anyway, we’ve reached the point where we feel like, “Hey. If someone wants to give us free money because they like what we’re doing, more power to them!” So here’s the deal:

We’ve added a PayPal button. It’s over there in the sidebar, beneath the search function. If you want to donate, that’s the way to do it. If we ever somehow make back the money we’ve invested in this little website and wind up with extra, we promise to spend the rest on the finest Bolivian marching powder we can get our hands on.

Sincerely,

The Management

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The Mayan Apocalypse Cometh

By
Tom OHare
– June 13, 2011

Rebecca Black’s music video is now only available for rent. $2.99 for 72 hours. Deal of the century alert!

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The Week is Over

By
Tom OHare
– June 10, 2011

I realize that I use this weekly space to talk about my personal life too much, and I frankly don’t care. Because today, before I disclose the most wonderful things you missed on the blog this week, I would like to discuss books. And I would particularly like to discuss the newfound joy I feel when I throw books the fuck away.

It is a very deep metaphor, to be sure!

Perhaps I should preface this with the following, so no one misunderstands: I LIKE BOOKS, AND I LIKE HAVING THEM! But I realized when I moved across the country that I have about a 14 X 14 X 14 box’s worth of books that I’m actually willing to cart around with me to whenever life demands that I relocate. I can read Shakespeare and Plato online; I can, in fact, locate exactly what I wanted to cite or re-read much more efficiently than a librarian, since I can just type in, “All the world’s a stage…” on Google and be directed to a website with a citation and a full quote with my first result. I don’t need Shakespeare or Plato, because they’re everywhere. Do I get the fascinating annotations and notes that come with reading the Oxford edition of Macbeth? Do I get my own marginalia — my underlines, chickenscratch, emphases? Well, no. But I also didn’t go to college to become a book collector, and I don’t read to re-read. I read to read. The number of books — full books — I’ve read more than once is less than one hundred. (Articles, chapters, essays, and passages would number in the hundreds, if not thousands, but those don’t count.) Why should I bring them all with me everywhere I end up living? To showcase my erudition? To maybe — one day, possibly, with a little luck — look something up that I couldn’t look up online?

Again, I’m really not knocking people who feel otherwise. Maybe I just don’t understand the concept of the personal library, in general, never mind the mobile one. Let me explain:

Today I drove a big van — a miniature bus, really (Part of my job — the job that was advertised and the job I applied for, as a matter of fact — is driving old people from Point A to Point B. Driving those Old People Buses is pretty cool, is what I’m saying. Also, I want to have business cards made up that say, “Tom O’Hare: Back-up Bus Driver.” That is all.) — to a lovely old woman’s house in Peabody, Massachusetts. My task? To take 60 boxes of books from her garage, from which boxes I would cull the good books (Pro-tip: lovely old women don’t have any) to re-sell for the benefit of my non-profit organization, while the remainder would be recycled by the industrial fiber recycling people. So I get there with my hand truck and my youthful vigor, and an hour later, the books loaded into miniature bus, driven to book recycling HQ, and Thrown. The. Fuck. Away. Honestly. I’ve been doing this for three months now — dealing with you people’s shit, your discarded books, your personal libraries; re-purposing your trash to benefit the lives of senior citizens — and I have never seen a more thoroughly terrible batch of books than the one I pulled today. Smelly, yellowed, decaying. Were there classics? There were a great number of them. Did I give a single shit when I threw them into the big blue recycling bins along with the cookbooks and the encyclopedias? Not a single shit was given.

“What’s your point?” you’re saying. HOLD ON A SECOND, JESUS.

The point is that books are just words written on paper. They’re not fundamentally different from blogs or newspapers, except for the fact that both of those media lend themselves quite a bit more easily to the process of a) consumption and b) immediate disregard. In other words, you buy a book and you’re expected to keep it. Even after it’s gotten all of the use it’s ever going to get, you’re expected to keep it. Display it. Put it on your bookshelves and watch the gawkers gawk. Even if 90+% of those books will never be touched again, we feel a compulsion to hold onto them. To forefront them. To amass them, even though nobody will ever read them again.

It’s more likely than not that this is a generational phenomenon, which both heartens and disheartens. I mean, I won’t lie: throwing a thousand Reader’s Digest books the fuck out — just, “Oh, this box doesn’t look good,” *crashbangboomgoesthedynamite* all day long — that felt good. Some half-assed novel of some striver from the 70′s trying to make it, just going right into the proverbial dumpster (as I keep emphasizing, we RECYCLE these things). No guilt. Absolutely none. The larger part, in fact, is some sort of odd schadenfreude. As in, “No one will remember you either, pal. Not even now, when we have the chance.” And then, boom. Another box of books, disregarded. Trashed. Junked. Crashing to the bottom of a big blue bin. I can’t explain why it is exactly that I feel so immediately content to hear that sound. A brief, quiet thunderclap of books, hitting the ungodly hollow and solipsistic shell of a big ass blue bin. On wheels.

(When they’re empty, they roll a little bit with each memoir I throw in, which adds a nice thunder-y echo effect. When I’m doing the actual work of scanning the books, I literally shoot baskets all day long — into [practically] un-missable-sized baskets [namely, the blue bins]. My rule of thumb being that if the book has an Amazon sales ranking of over one million, it’s junk [unless it's collectible, in which case I'll try to sell it to another seller]. Anyway, that’s when the shooting baskets comes in. “Oh, this Danielle Steele novel isn’t selling well… Into the trash with you!” Crashcrashblamblam, you get the picture: it’s fun. It’s how I stay in shape anyway.)

Hahaha. Where was I going with this?

Books are the ideas contained within them. When you’ve stopped caring about those ideas, it’s time to get rid of the books. Give them to people who might care, or donate them to charity (not Got Books). I can assure you that you will probably never care again. Just set aside a couple of boxes for the ideas you’re not sure you’ve quit yet, and you’ll be fine.

Here are some ideas that you probably won’t care about forever, but that you might care about right now:

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The Hippies Are Winning

By
Trevor Macomber
– June 2, 2011

According to the it’s-about-goddamn-time report released today by the Global Commission on Drug Policy (pdf):

The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.

That right there is the very first paragraph from the report’s refreshingly unflinching executive summary. Moreover, the no-pussyfooting-around candor is established right from cover page:

Photoshop 101, perhaps, but for a commission populated by former U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan; former U.S. Secretary of State (under Reagan, my Republican brothers!) George P. Schultz; former President of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo; current Prime Minister of Greece, Georgios A. Papandreou; and numerous other intellectual and political luminaries, it’s a pimp slap of the highest order.

The report goes on to fillet the long-consumed red meat of War on Drug evangelicals by declaring that:

Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption. Apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organization are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers. Repressive efforts directed at consumers impede public health measures to reduce HIV/AIDS, overdose fatalities and other harmful consequences of drug use. Government expenditures on futile supply reduction strategies and incarceration displace more cost-effective and evidence-based investments in demand and harm reduction.

Conventional blogging prudence prevents me from quoting the entire summary, but it’s only two pages long, so even if you don’t read the rest (a mere 18 additional pages, incidentally), I’d strongly urge you to at least peruse said.

In the words of the commission itself:

Break the taboo on debate and reform.
The time for action is now.

(via)

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