American Bar Association: Health Law looks at drugs

The American Bar Association's 20-year old Standing Committee on Drug Abuse was merged into the Health Law Section in August after the Annual Meeting with the start of the association's new year.  Here is a very thoughtful column by the Section Immediate Past Chair, David H. Johnson of New Mexico, on the breadth of the issue from the perspective a lawyer not looking from the criminal justice/enforcement perspective.

Amidst its other work and continuing legal education (CLE) programs, the Standing Committee was a leading voice (adopting policy in 2004) decrying the terrible collateral consequences of drug convictions and the stigma for persons who once had a substance abuse problem.  And it organized three well-attended annual meeting programs on legal issues related to medical use of marijuana (including the Raich case -- before it went to the Supreme Court).

As a task force of the Health Law Section, this group can become a more important voice.

If you are a lawyer or law student reading this blog, join the ABA -- it is a welcoming, progressive and influential institution -- and join the Health Law Section and the Substance Abuse Task Force. Think about how your informed voice might further help develop wiser policies on substance use and misuse.

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Kumar's Plan to kick it in Charlotte

Barry,
Thinking about your call the other night. Yes, we've got to get this right.
If you really have the fire for America that Clinton says you have, then show everybody else that fire. Let's fire one up and get down and party with young America and show off you and the future everybody is talking about.

The Bank of America Stadium is free. Let's have a free concert Saturday night. (Definitely not exclusive to delegates and credentialed guests, but for them drinks are on the house!)

Invite the dopest young Americans -- everybody from software wranglers, game champions, skateboard gymnasts, athletes of every kind, writers, singers, poets, guitarists, keyboardists, drummers, lot of drummers, scientists, Burners, actors and actresses, models, deal makers, great students of all kinds! (writers -- give me some better lines) Play up the wonderfulness of youth and the future we want to give them!

Stage a big free alternative rally rockin' rave for Obama in the the Bank of America Stadium on Saturday.

HERE'S THE SECRET SAUCE:

Issue an Executive Order guaranteeing that no one will be arrested bringing pot, shrooms, XTC or Acid into the stadium, but if anyone is deliberately passing out bad stuff they will go to jail!!

No ticket required! Then give a triumphant speech to the most wildly cheering young people!

Have them all posting photos of you and them on Facebook partyyyying on!

Dude, isn't this savage!
Just get the details right like enough porta-potties, water, and shade. Yes allows tents and canopies on the field.

Encourage make up. Big Prizes to the best Obama tattoos.

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President Obama calls "Harold and Kumar"

The Democratic National Committee thought it would be great sport and smart politics to run a lighthearted ad in which the President calls movie characters "Harold" and "Kumar," who are lamely stereotyped "stoners," to ask them to help him get the Democratic Convention "right."

Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) alumni Shaleen Title, Chris Wallis and Andrew Livingston (I am proud to call all of them friends and colleagues) have produced a wonderful video of how the call might have gone if Pres. Obama had called a real marijuana user, not the drug czar's stereotypical vision of one.



The Obama call to Harold and Kumar ad is perhaps one of the dumbest moves by a campaign that has clearly lost its touch with the young because it draws renewed attention by young voters to Obama's cumulative insults and disregard of marijuana users and their political concerns. When Obama's early efforts to communicate with the public in direct online question format produced enormous support for marijuana legalization questions he joked that this support was a quirky and trivial artifact of the online world. In every other later social media communications efforts, when such questions were submitted and drew the largest number of "likes" or other approval, the questions were pointedly ignored or simply removed from the websites in a classic "1984," Orwellian consignment to the "memory hole" of invisibility.

Aside from the insults, the mockery, and the contemptuous disregard of marijuana users' concerns, the substance of the policy has been shocking, especially regarding medical use of marijuana. Obama pledged in his campaign to honor state medical marijuana laws. But he abdicated control of the Justice Department which has raided and shut down more dispensaries in 3 1/2 years than Pres. G.W. Bush's Justice Department (remember Ashcroft and Gonzales?) shut down in 8 years.

Federal marijuana prosecutions have increased to almost 7000 prosecutions a year in FY 2011, eclipsing all other drugs. And over two thirds of federal marijuana prosecutions are directed at Hispanics. White federal marijuana defendants are only 22.6 percent of the total, a rather blatant racial disparity.

Over seventy percent of House Democrats have voted to abandon the Administration's anti-medical marijuana policy, and it has been pointedly criticized by House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, the party's most successful fund raiser.

Others will write about the wrongheadedness of this crusade from a medical policy or constitutional law perspective, but the political myopia is heartbreaking for Democrats and supporters of Obama. The voters have passed medical marijuana initiatives every time they have had the chance with the exception of a quixotic unfunded initiative in South Dakota. Numerous state legislatures have passed and governors have signed such laws in Hawaii, New Mexico, New Jersey, Delaware, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut and the District of Columbia. (Maryland's legislature passed a watered down medical marijuana law.)

The timing could not be worse -- this is going to spill over the convention coverage in a bad way for Obama -- and he and his cynical campaign deserve it!

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Eric E. Sterling- Guest Blogger for The Agitator

CJPF President Eric E. Sterling is one of the guest bloggers for The Agitator, (Huffington Post's Radley Balko's blog), this week. Eric wrote about the sad news regarding the overdose death of DeAndre McCullough, as well as the millions of dollars that Texas is spending to keep prostitutes locked away in prisons. 

Join the discussion on these interesting topics, and check out more posts this week!

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Examining the 2012 Campaigns to Legalize Cannabis: Washington

The following blog post was written by Patrick Wood, a student at SUNY-Geneseo in New York. Patrick was an intern for the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation during the summer of 2012, and we thank him for his excellent work on this and other projects throughout the summer. This is the final of a three part series written by Patrick. Check out an analysis of the Colorado Initiative here, and an analysis of Oregon's here. 

The official campaigns of the initiatives to legalize cannabis in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington all make big claims about what the initiatives will do for their states if they are passed. How do these claims stand up to the facts?

This post examines Washington’s Initiative 502 as the final of a three part series regarding these cannabis 

legalization initiatives.

Washington’s I-502 campaign website says:

• [The initiative will] Create a tightly regulated system that takes money away from criminal organizations and generates tax revenue for our state and local governments.
• We are united in the belief that Washington should stop wasting law enforcement resources on adults who use marijuana

Supporting I-502 would save law enforcement resources:

“The savings in state and local government expenditure that would result from marijuana legalization consists of three main components: the reduction in police resources from elimination of marijuana arrests; the reduction in prosecutorial and judicial resources from elimination of marijuana prosecutions; and the reduction in correctional resources from elimination of marijuana incarcerations.” - Daniel Egan and Jeffrey A. Miron in The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition in Mitch Earleywine’s Pot Politics

Washington expenditures attributable to marijuana prohibition total about $98,944,000. Of this approximately $41,169,000 is police expenditures - Miron & Waldock in The budgetary impact of drug prohibition

Link: http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/DrugProhibitionWP.pdf

Supporting that legalizing marijuana would generate tax revenue:

An article in the Seattle Times by Jonathan Martin predicts huge Washington tax revenue from I-502, $560 million a year. Martin notes that is more than twice what the Initiative 502 campaign itself had originally predicted: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017810760_marijuana22m.html

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