Status Updates From Smoke and Mirrors: The War ...

Precisely because it doesn't kill people who use it, spawn gun battles in city streets, enrich foreign drug lords, or inspire women to abandon their babies, marijuana separates drug policy for public welfare from drug policy for public relations. (1/2)

The prospect of even a slight softening on marijuana was tantalizing, because if anything is clear from the past 25 years of drug warfare, it is that marijuana-- not crack, cocaine or heroin-- is politically the most important legal drug. (1/2)

On June 21 [1991] Dr. James O. Mason, chief of the Public Health Service, announced the government would no longer make marijuana available to desperately sick people... In his press conference, Mason acknowledged the decision was based on politics, not health. "If it's perceived that PHS is going around giving marijuana to people, there would be a perception that this stuff can't be so bad."

Drug violence, unheard of at the start of the Drug War, now terrorized poor neighborhoods. Drug combatants died daily; just the number of slain innocent bystanders had tripled in two years prior to Bush's inauguration. (2/2, 1989)

Despite the billions spent, the millions imprisoned, and the loss of liberties to both drug user and nonuser alike, drugs were cheaper, more potent, and used by younger children than when Nixon started the war. The drug cartels were wealthier and more sophisticated than ever. The number of cocaine dependents had grown. (1/2)

"We have repeatedly held that the government's regulatory interest can, in appropriate circumstances, outweigh an individual's liberty interest. For example, in times of war or insurrection, the government may detain individuals whom the government deems to be dangerous." Thus was the War on Drugs anointed a real war by the Supreme Court.

At a conference of forensic scientists in Cincinnati, the chief toxicologist for North Carolina's medical examiner asked, "Is there anybody in the audience who would submit urine for cannaboid testing if his career, teputation, freedom or livelihood depended on it?" Not a single hand was raised.

Don't talk about the lives, taxpayer dollars, and civil liberties sacrificed for the Drug War. Don't talk about the culture and race wars waged under the Drug War battle flag. Don't talk about the medical potential of illegal drugs. Don't talk at all. Just say no. (2/2)

But Just Say No did something insidious. It reduced the debate to a single word. Don't talk about why people use drugs. Don't ask why Halcion and malt liquor are legal drugs while marijuana and cocaine are not. Don't talk about the difference between drug use and drug abuse. Don't talk about the tendency of prohibition to promote violence and the use of stronger or more dangerous drugs. (1/2)

Manufacturing jobs began disappearing in the 1980s for the first time since the Great Depression... But dope-smoking workers were not the problem. Industrial America was collapsing because companies were putting their money not into developing products and building factories to make them, but rather into buying and selling each other.

Acknowledging that it had come up with "politically inconvenient scientific knowledge," NAS found "no convincing evidence" that pot permanently damages the brain or nervous system, or decreases fertility. As for the legal question, small-quantity possession should not be a crime, the report said. "Alienation from the rule of law in a democratic society may be the most serious cost of the current [pot] laws."

Like other "gateway drug" theorists, the researchers only looked in one direction, asking heroin and cocaine users if they first used [pot] and predictably finding that a great many had. ... More important, the researchers failed to track [pot] smokers on how many graduate to harder drugs. Whenever the question is asked that way, the percentage is in the single digits.

Cocaine, occasionally used as a topical anesthetic, was a Schedule 2 drug, but marijuana was classified as being as deadly and useless as heroin. Finally, as one FDA official put it, marijuana will never be a legal drug because "there's no profit incentive to develop marijuana"; anybody can grow it.

"I think there is a genuine hypocrisy in all of this. The people in the federal government [are] just kidding themselves and kidding the people when they say we have mounted a massive war on narcotics when they know darned well that the massive war they have mounted in narcotics is only going to be effective at the margins." John Ehrlichman

"The government line is that the use of marijuana leads to more dangerous drugs," David Smith told reporters. "The fact is the *lack* of marijuana leads to more dangerous drugs."

For much of this book, you could substitute "terror" for "drugs" and the story would be the same: the State using fear to consolidate or ensure their power, out of the goodness of their hearts.

Making my way through the chapters on the Reagan administration, and I'm recalling hearing these stories as a high school student who, for one reason or another, thought the liberty interest of citizens trumped the state's authority in most cases. And here is small government Reagan eviscerating the Bill of Rights because drugs.

Matt wanted me to read this, so I picked it up tonight. It's eye-opening and very interesting so far.