November 06, 2009

American Drug Policy; what ever happened to Skepticism?

I’ve long subscribed to Scientific American and often read its monthly columns, not because I necessarily agree with the columnists, but because they often make me think. One such is Michael Shermer, an academic from Southern California whose column is known simply as Skeptic. Shermer has literally made a career of skepticism, not only has he written extensively about it, he's also founded an organization dedicated to it, and publishes a magazine focused on it.

I recently caught up with his July column, and became intrigued with the esoteric concept of the Null Hypothesis, which, upon first reading, seemed to have some promise as a model for what had become a personal holy grail: the perfect argument for dispatching the drug policy monster once and for all in a way that would leave little doubt about its fundamentally evil and irrational nature.

After considerable time spent going back and forth between various Null Hypothesis explanations summoned by Google, I realized that holy grail, if it exists at all, is still out there waiting to be discovered and that Michael Shermer will probably always have work trying to explain the nature of truth to skeptics of all stripes.

On the other hand, the short essays I'd just posted do reveal how deeply rooted our drug policy is in two deceptive laws which, when taken together, reveal how faithfully it reflects the ambient ignorance of two bygone eras. That raises an important question: how could such limited views of drug use and addiction have remained almost unchanged over so long an interval?

The answer is that drug policy "science" was easily discouraged during the Anslinger era when Pharmacology was relatively primitive. Following Harry's departure, it was replaced by Nixon's CSA, which gave rise to two in-house agencies, the DEA and NIDA, that have protected their policy from scrutiny far more successfully than their policy has protected civilization from the evils of the global criminal drug markets it has sponsored.

In that respect, they have been aided to no small degree by an essential human weakness: that of denial. I expect that over the next few days we will see plenty of denial as our government and news agencies attempt to minimize and confine the obvious PTSD that is now afflicting an increasing percentage of our military, which, in turn, is being assiduously drug tested to detect the agent my study has revealed to be most effective in treating it.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:43 AM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2009

A Belated Assertion of Priority

Several recent entries reviewed the creation of federal marijuana prohibition (a.k.a. the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937) out of whole cloth via a deceptive transfer tax, the same mechanism that had been used 23 years earlier to launch its equally dishonest prototype, the Harrison Narcotic Act. Fifteen years after passage of the MTA, when Harry Anslinger, the man most responsible for that abomination, was approaching senility, he was allowed to end his career as the first-ever UN High Commissioner of Narcotics; thus his never-validated slander of a useful plant suddenly became (and remains today) global policy by default. In the same vein, the Supreme Court’s 1969 invalidation of Timothy Leary’s 1965 pot conviction proved another bit of execrable timing because it provided the Nixon Administration with an excuse to rewrite existing drug laws and thus arrogate enormous additional powers to the policy. Beyond the highly fanciful reasons used to justify Schedule One, the CSA’s inclusion of cannabis and several other potentially useful agents like LSD on the same list has blocked any study of them as therapeutic agents. Even worse, the CSA provided a simplified mechanism by which a scientific ignoramus like the average Attorney General (think John Ashcroft or his successor) is free to add additional agents to Schedule One without any need for legislative, let alone scientific, approval.

Ironically, just as ratification of the Single Convention treaty was taking place in the mid-Sixties, American and British baby boomers were discovering the unique appeal of “reefer” as an inhaled anxiolytic, a phenomenon that would not be identified and documented by my clinical research for another thirty years. Finally, and perhaps most ironic from my point of view: Nixon’s rejection of any study of pot’s medical potential, as recommended by his own select committee in 1972, meant that my opportunistic study of pot use by Proposition 215 applicants in California would become the first such study ever published in "peer-reviewed" literature.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2009

Some Different Perspectives on a Failing Policy

The most recent entry recounted how the fanciful, scientifically ridiculous assertions of a medically uneducated bureaucrat named Harry Anslinger became the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937; also how, following World War Two, the same law essentially became global policy after he was named the first UN Commissioner of Narcotics. Ironically; in 1969, after the Supreme Court ruled that the MTA was unconstitutional for reasons completely unrelated to its scientific shortcomings, it was rewritten as the CSA, thus endowing it with far more sweeping powers.

Even more ironically, ever since an inattentive press allowed President Nixon to bury the unexpected recommendation of his own special committee to study pot's potential medical benefits in March 1972, drug war apologists have routinely cited the completely unsubstantiated Congressional "Findings and Declarations", originally intended only to claim the new Constitutional basis required by the CSA, as absolutely inviolable reasons why there could be no revision of what has always been a failing policy of dubious Constitutional legitimacy.

As is now also painfully obvious: thirteen years after California’s medical marijuana law passed easily despite the protests of the federal government, there has been no diminution in stubborn federal opposition to voter intent. Despite recent conflicting signals from the Obama Administration, DEA raids have continued, albeit at a reduced rate, while the Agency's supporters have continued to urge their continuation. Almost a full year since his election, as President Obama's Administration struggles with Health Care reform, it will almost certainly remain refractory to any serious consideration of cannabis legalization; nor is it possible to imagine any Congressional retreat from our war on drugs in the near future.

That is particularly unfortunate because our study suggests that in a more rational environment, legal cannabis might be a big winner. Despite its undeniable limitations as a criminal or gray market product, pot has been consistently safe and effective in treating the anxiety disorders and related symptoms of its chronic users, while clearly reducing both their medical costs and the damage done to to their health by alcohol, tobacco, and other illegal drugs; benefits that have been unrecognized for years.

The possibility that legalization could enhance those effects while conserving much of the tax money now wasted on enforcement and incarceration, is nothing short of mind-boggling, not to mention the additional possibility of converting what are now criminal receipts into legitimate profits and tax revenues.

Unfortunately, the most basic requirement of an "evidence-based policy" is a willingness to look at the available evidence, rather than rejecting it out of hand, simply because it isn't consistent with the ad-hoc assertions of a failing policy that has always been based on ideology and false assumptions.

There is a glimmer of hope: hearings are being conducted in Sacramento, but the problem at the state level is that most of the reform organizations with a seat at the table are backing federal policy by agreeing that legal use should be restricted to those over 21. Perhaps the only finding solidly established by federally sponsored research over the past thirty-four years is that kids begin trying drugs in Junior High School and most adults will have tried all the drugs they will ever use well before the age of twenty-five.

Finally, the ability of California's pot smokers to support the impressive growth of their gray market has been well demonstrated. Remembering that at least half of all Americans born since the Baby Boom have been trying pot during adolescence, do we have an accurate idea of how many are still using it?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2009

Pot Prohibition’s Ultimate Absurdity

On several occasions, this blog has asked the same rhetorical question: how could a policy as ludicrous and destructive as marijuana prohibition have been endorsed by the whole world? The answer turns out to be critically important, embarrassing, and even more absurd than the policy itself.

In 1937, the “reefer madness” fantasy of a single uneducated bureaucrat named Harry Jacob Anslinger, with a big assist from the Hearst Newspaper chain, became the basis of a deceptive tax law that had the net effect of subjecting all the products of the hemp plant to criminal prohibition. The excuse used to justify that legislative sleight-of-hand was both highly imaginative and totally bereft of pharmacological validation, even by the comparatively primitive standards of 1937. Most notably missing was any clinical research on the effects of either inhaled or orally ingested cannabis on humans; nor were there any economic or demographic data on the use of what was then a legal product listed in the US Pharmacopeia.

The subsequent history of the Marijuana Tax Act and the drug war it eventually gave rise to is that neither was ever subjected to any more official scrutiny than the MTA received in 1937. Thus, billions of words of empty rhetoric, millions of felony arrests, and thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of avoidable deaths are traceable to Anslinger's imagination and Hearst's propaganda, as they have been interpreted and enforced by the US Federal Government over the next seventy two years.

Following passage of the MTA in 1937, several states were persuaded to pass matching legislation, most notably in the South, where excessive penalties for illegal drug possession became legendary, especially in the case of minorities. Nevertheless, overall "marijuana" arrests remained so infrequent that no statistics were kept, a situation that persisted beyond Anslinger's retirement in the early Sixties, just after JFK's election. He was next appointed the first UN High Commissioner of "Narcotics," a position from which he promoted the Single Convention Treaty, which, upon ratification, had the effect of making his deceptive MTA, still bereft of clinical and pharmacological support, the basis of a policy binding on all UN member nations.

But the travesty didn't end there; indeed, the worst was yet to come: the election of Richard Nixon, a calamitous event, inspired at least partially by adult fears provoked by a youthful, cannabis-influenced Counterculture.

In the mid Sixties, what had started as a flurry of interest provoked by a literary genre critical of US culture and publicly extolling use of marijuana and several new psychedelic agents, resonated enough with the first Baby Boomers to encourage many of them to try marijuana. In 1965, Timothy Leary, an associate of many Beat authors, was arrested for marijuana possession at the Mexican Border and sentenced to 30 years in prison, a verdict that was finally overturned by the Supreme Court, which declared the MTA unconstitutional; not for lack of scientific validity, but because it required self-incrimination. The almost immediate response of the Nixon Administration and Congress was the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, essentially rolling all existing drug prohibitions into a single omnibus package; still without benefit of any research that would support its multiple erroneous assertions.

Even as the CSA was setting the stage for what would soon become infamous as the War on Drugs, a long overdue and non-binding review of 1972 evidence, by a committee Nixon himself had appointed, reported that cannabis possessed enough therapeutic potential to be decriminalized so as to permit appropriate medical studies. Once again, fate intervened when Nixon personally buried their report immediately after its release in March,1972, an event hardly noticed (and never protested) by the same "mainstream" press that would hound him from office two years later.

The MTA's lack of justification is now painfully obvious; Anslinger's faith in the power of arrest to "control" illegal drugs was never really tested until after the explosion in drug use that characterized the youthful Counterculture. By that time, so much political capital and administrative infrastructure had been invested in the belief that prohibition is a viable policy that admitting its failure is the last thing those responsible for it are likely to do without considerable external pressure.

One thing that might help get the ball rolling would be if the Gang of Four were to be challenged to modify their positions by a few well-known citizens with impeccable reputations for integrity.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

The Drug War and Academe

Last week’s discovery that the clinically untrained representative of a brand new Academic Discipline was the dominant voice in a forum considering the medical use of cannabis was a reminder that, although the real heavyweights in such policy discussions are relatively few in number and unknown to the general public, they do exert a critical influence in allowing the drug war to confound its many critics.

That's because the administrators of our war on drugs could not tolerate public disclosure of even a third of of their failures and disasters without being laughed out of authority. One of the main reasons it hasn't happened yet is the great skill of a small group of policy wonks I've come to think of as the drug war's own "Gang of Four".

All are widely published, often with each other; they are Mark Kleiman of UCLA, Peter Reuter of Maryland, Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon, and Rob MacCoun of UC Berkeley. The Gang's considerable strength comes from their deft mutual support while managing to sound sincere and reasonable in defense of a policy that can be counted on to fail ingloriously at whatever goal it sets for itself. They are aided in that feat by not mentioning that US policy has never permitted itself to be measured by reasonable standards, nor allowed its subjects to be studied clinically, except as mentally ill, criminal, or worse.

The Gang typically also cites the unreliability of data from criminal markets but seldom blames that circumstance on a policy that has corrupted all market participants, including law enforcement, for the four decades it has been a top national priority. In other words, the constant default in their analysis is that, despite its many flaws, the drug war is an essential policy.

The hard evidence behind my contrary assertions are unique data supplied by drug users that directly contradict many of the long held beliefs endorsed by policy "experts." Also their demographics and initiation ages, which provide the historical context in which a tiny criminal market suddenly began expanding very rapidly in the early and mid Sixties, data that has always been conspicuously absent from official accounts.

Of course, that might open the door to claims my data isn't representative of the whole criminal pot market, with which I can only agree. In fact, I think that market may turn out to be even bigger than the feds have either realized or dared to admit.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)