August, 2009
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Rasmussen Reports: Majority Of Americans Now Agree That Booze Is More Dangerous Than Pot
August 31, 2009
More than half of Americans agree that marijuana is safer than alcohol. Rassmussen Reports has the details here:51% Rate Alcohol More Dangerous Than Marijuana
via Rasmussen ReportsFifty-one percent (51%) of American adults say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 19% disagree and say pot is worse.
But 25% say both are equally dangerous. Just two percent (2%) say neither is dangerous.
Younger adults are more likely than their elders to view alcohol as the more dangerous of the two.
Fifty-three percent (53%) of women say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, compared to 48% of men. Men by a two-to-one margin over women say pot is riskier, but women are more inclined to say both are dangerous.
Unmarried adults are more critical of alcohol than those who are married. Those with children at home think alcohol is more dangerous than those without kids living with them.
Given the multitude of ways that our culture celebrates booze while simultaneously stigmatizing cannabis, these survey results are rather remarkable. Despite more than seven decades of federally sponsored pot propaganda, a slight majority of adults — including many Americans who drink booze and don’t smoke pot — recognize that alcohol poses far greater harms to the consumer and to society than does weed.
Here are just a few of the ways:
Quite literally, alcohol is an intoxicant; cannabis is not.
The word intoxicant is derived from the Latin noun, toxicum, meaning: “a poison.” It’s an appropriate description for booze. Alcohol is toxic to healthy cells and organs, a side-effect that results in some 35,000 deaths per year. Ethanol, the psychoactive ingredient in booze, is carcinogenic following its initial metabolization, which is why even moderate drinking is positively associated with increased incidences of various types of cancer. Heavy alcohol consumption can depress the central nervous system — inducing unconsciousness, coma, and death — and is strongly associated with increased risks of injury (Booze plays a role in about 41,000 fatal accidents per year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.) and acts of violence. In fact, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Crime Statistics, alcohol consumption plays a role in approximately one million violent crimes annually.
By contrast, the active compounds in marijuana, known as cannabinoids, are remarkably non-toxic and actually mimic chemicals naturally produced by the body, so-called endocannabinoids, that are vital for maintaining one’s proper health. Unlike alcohol, marijuana is incapable of causing fatal overdose — cannabinoids do not act upon the brain stem — and its use is inversely associated with aggression and injury. Finally, lifetime use of cannabis is not associated with increased risk of mortality or various types of cancer — including lung cancer — and may even reduce such risk.
Given our government’s demonization of the cannabis plant and its users it’s a wonder that anyone — much less over half of America — is finally recognizing these facts. That said, this awareness does not yet translate into majority support for legalizing cannabis, which Rasmussen reports remains below 50 percent — meaning that we still have our work cut out for us.
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Profiles in Cannabis: Jessica Peck Corry
August 29, 2009NORML is proud to confirm that Jessica Peck Corry will be speaking at the 2009 NORML National Conference in San Francisco, CA.
Ms. Corry is a Denver-based public policy analyst and political strategist, specializing in civil rights issues. In 2008, Jessica was highlighted as one of Colorado’s most influential women by the Denver Examiner; in 2007, she was named one of Colorado’s top political “Movers and Shakers” by the Colorado Statesman. She regularly appears on Denver TV and radio for her policy expertise and her blog, “The Corry Story,” is published by The Denver Post’s PoliticsWest.com.
Jessica is a former GOP candidate for the Colorado state senate, where despite being outspent more than four-to-one, she garnered nearly 47 percent of the vote against a two-term incumbent. She began her career as a press secretary in the United States Senate, working for U.S. Senators Fred Thompson (R-TN) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and for the U.S. Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
Ms. Corry is the proud parent of two young daughters, and is an outspoken critic of cannabis prohibition in particular, its adverse effects on children. “It costs $30,000 a year to incarcerate a pot dealer,” she says, “and we spend $10,000 a year to educate a child.”
Jessica says, “Yes we cannabis” and so should you! Meet Jessica and hundreds of other like-minded people at NORML’s 38th annual conference, taking place September 24-26 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown San Francisco. For registration information, please visit: http://www.norml.org/conference.
More about Jessica:
Colorado Daily: Republican Moms Hold the Keys to Marijuana Legalization
Mom’s Logic: Pot Parents: Smoking’s Better Than Drinking
NORML Daily Audio Stash interview: “Let me be the parent to my children”
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Study Says It’s Easier For Teens To Buy Marijuana Than Beer
August 28, 2009
It’s that time of year — time for one of America’s leading prohibitionist organizations, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (aka CASA), to once again report that seven-plus decades of criminal pot prohibition have resulted in making cannabis more readily available to teens than alcohol!Study Says It’s Easier For Teens To Buy Marijuana Than Beer
via KPVI News 6A recent study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University has some startling results about teens and drugs.
In their study, they found that 40 percent of teens could get marijuana within a day; another quarter said they could get it within an hour. In another portion of the survey, teens between the ages of 12 and 17 say it’s easier to get marijuana than buy cigarettes**, beer or prescription drugs. That number is up 37 percent from 2007.
[**Note: The CASA study actually reported that teens could more readily access pot than beer or prescription drugs; the percentage of teens reporting that either marijuana or cigarettes were the "easiest to buy" were equal (26 percent) -- got to love the mainstream media's dedication to accuracy in reporting. That said, the percentage of Americans actually smoking cigarettes is now at an all-time low.]
Ask any advocate of marijuana prohibition, including CASA’s head Joseph ‘Russian Roulette’ Califano, why they oppose legalization and you will almost always receive the same response: Keeping pot illegal keeps it out of the hands of children. Yet CASA’s own survey demonstrates once again that just the opposite is true. In fact, it’s legalization, regulation, and public education — coupled with the enforcement of age restrictions — that most effectively keeps mind-altering substances out of the hands of children.
Abdicating the production and distribution of pot solely to black market criminal entrepreneurs increases, rather than decreases, teens’ access to cannabis.
In short, no system could possibly provide America’s children with greater access to weed than the one we have: prohibition. Now when will our elected officials get the message?
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Profiles in Cannabis: Norm Stamper
NORML is proud to confirm that Norm Stamper will be speaking at the 2009 NORML National Conference in San Francisco, CA.
Mr. Stamper was a police officer for 34 years, the first 28 in San Diego, the last six (1994-2000) as Seattle’s Chief of Police. He has a doctorate in Leadership and Human Behavior, and is the author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing (Nation Books, 2005). He is an advisory board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and is a frequently featured critic of the drug war on radio and cable news outlets.Most recently, Norm penned the forward to the book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? (Chelsea Green, 2009), stating: “From my own work and the experiences of other members of the law enforcement community, it is abundantly clear that marijuana is rarely, if ever, the cause of harmfully disruptive or violent behavior. In fact, I would go so far as to say that marijuana use often helps to tamp down tensions where they otherwise might exist.”
Norm says, "Yes we cannabis" and so should you! Meet Norm and hundreds of other likeminded people at NORML’s 38th annual conference, taking place September 24-26 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown San Francisco. For registration information, please visit: http://www.norml.org/conference.
More about Norm:
Huffington Post: Thoughts on Pot vs. Alcohol from a Former Police Chief
Huffington Post: Marijuana Is No Laughing Matter, Mr. President
Huffington Post: A Former Police Chief on New Marijuana Book
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Anti-Marijuana Zealot Still Employed By Obama
August 26, 2009No employee of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) sans the director has ever drawn more public and academic criticism than David Murray, ONDCP’s chief scientist.Virtually an entire book was derived from the ONDCP’s twisting science and statistical data during Murray’s eight-year tenure—Dr. Matthew Robinson’s Lies, Damn Lies and Drug War Statistics, A Critical Analysis Of Claims Made By The ONDCP. You can watch Murray and Robinson debate about the drug war and ONDCP’s methodology at the Cato Institute here.
Question: When will Obama and Holder finally kick Murray to the curb and replace him with someone other than another anti-cannabis zealot masquerading as a ‘scientist’?
The Washington Monthly’s Charlie Homans cast some much needed, white hot light in Mr. Murray’s direction.******The Bushie Obama Can’t FireObama vowed to reverse Bush’s hard-line drug policies, but Dubya still has a man raising havoc in the White House drug office. Problem is, Obama can’t fire him.
The Bush years were not the finest hour for the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. Drug czar John Walters, who ran the place beginning in late 2001, waged a militaristic drug war, pouring money into dubiously effective efforts to fight trafficking abroad while letting treatment programs stagnate at home, and obsessing over marijuana at the expense of more dangerous drugs.
It’s an approach that Barack Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, is now trying to steer away from. He has vowed to end the use of the phrase “war on drugs,” and the hard-liners who filled out Walters’ office are now gone. All of them, that is, except one guy: David Murray, the drug czar’s chief scientist, and Walters’ most enthusiastic disciple.
David Murray is a lone human memento of the Bush administration’s drug war, surrounded bypeople who are trying to undo the work on which he has spent the past eight years.
“He was brought in as a political hatchet man,” says Ross Deck, a former ONDCP analyst and a 16-year-veteran of the office who quit during the Walters years. Before joining in the ONDCP, Murray had no prior experience in addiction science, or law enforcement, or anything else particularly related to drug policy.
He is on the record questioning many of the drug policies espoused by Kerlikowske. Congress has spent three years trying to get him fired.
Why, then, does Murray somehow still have a job in the Obama administration? The reason can be found in the fine print of the federal bureaucracy. Midway through his tenure, Walters moved Murray—at the time his special assistant—from a politically appointed job to the chief scientist’s post, a theoretically apolitical position that makes him much harder to fire. By law, Kerlikowske can’t touch a hair on his head for the first 120 days of his own stint as drug czar. Which means that until the middle of September, Murray is living in a peculiar limbo: a lone human memento of the Bush administration’s botched prosecution of the drug war, surrounded by people who are trying to undo the work on which he has spent the past eight years.
ONDCP veterans speak fondly of Murray’s predecessor, a defense research veteran named Al Brandenstein, who was the drug czar office’s only previous chief scientist from 1991 until Walters removed him in 2004. Brandenstein worked to put advanced drug-detection technologies in the hands of law-enforcement agencies, but he was also interested in advancing the understanding of the demand side of the drug-use equation. In the 1990s, he got government funding for brain-scanning equipment that medical researchers would use to better understand the biochemistry of addiction. Critics in the drug-policy community argue that Brandenstein’s work produced little of value, and that his post existed mostly to provide a pretext for government spending on gadgetry—but for better or worse, that was what Congress had asked for when it created the chief scientist job.
Murray, on the other hand, was not. A former cultural anthropologist who had left academia for the conservative think-tank circuit, he had made a name for himself in Washington a decade earlier with an article in Policy Review about the danger out-of-wedlock births posed to the fabric of American society. (It began, memorably, “America is becoming a nation of bastards.”) As Walters’ special assistant, he had made headlines in Canada in 2003 by suggesting that the U.S.’s northern neighbor’s experiments with marijuana decriminalization could cause diplomatic problems along the border.
Shelving most of Brandenstein’s work, Murray pursued the occasional science project—he was enthusiastic about testing the Beltway’s sewage for traces of cocaine—but mostly used his office as a political soapbox, lambasting opponents and burying unflattering data that suggested his boss wasn’t exactly winning the drug war. (The Statistical Assessment Service, a research organization that Murray himself launched in 1994, has in recent years devoted much ink to debunking its own founder’s claims on drug-policy issues like needle exchange.)
In congressional testimony, Murray branded medical-marijuana advocates “modern-day snake-oil proponents”; in a 2007 appearance on a panel at the libertarian Cato Institute, he derided the think tank’s pro-legalization stance to be “an illusion” that “grows out of late-night dormitory engagements in college that one hopes one outgrows.” He also alienated more middle-of-the-road drug-policy experts both inside and outside the bureaucracy; one outside expert recalls attending a drug-research group meeting with Murray and hearing him offhandedly refer to the pot-friendly Netherlands as a “narco-state.”
“David acted as though he had said nothing the least bit unusual in saying that,” the expert says. “It’s indicative of how off the map he is—he simply doesn’t understand how strange his own views are about these things.”
Congress felt similarly. In the fall of 2005, as the panic over methamphetamine use in rural America was reaching its apex, Walters sent Murray to brief the members the House of Representatives’ Meth Caucus—a group formed by mostly rural and Western congressmen in 2001—on what the administration planned to do about the burgeoning problem. The assembled lawmakers were so spectacularly unimpressed that one of them, Indiana Republican Mark Souder, marched out of the meeting and promptly demanded that Murray step down from his post, calling his briefing “pathetic” and an “embarrassment.” Murray’s performance was so bad, Souder declared, that “if Director Walters and anyone else in that office agrees with what was said today, they should resign.”
This was grandstanding, of course. But Congress made more substantial efforts to oust Murray after the Democrats came to power in 2006. Over the next three years, the Senate Appropriations Committee—which controls the federal government’s purse strings—used its annual report to criticize the chief scientist directly, a highly unusual gesture. “The Committee,” one of the reports reads, “is highly disappointed in the director of this program”—Murray—“and is troubled by his ideas for research and development that appear to have little or no value.” When Walters insisted on keeping him in the post in the face of such criticism, the Appropriations Committee responded by slashing funding for it. Murray’s office, which received nearly $47 million in 2003, got just $1 million this year.
The committee has made it clear that ONDCP’s science shop won’t see another dime until Murray is gone, at least from his current job. What happens after that is an open question. (Repeated calls to the ONDCP’s press office for an interview with Murray or a comment on his future prospects went unreturned.) While most drug-policy watchers assume Kerlikowske will kick him out of the chief scientist post as soon as he can, actually firing him is trickier. There are ways to encourage burrowed-in ideologues to quit, however—ONDCP veterans recall that George Bush Sr.’s drug czar, Bob Martinez, used to do it by assigning them to an office with no windows, phones, or computers.
“He’ll be there until somebody runs him off,” Ross Deck, the former ONDCP analyst, says of Murray. “What can they do with him? They can give him a job counting paperclips.”
Charles Homans is an editor of the Washington Monthly.
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