Update!!! Update!!! Update!!! 

Please tune in to NORML’s podcast tonight at 4:20pst when host Russ Belville will interview former Seattle Police Chief and NORML Advisory Board Member Norm Stamper regarding the selection of colleague Gil Kerlikowke as Drug Czar.

According to just published news reports, President Barack Obama has tapped Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske to be the nation’s next ‘Drug Czar.’

From Seattle’s top cop to ‘drug czar’
via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[excerpt]

Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske has been appointed to a law enforcement post within the Obama administration, which would return him to Washington, D.C., after almost a decade as Seattle’s top cop, sources said Tuesday.

… Kerlikowske came to Seattle in 2000 after serving as deputy director in the Justice Department, overseeing the Community Oriented Policing Services grant program. A military veteran with 36 years in law enforcement, he spent four years as Buffalo’s police commissioner after starting his career in Florida.

On the positive side, Kerlikowske hails from Seattle — a city that has elected to make the enforcement marijuana crimes cops’ lowest priority. And although the police chief spoke out against the initiative effort — which passed with 58 percent of the vote in 2003 — he’s abided by the will of the people since then. As a result, there are now fewer marijuana-related arrests in Seattle than in virtually any other major city in the United States.

On the negative side, Kerlikowske is first and foremost a cop. He’s served 36 years in law enforcement, and it is foolish to assume that he will in any way embrace our issue with open arms. That said, I find myself in cautious agreement with NORML Board Member (and longtime Seattle resident) Dominic Holden, who believes that Kerlikowske may bring a “progressive” approach to an agency that has, almost since its inception, operated in the ‘Dark Ages.’

The day the U.S. government finally — and properly — recognizes that drug use is a public health problem and not solely a criminal justice issue will be the day that the President appoints a White House ‘Drug Czar’ who possesses a professional background in public health, addiction, and treatment rather than in law enforcement.

But until that day arrives, perhaps the best we reformers can hope for is a cop who appreciates that pot poses less of a danger to the public than alcohol, and who recognizes that from a practical and fiscal standpoint, targeting and arresting adults who engage in the responsible use of cannabis doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. At first glance, Obama’s pick — unlike his predecessor John Walters — appears to possess both of these common sense qualities.

More and more journalists and columnists are starting to read into the tea leaves and seeing signs of generational change seemingly embodied in the incoming White House administration. A prime example is found today at AlterNet, in a well written column by Alexander Zaitchik that, like NORML’s staff, seeks balance between an undeniable enthusiasm for the potential of substantive changes in cannabis laws under a more enlightened and science-based Obama administration and the stark reality of the collective histories of many of his important cabinet members opposing cannabis law reforms–even for medical access and industrial purposes.

-Allen St. Pierre, Director, NORML

If Obama Is Pro-Science and Honest, He’ll Put the Kibosh on the Drug War

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet

Posted on December 23, 2008

One of the many things that made Barack Obama such a refreshing candidate was his frank and unapologetic admission of drug use. True, Anderson Cooper extracted curt “yeses” from some 2004 Democratic candidates when he asked them point-blank if they had ever smoked pot. But Obama has written openly and without prompting about his experiences, not only with marijuana, but cocaine, a “hard” drug. On the campaign trail he even joked about inhaling deeply — “that was the point,” he said more than once. Unlike George W. Bush, Obama didn’t hide behind evasive murmurs about “irresponsible behavior,” or turn his drug experiences into a setup for some maudlin born-again conversion story.

As recounted in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama was a normal American kid. Which is to say he used drugs, had fun and survived. The book doesn’t romanticize the president-elect’s days of smoking pot and snorting “a little blow when [he] could afford it,” but it’s easy to take what details he provides and imagine him with his basketball buddies on some Oahu beach blazing bowls of Maui Wowie, alternately laughing until his guts hurt and sitting in quiet wonder before a magnificent pink-and-yellow Pacific sunset. Obama has even written about his pursuit of heroin’s moon-shot high. As a teenager, he went so far as to ask a junkie friend for an assisted first hit, but recoiled when presented in a deli freezer with the surgical tools of the mainliner’s trade: rubber tubing and second-hand syringe.

Partly because Obama was so reasonable and matter-of-fact about his own All-American experiences getting high, drug-policy reformers were among those most excited by his candidacy. If any aspect of America needs change, it is the country’s prohibitionist and punitive approach to drugs and drug use. Obama, it seemed, was the right politician to take an executive hammer to the cracked marble pillars of America’s disastrous war on drugs. Throughout the primaries and general election, Obama gently encouraged these hopes by advocating commonsense drug-policy reforms. He criticized federal paramilitary raids on state-sanctioned greenhouses and called for ending racist discrepancies in cocaine sentencing laws. (As a little-mentioned footnote to the first of these positions, Obama’s mother died from cancer five years before the Hawaii legislature legalized medical marijuana.)

Nobody expected Obama to tap Tommy Chong to run the Office of National Drug Control Policy. But maybe, just maybe, Obama would have the political courage to publicly acknowledge what an emerging majority of Americans now grasps: that the war on drugs is a failure, that it is unjust, and that it is an epic waste of law-enforcement time and resources.

Full Story

Is saving the Drug Czar nominee as the last cabinet pick indicative of the low priority assigned by the incoming Obama administration to the so-called ‘war on drugs’?

With the entire cabinet nominated (save for US Ambassador to the United Nations and director of the Central Intelligence Agency), who is President–elect Obama going to nominate as director of the Office Of National Drug Control Policy (a.k.a. ‘Drug Czar’).

To date, Obama and Co. have prioritized the cabinet nominations of:

Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Treasury, Secretary of Homeland Security, Attorney General, Secretary of Interior, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Environmental Protection Agency, Secretary of Veteran Affairs, National Security Adviser, Director of National Intelligence, Director of National Economic Council, Director of Securities and Exchange Commission, US Trade Representative and Director of Office of Management and Budget.

But no Drug Czar (or Czarina)!

Obama told the media yesterday that his entire cabinet would be nominated before he is to begin his last semi-sane holiday break this week with his family. But as of 10AM this morning (eastern), there has been no nominee announced for ‘Drug Czar’.

Hmmmmm. One wonders why not?

Looks like one reputed nominee for Drug Czar, retiring Republican congressman Jim Ramstad of Minnesota is getting hung up in the political vetting process. Some in the media and in drug policy reform inform NORML that Atlanta police chief Richard J. Pennington might emerge as the potential nominee. Some speculate that current Drug Czar transition team leader, Dr. Don Vereen, might pull a ‘Cheney’ and offer himself up as the best person to head the ONDCP.

Whatever the case and whomever the nominee, is the ONDCP nominee and their staff going to closely adhere to Obama’s stated goal that health (and environmental) policy-making in his administration, unlike the current Bush White House, will be guided by contemporary and credible science—and not ideology or politics?

In Obama’s now weekly radio address, he asserted this morning that science and rational thinking is going to instruct much of his decision-making in the realms of education, public health and environmental protection. To demonstrate such, this morning Obama nominated two prominent scientists—not political hacks—to fill important science policy-making roles in his new administration (Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

“Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States.”
-President-elect Barack Obama (December 20, 2008)

NORML certainly hopes that Obama’s professed support for science over political ideology logically extends to repairing and overhauling the country’s totally flawed and decidedly unscientific approach in administering a functional and economical criminal justice system—fueled in large part by antiquated and misguided illicit drug laws, notably the abject failure of 70 plus years of cannabis prohibition laws.

In the interim, please join me (and thousands of other drug policy reform supporters), with a bit-of-tongue-in-cheek, in advancing Drug Policy Alliance director Ethan Nadelmann, Ph.D as Obama’s next Drug Czar. Now that is change I can believe in!

Who President-elect Obama nominates for Drug Czar I believe will strongly demonstrate whether or not he genuinely believes in science as a guiding principle in replacing failed, feckless, racist and politically expedient law enforcement efforts to ‘control’ drugs with, ultimately, effective, commonsense, scientific and public health-based alternatives to America’s failed war on some drugs.

Like the Energizer bunny, Drug Czar John Walters’ lies just keep on coming. It was only one-month ago when the Czar made a fool of himself on cable television — denying the fact the law enforcement arrest 800,000+ individuals on pot charges each year. (The FBI’s 2008 Uniform Crime Report, released just days after Walters’ absurd denial, showed that police made a record 872,721 marijuana arrests in 2007.)

Walters further embarrassed himself by claiming that the likelihood of finding a marijuana smoker in prison or jail for pot possession is like finding a “unicorn” — a claim that is readily rebutted by the US Department of Justice’s own data, as well as by the startling number of former ‘unicorns’ who wrote to NORML here.

You’d think that these two gaffes would fulfill the Czar’s ‘lie quota’ for one day, but Walters was just getting started.  At the same press conference, Walters further alleged (read: lied) that marijuana use has fallen dramatically under his watch when, in fact, according to the government’s own data — recently crunched by George Mason University senior fellow Jon Gettman and posted to The Hill.com by MPP’s Bruce Mirken — Americans’ overall pot use rates have remained stable since 2002.

And then there’s this story, just released by ABC News.

Study: Anti-Drug Ads Haven’t Worked
Report Finds $1 Billion Campaign to Curb Teen Drug Use May Have Encouraged It
via ABC News

Despite investing $1 billion in a massive anti-drug campaign, a controversial new study suggests that the push has failed to help the United States win the war on drugs.

A congressionally mandated study released today concluded that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign launched in the late 1990s to encourage young people to stay away from drugs “is unlikely to have had favorable effects on youths.”

In fact, the study’s authors assert that anti-drug ads may have unwittingly delivered the message that other kids were doing drugs, inadvertently slowing measured progress that was being made to curb marijuana use among teenagers.

“Youths who saw the campaign ads took from them the message that their peers were using marijuana,” the report suggests as a possible reason for its findings. “In turn, those who came to believe that their peers were using marijuana were more likely to initiate use themselves.”

… “Despite extensive funding, governmental agency support, the employment of professional advertising and public relations firms, and consultation with subject-matter experts, the evidence from the evaluation suggests that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign had no favorable effects on youths’ behavior and that it may even have had an unintended and undesirable effect on drug cognitions and use,” the report said.

In other words, teens who specifically said they had a lot of exposure to the campaign messages were no less likely to stay away from marijuana than those who did not.

… The evaluation was conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, after Congress called for the study. The study was based on four rounds of interviews conducted between 1999 and 2004, each involving about 5,000 to 8,000 youths between the ages of 9 and 18 years.

Predictably, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy spokesman Tom Riley responded to the data by sticking his head in the sand. “This campaign has been a striking success,” he said — his nose growing significantly longer as he spoke.

Riley also questioned why Annenberg’s findings only assessed the White House’s public service announcements through 2004. ABC News didn’t provide an answer, so I will.

The reason Annenberg abruptly ceased evaluating the (in)effectiveness of the ONDCP’s failed media campaign in 2004 was because the National Institute on Drug Abuse — which by law was instructed to fund an independent, ongoing review of the ads — ceased paying the school’s evaluators to do so. NIDA pulled the plug on the evaluations after preliminary findings by Annenberg’s investigators found the Czar’s ad campaign to be among the least effective in the history of large-scale public communication campaigns. Somebody ought to tell John Walters, who apparently failed to get the memo.

Of course, were the mainstream media to actually do its job, Walters’ bottomless pit of documented lies and delusional fabrications would be headline news, and the reigning Czar would be looking for a new line of work (dogcatcher perhaps). Unfortunately, lying about the war on (some) drugs has become so common and pervasive among police and politicians that the fact that America’s top drug cop is completely full of, ahem, crap isn’t only acceptable, it’s actually compulsory.

UPDATE!!! UPDATE!!!

Well, it’s only been 24 hours, but so far 100+ readers have posted comments to The Hill’s blog telling John Walters to either tell the truth or get out! (I’d be more than happy with the latter.) Keep the feedback coming.

Also, many of you may also wish to stop by the Huffington Post, where my essay has just been re-posted here.

Like The Hill, the Huffington Post is a highly influential political website — and it is one of the most visited sites on the Internet. Yet their reporting is seldom critical of the war on (some) drugs. Please send The Post a message that their readership supports marijuana law reform by commenting on this story, “digging” it, and disseminating it widely. Thanks!

Drug Czar John Walters believes he can lie with impunity.

He’s wrong.

Today NORML responds to the Czar’s outrageous claims that few, if any, people are arrested or incarcerated for marijuana violations — and we do so in John Walters backyard: The Hill’s influential Congress blog.

How Can We Discuss Marijuana Policy When America’s Top Drug Cop Won’t Even Acknowledge The Facts?
via The Hill

If denial is the first sign of addiction, then Drug Czar John Walters is hooked to the gills. He’s addicted to targeting and arresting marijuana consumers, and he’ll do and say anything to keep this irrational and punitive policy in place.

The Hill is providing reformers with a valuable service by bringing our message prominently to Capitol Hill, and acting as a mediator in a high profile debate with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. In the past, the Drug Czar’s office has outright refused to debate spokespersons from NORML or other marijuana law reform groups, but the office has felt obligated to respond to our posts on The Hill, which remains the paper of record for members of Congress and their staff.

Because The Hill is widely read by lawmakers and by the national media, it is vital that we demonstrate the popularity of this issue by commenting prolifically. Please post your feedback to The Hill and make a point of disseminating this essay to your friends and colleagues. Previous posts by NORML to The Hill’s blog have received hundreds of readers’ comments — virtually all favorable toward marijuana law reform. Editors at The Hill inform NORML that it’s the highest volume of readers’ response they’ve ever received on any commentary on any topic!

The Hill is getting our message; will Congress or the Drug Czar?

UPDATE!!! UPDATE!!!

You can now listen to the archived audio of my Sept. 16th appearance on Dr. Drew Pinsky’s radio show by visiting: westwoodone.com or by clicking here. We discuss the record number of pot arrests for 2007, the presidential candidates’ positions on drug policy, and debate whether Drug Czar John Walters is a “reasonable” man.

Just days before the FBI released statistics indicating that police in 2007 arrested over 872,000 Americans — the most ever reported in law enforcement history — for violating pot laws, reigning Drug Czar (and pathological liar) John Walters alleged on C-Span, “We didn’t arrest 800,000 marijuana users. … That’s [a] lie.”

(Watch the video of Walters’ remarks here.)

The Czar’s nose grew another six inches when he uncorked this whopper: “The fact is today, people don’t go to jail for the possession of marijuana. Finding somebody in jail or prison for possession of marijuana is like finding a unicorn. It doesn’t exist.”

(The video can be seen here.)

Question: Why does the Drug Czar feel obligated to go to such absurd lengths to hide the fact that the criminal prohibition of cannabis is responsible for the arrest of hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding Americans every year?

After all, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy typically issue chest-thumping press releases when they achieve record busts for offenses involving cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine? Why then do they shy away from making similar proclamations for pot?

Perhaps it’s because, deep down, even the Drug Czar knows that the use of cannabis does not pose anywhere near the health and safety threat as does the use of other intoxicants, including alcohol, and that most Americans — rightly — would be outraged to learn that our nation’s so-called war on drugs is really just an assault on young adults caught with small bags of weed.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith are big fat liars.

In the months prior to the duo’s decision to call for the reclassification of cannabis — a move that increases the penalties for minor pot possession from a verbal warning to up to five years in jail — both politicians claimed that the potency of so-called British ’skunk’ was skyrocketing out of control. Smith told the Commons that the strength of pot had increased “threefold” in recent years, while PM Brown told Reuters news wire, “[T]he cannabis on the streets is now of a lethal quality.”

Both implied that Parliament’s 2004 decision to downgrade pot possession to a verbal warning was responsible for the influx of supposed ‘triple-strength killer weed.’

Turns out Smith and Brown were full of it.

According to pot potency data collected by the UK’s Forensic Science Services and published by The Guardian newspaper, the average potency of THC in seized samples of British cannabis fell approximately 25 percent between 2004 and 2007.

Predictably, neither Smith nor Brown have issued any sort of public correction for their politically expedient, though thoroughly dishonest, remarks. Nor would one expect them to.

After all, for politicians, cops, and bureaucrats, lying about cannabis isn’t even considered lying — it’s simply viewed as part of the job. In fact, for the US Drug Czar, lying is actually mandated by law.

Of course, given the relative safety of adult cannabis use and given the utter failure of US criminal cannabis prohibition, it really can be no other way. Talking honestly about marijuana undermines federal drug policy so the only alternative for our elected officials is to lie — or say nothing at all. Troublingly, the leaders of both political parties have become adept at both.

More than 100 readers have posted comments in support of NORML’s recent guest editorial, “Criminalization of Marijuana Must End,” which appeared in The Hill’s influential ‘Congressional Blog.’ Editors at The Hill inform NORML that it’s the highest volume of readers’ response they’ve ever received on any commentary on any topic!

So it’s hardly surprising that the Drug Czar’s office has grudgingly and belatedly offered their two-cents worth in a factually bereft editorial entitled “Marijuana Decriminalization Bill Ignores the Facts.” It’s an unintentionally amusing essay — though judging by the comments it appears that few people, if anyone, have actually bothered to read it — topped off by this half-baked claim, “[L]egalizing marijuana [is] a topic more often heard in college dorms at 2 o’clock in the morning than in the hallowed halls of our Congress.”

Excuse me, but if debating the merits of America’s failed cannabis policy is, in the Drug Czar’s opinion, a topic only appropriate for midnight musings, then why is the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy straining their already diminished intellectual capacities responding to this discussion in The Hill (which, last time I checked, was not a publication frequently read by college students in their dorm rooms at 2 am)??!!

Of course, I suppose The Hill should thank their lucky stars that the Drug Czar responded at all, given that no representatives from the ONDCP, CADCA, or other ‘pro-prohibition’ groups will ever agree to engage with NORML in a face-to-face debate in a public forum. I mean, it wasn’t all that long ago that federal officials were distributing a guidebook, “How to Hold Your Own in a Drug Legalization Debate,” that recommended that prohibition advocates decline invitations to publicly debate drug policy issues.

My how times have changed!

Nearly six years ago, Deputy Drug Czar Scott Burns mailed a two-page letter to every prosecutor in America urging them to target and “aggressively prosecute” marijuana violators, including first-time offenders.  

At that time, I spent some 5,000 words addressing Mr. Burns numerous lies and exaggerations — which included this shocking statement, ”No drug matches the threat posed by marijuana.”

Yes folks, in 2002 that was the official position of your federal government.

Fast forward to today and you’ll see that little, if anything, has changed among the Czars who cohabit the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Earlier this month Scott Burns flew to Humbolt County in northern California where he gave this revealing (as in, it reveals just how clueless this man really is) interview with the editors of the Arcata Eye, explaining why the White House continues to believe that pot remains the most dangerous herb on the planet. However, rather than bleed my fingertips to the bone responding to Mr. Burns’ inherent inability to tell the truth, this time around I’m simply going to let his words speak for themselves.

Full Story

Granted, those of us who work in drug policy reform knew this already.

Nonetheless, it’s doubly satisfying when a former longtime White House employee states the obvious.

The Failure of the Office of National Drug Control Policy
via Huffington Post

As an insider in the nation’s war against drugs, I spent almost fifteen years in the executive office of the President. Eleven of these years were in the Office of National Drug Control Policy where I served four of the nation’s so-called drug czars preparing the federal drug control budget, writing many of the national drug control strategies, and conducting performance measurement and analysis of the efficacy of those strategies. I left government in 2000, but continue to be highly involved in shaping drug policies and measuring performance in drug policy both nationally and internationally.

In the latest 2008 National Drug Control Strategy, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) — the federal executive office agency charged with shaping this nation’s national drug control strategy — claims that America has reached a turning point in the war on drugs. In reality, we have little reason to believe a significant change has occurred.

… Though Congress created ONDCP to formulate research-driven and performance-based policy, assess and modify policy through performance measures, and give a precise accounting of the federal drug control budget, ONDCP fails at all of those tasks. In the 90’s ONDCP created a performance measurement system for evaluating the effects of its policies on drug use, drug availability, and the negative consequences of drug use; however, this decade, no such performance measurement system has been utilized. As a consequence, policy is now flying blind resulting in lost opportunities for more success.

Naturally, the author ultimately fails to suggest any significant changes in US drug policy — such as legalizing cannabis for adults, or disbanding the DEA or the Drug Czar’s office — but, hey, it’s a start.