Ours is afederal republic. The federal government has only the powers granted to it in the Constitution. And the United States has atradition of individual liberty, vigorous civil society, and limited government. Identification of aproblem does not mean that the government should undertake to solve it, and the fact that aproblem occurs in more than one state does not mean that it is aproper subject for federal policy.

Perhaps no area more clearly demonstrates the bad consequences of not following such rules than does drug prohibition. The long federal experiment in prohibition of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and other drugs has given us crime and corruption combined with amanifest failure to stop the use of drugs or reduce their availability to children.

In the 1920s, Congress experimented with the prohibition of alcohol. On February 20, 1933, anew Congress acknowledged the failure of alcohol prohibition and sent the TwentyFirst Amendment to the states. Congress recognized that Prohibition had failed to stop drinking and had increased prison populations and violent crime. By the end of 1933, national Prohibition was history, though many states continued to outlaw or severely restrict the sale of liquor.

Today, Congress must confront asimilarly failed prohibition policy. Futile efforts to enforce prohibition have been pursued even more vigorously since the 1980s than they were in the 1920s. Total federal expenditures for the first 10years of Prohibition amounted to $88 million about $1 billion in 2015 dollars. Now, drug enforcement costs about $27 billion ayear in federal spending alone.

Those billions have had some effect. Total drug arrests are now more than 1.5 million ayear. Since 1989, more people have been incarcerated for drug offenses than for all violent crimes combined. There are about 300,000 drug offenders in jails and prisons, and 50 percent of the federal prison population consists of drug offenders.

Yet, as during Prohibition, all the arrests and incarcerations havent stopped the use and abuse of drugs, or the drug trade, or the crime associated with blackmarket transactions. Cocaine and heroin supplies are up; the more our Customs agents interdict, the more smugglers import.

As for discouraging young people from using drugs, the massive federal effort has largely been adud. Every year from 1975 to 2012, at least 82 percent of high school seniors said they found marijuana fairly easy or very easy to obtain. During that same period, according to federal statistics of dubious reliability, teenage marijuana use fell dramatically and then rose significantly, suggesting that cultural factors have more effect than the war on drugs.

The United States is afederal republic, and Congress should deal with drug prohibition the way it dealt with alcohol prohibition. The TwentyFirst Amendment did not actually legalize the sale of alcohol; it simply repealed the federal prohibition and returned to the states the authority to set alcohol policy. States took the opportunity to design diverse liquor policies that were in tune with the preferences of their citizens. After 1933, three states and hundreds of counties continued to practice prohibition. Other states chose various forms of alcohol legalization.

The single most important law that Congress must repeal is the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. That law is probably the most farreaching federal statute in American history: it asserts federal jurisdiction over every drug offense in the United States, no matter how small or local in scope. Once that law is removed from the books, Congress should move to abolish the Drug Enforcement Administration and repeal all the other federal drug laws.

There are anumber of reasons why Congress should end the federal governments war on drugs. First and foremost, the federal drug laws are constitutionally dubious. As noted, the federal government can exercise only the powers that have been delegated to it. The Tenth Amendment reserves all other powers to the states or to the people. However misguided the alcohol prohibitionists turned out to have been, they deserve credit for honoring our constitutional system by seeking aconstitutional amendment to explicitly authorize anational policy on the sale of alcohol. Congress never asked the American people for additional constitutional powers to declare awar on drug consumers. That usurpation of power is something that few politicians or their court intellectuals wish to discuss.

Second, drug prohibition creates higher levels of crime. Addicts commit crimes to pay for ahabit that would be easily affordable if it were legal. Police sources have estimated that as much as half of the property crime in some major cities is committed by drug users. More dramatically, because drugs are illegal, participants in the drug trade cannot go to court to settle disputes, whether between buyer and seller or between rival sellers. When blackmarket contracts are breached, the result is often some form of violent sanction, which usually leads to retaliation and then open warfare in the streets.

Make no mistake, the annual carnage from gang violence has little to do with the mindaltering effects of amarijuana cigarette or ameth pipe. It is instead one of the grim and bitter consequences of an ideological crusade whose proponents will not yet admit defeat.

Third, U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly warned us of possible terrorist attacks. Given that danger, it is agross misallocation of law enforcement resources to have federal police agents looking for marijuana fields when they could be helping to discover terrorists on U.S. territory. The Drug Enforcement Administration has 10,000 agents, intelligence analysts, and support staff members. Their skills would be much better used if they were redeployed to fulltime counterterrorism investigations or recruited into local police departments to work unsolved murder and rape cases.

Fourth, drug prohibition is aclassic example of throwing money at aproblem. The federal government spends some $27 billion to enforce the drug laws every year all to no avail. For years, drug war bureaucrats have been tailoring their budget requests to the latest news reports. When drug use goes up, taxpayers are told the government needs more money so that it can redouble its efforts against arising drug scourge. When drug use goes down, taxpayers are told that it would be abig mistake to curtail spending just when progress is being made. Good news or bad, spending levels must be maintained or increased.

Fifth, drug prohibition channels more than $40 billion ayear into acriminal underworld that is occupied by an assortment of criminals, corrupt politicians, and terrorists. Alcohol prohibition drove reputable companies into other industries or out of business altogether, which paved the way for mobsters to make millions in the black market. If drugs were legal, organized crime would stand to lose billions of dollars, and drugs would be sold by legitimate businesses in an open marketplace.

Sixth, drug prohibition has exacerbated racial tensions in America. The immense profits to be had from ablackmarket business make drug dealing the most lucrative endeavor for many young minority men. Drug dealers become the most visibly successful people in innercity communities, the ones with money and clothes and cars. Social order is turned upside down when the most successful people in acommunity are criminals. Even though most will end up in prison, the money tempts many young men away from seeking lowerpaying legal employment. Since the police are tasked with combating the drug trade, they constantly clash with the residents in minority neighborhoods.

Students of American history will someday ponder the question of how todays elected officials could readily admit to the mistaken policy of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s but recklessly pursue apolicy of drug prohibition. Indeed, the only historical lesson that recent presidents and Congresses seem to have drawn from Prohibition is that government should not try to outlaw the sale of booze. One of the broader lessons that they should have learned is this: prohibition laws should be judged according to their realworld effects, not their promised benefits. If the 115th Congress subjects the federal drug laws to that standard, it will recognize that the drug war is not the answer to problems associated with drug use.

The failures of drug prohibition are becoming obvious to more and more Americans. In 2012, voters in Colorado and Washington approved ballot initiatives that legalized marijuana for recreational purposes. In 2014, voters in Alaska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia approved similar measures. Several more states California, Massachusetts, Maine, and Nevada followed suit in the fall of 2016.

A particularly tragic consequence of the war on drugs has been the refusal to allow sick people to use marijuana as medicine. Prohibitionists insist that marijuana is not good medicine, or at least that legal alternatives to marijuana are equally good. Those who believe that individuals should make their own decisions, not have their decisions made for them by Washington bureaucracies, simply say that thats adecision for patients and their doctors to make. But in fact there is good medical evidence of the therapeutic value of marijuana despite the difficulty of doing adequate research on an illegal drug. ANational Institutes of Health panel concluded that smoking marijuana may help treat anumber of conditions, including nausea and pain. It can be particularly effective in improving the appetite of AIDS and cancer patients. The drug could also help people who fail to respond to traditional remedies.

More than 70 percent of U.S. cancer specialists in one survey said they would prescribe marijuana if it were legal; nearly half said they had urged their patients to break the law to acquire the drug. In 2013, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the chief medical correspondent for CNN, apologized to his viewers for previously voicing his opposition to medical marijuana without having done his own homework. He admitted that he had basically assumed that the Drug Enforcement Administration had sound scientific proof that marijuana could not benefit persons who are ill. After studying the subject more thoroughly, Gupta said, We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70years in the United States, and Iapologize for my own role in that.

The most relevant point for federal policymakers is that 29 states have authorized physicians licensed in those states to recommend the use of medical marijuana to seriously ill and terminally ill patients residing in the states, without being subject to civil and criminal penalties.

If it is inappropriate for governors and mayors to entangle themselves in foreign policy and it is it is also inappropriate for federal officials to entangle themselves in state and local politics. In the 114th Congress, Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Steve Cohen (D-TN), Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Thomas Massie (R-KY), Jared Polis (D-CO), Justin Amash (R-MI), and others jointly proposed the Respect State Marijuana Laws Act of 2015, which would have prohibited federal interference with any person acting in compliance with state rules pertaining to the production, possession, or delivery of marijuana. The 115th Congress should enact asimilar bill without delay.

One of the benefits of afederal republic is that different policies may be tried in different states. One of the benefits of our Constitution is that it limits the power of the federal government to impose one policy on the several states.

The common law in England and America has always relied on judges and juries to decide cases and set punishments. Under our modern system, of course, many crimes are defined by the legislature, and appropriate penalties are defined by statute. However, mandatory minimum sentences and rigid sentencing guidelines shift too much power to legislators and regulators who are not involved in particular cases. They turn judges into clerks and prevent judges from weighing all the facts and circumstances in setting appropriate sentences. In addition, mandatory minimums for nonviolent firsttime drug offenders result in sentences grotesquely disproportionate to the gravity of the offenses. Rather than extend mandatory minimum sentences to further crimes, Congress should repeal mandatory minimums and let judges perform their traditional function of weighing the facts and setting appropriate sentences.

Drug abuse is aproblem for those involved in it and for their families and friends. But it is better dealt with as amoral and medical problem than as acriminal problem a problem for the surgeon general, not the attorney general, as former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke put it.

Congress should repeal the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, shut down the Drug Enforcement Administration, and let the states set their own policies with regard to currently illegal drugs. They would do well to treat marijuana, cocaine, and heroin the way most states now treat alcohol: it should be legal for stores to sell such drugs to adults. Drug sales to children, like alcohol sales to children, should remain illegal. Driving under the influence of drugs should be illegal.

With such apolicy, Congress would acknowledge that our current drug policies have failed. It would restore authority to the states, as the Founders envisioned. It would save taxpayers money. And it would give states the power to experiment with drug policies and perhaps devise more successful rules.

Repeal of prohibition would take the astronomical profits out of the drug business and destroy the drug kingpins who terrorize parts of our cities. It would reduce crime even more dramatically than did the repeal of alcohol prohibition. Not only would there be less crime: reform would also free federal agents to concentrate on terrorism and espionage and would free local police agents to concentrate on robbery, burglary, and violent crime.

The war on drugs has lasted longer than Prohibition, longer than the Vietnam War. Prohibition has failed, again, and should be repealed, again.

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Boaz, David. A DrugFree AmericaOr aFree America? UC Davis Law Review 24, no. 3 (1991): 61736.

Buckley, William F. Jr., and others. The War on Drugs Is Lost. National Review, February 12, 1996.

Carpenter, Ted Galen. Designer Drugs: ANew, Futile Front in the War on Illegal Drugs. Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 774, May 27, 2015.

. The Fire Next Door: Mexicos Drug Violence and the Danger to America. Washington: Cato Institute, 2012.

Dills, Angela, Sietse Goffard, and Jeffrey Miron. Dose of Reality: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations. Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 799, September 16, 2016.

Greenwald, Glenn. Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies. Washington: Cato Institute, 2009.

Lynch, Timothy, ed. After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century. Washington: Cato Institute, 2000.

Masters, Bill. Drug War Addiction. St. Louis, MO: Accurate Press, 2002.

McNamara, Joseph. The Defensive Front Line. Regulation, Winter 2001.

McWhorter, John. How the War on Drugs Is Destroying Black America. Catos Letter 9, no. 1 (2011).

Mikos, Robert A. On the Limits of Federal Supremacy: When States Relax (or Abandon) Marijuana Bans. Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 714, December 12, 2012.

Miron, Jeffrey A., Marijuana Policy in Colorado, Cato Institute Working Paper no. 24, October 23, 2014.

Miron, Jeffrey A., and Katherine Waldock. The Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition. Washington: Cato Institute, 2010.

Nadelmann, Ethan A. Legalize It: Why Its Time to Just Say No to Prohibition. Foreign Policy, SeptemberOctober 2007.

Ostrowski, James. The Moral and Practical Case for Drug Legalization. Hofstra Law Review 18, no. 3 (1990): 607702.

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23. The War on Drugs - Cato Institute

Novembers election saw criminal legal system and drug policy reform win big at the polls. Oregon became the first state to decriminalize all drugs, and voters overwhelmingly passed other reforms to drug laws, even in deeply red states like South Dakota. Policing took center stage in the national dialogue. And both the vice president and president-elect in their first addresses to the nation promised to root out systemic racism in the criminal legal system.

The people have spoken, and we are on the precipice of a new moment for justice reform. But how we understand the scope of this collective call for change and the challenge to which Biden and Harris will have to rise stands to shape what our new world may look like for decades to come.

Central to determining the outcome of that question will be whether or not we as a nation move past one particular old and dangerous habit: for decades, reforms have underscored a dichotomy between nonviolent and violent offenses. This contrast often gets good traction, since it allows people who support drug policy and lower-level criminal legal reform to avoid having to grapple with the question of violence. It has been a winning strategy but only for certain victories and people, and not without long-term costs.

The first shortcoming of this false binary is straightforward: it curtails the chance of ending mass incarceration. More than half of the people incarcerated in the U.S. are serving jail or prison sentences for charges of violence. This means truly transformative reductions in the number of people locked up in the U.S. will have to include changing our responses to these crimes. There is no other way about it.

A more subtle but no less insidious cost to this narrow understanding of reform is that the reinforcement of the violent vs. nonviolent dichotomy has at best ignored and, at worst, amplified the narrative that has long underpinned mass incarceration in the United States: the familiar though fabricated story of an imagined monstrous other from whom we have to be protected at any cost. It is that well-worn story that makes us choose prisons over hospitals, prisons over schools, and prisons over yes noncoercive drug treatment. Its a story as old as our countrys founding and steeped, as our nation is, in deep-seated racism.

From a human perspective, reformers failure to contend with this narrative has left a critical dimension of our nations racism unchallenged and unchecked. From a policy perspective, it has inadvertently reinforced the notion that some people are beyond the reach of reform efforts and, in so doing, has exacerbated barriers to sentencing reform and alternative strategies like restorative justice that would tackle serious violence differently and in a much more transformative way. So, while it has obviously limited the prospects of ending mass incarceration for crimes of violence, it has also inadvertently created barriers to ending the war on drugs.

Just like the stories about merciless superpredators or gang members, year after year, Hollywood cranks out the same one-dimensional tropes of violent international drug trade organizations with stories that are almost entirely divorced from the very real daily harms caused by prohibitionist policies from increasing the likelihood of overdoses to diverting critical resources away from meeting peoples basic needs and into enforcement. Like the narrative about robbers and murderers, this narrative of the malicious drug seller (almost always Black or Brown) is disconnected from the reality of people who sell drugs and conceals the structural harm done to communities behind stories of individual evil. Together, these stories limit what we can envision and tolerate in our responses to violence, whether related or unrelated to the drug trade, even as evidence shows prison actually increases, rather than decreases, the likelihood that someone will cause further harm.

But this imaginary division is not our only option. Instead, we can choose to confront the historical roots and systemic racism of the drug war and mass incarceration and to see the alignment between people who want to end both. Moving past the violent vs. nonviolent false binary will allow the drug policy reform movement to affirm that while drug markets are not inherently violent, at the same time, unregulated drug sales can cause harm. Drug reform work can then build on and borrow from existing alternative responses to violence work and allow us to find ways of repairing harm that do not over-rely on punishment.

When the wide sphere of people who say they are committed to drug policy and justice reform set aside this tired and harmful narrative, we will no longer have to pretend that instances of drug users causing harm to themselves or others do not exist in order to win. Policymakers will then be able to broaden the terrain beyond rethinking drug possession, but also include reforming our nations approach to people who sell drugs. This will give us an opportunity to address the challenges associated with drugs and violence, recognizing that prohibition has made them inextricable from each other. We can then adopt transformative justice responses to violence that allow us to imagine what it might look like for our nation not just to stop criminalizing drugs, but to also enact reparations for the harm inflicted on our communities after many years of criminalization, harm that often drives both problematic drug use and violence.

And people committed to criminal legal reform more broadly can finally move into the terrain of other violent crimes like assault, robbery and murder that do not always arise from the drug trade but almost always arise from the same underlying conditions that gave birth to the war on drugs. Then we can advance solutions that align with what the evidence proves time and again: that alternatives to incarceration produce better results and more safety including in responding to violence.

If 2020 has shown us anything, its that our survival is tied to one another in countless ways and that we cannot win one groups freedom or well-being by depleting the dignity and chances of another. It will not be enough for policymakers, including the president- and vice-president-elect, to just stay in cautious political territory and only tinker with our nations responses to nonviolent crime while avoiding the rest. The mandate of this moment and the people is far greater. The sooner our new leadership comes to terms with the scope of what will be expected of them, the sooner we will become, for the first time, a nation that keeps its promise of safety and equity for all.

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Let's Reject the Violent vs. Nonviolent Crime Dichotomy to End the War on Drugs - Truthout

BOSTON, Dec. 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- In collaboration with the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Open Society Foundations, the Franois-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University today urged the Biden-Harris transition team to advance public health policy recommendations detailed in a new report, titled From the War on Drugs to Harm Reduction: Imagining A Just Overdose Crisis Response, to help address the opioid crisis equitably and amend harsh criminal justice practices disproportionately imposed on Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.

"Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, when overall overdose-related deaths were beginning to decline, the number of overdose deaths among people of color continued to rise across the country," said Dr. Mary T. Bassett, director of the FXB Center. "Under the new administration, we are confident our recommendations will go far in closing these inequitable gaps. As President-Elect Biden understands first-hand the experience of loving someone who lives with drug addiction, we know that his commitment to a just response is real, and that countless others affected by the ongoing crisis can feel hopeful toward achieving necessary reforms for real change."

The report's recommendations recognize and respond to structural health disparities, racially motivated drug policies, class inequalities and sustained disruption of social safety nets. Some of the recommendations include:

To download the full report and related infographic, please click here.

About the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University

The FXB Center is an interdisciplinary center that conducts rigorous investigation of the most serious threats to health and wellbeing globally. We work closely with scholars, students, the international policy community, and civil society to engage in ongoing strategic efforts to promote equity and dignity for those oppressed by grave poverty and stigma around the world. To learn more, please visit fxb.harvard.edu.

SOURCE FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University

https://fxb.harvard.edu/

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National Public Health Experts Urge Biden-Harris Transition Team To End War On Drugs And Lead Coordinated Public Health Response To The Opioid...

I hate myself. The words slipped out of my youngest childs mouth with a casual levity. Only 5 years old, her voice still carries that bright, fluted tonality unique to young children. The first time she said it, she was sitting in a little pink play-chair set against the wall in her grandmothers living room, where shed been living with her sister.

Im ugly, she added. Im dumb.

These arent things that she or her 6-year-old sister have been told at homeat least not that Ive heard. Since the moment she was born and placed on my breast, where she immediately latched on and nursed contentedly for almost an hour, shes been showered with love and affection. Neither child has ever experienced anything resembling abuse or neglect.

But in early 2018, a little over a month after I hauled my family from our home in Seattle to my in-laws home in Broward County, Florida so their father could recuperate from mental illness, he and I were removed from the homeand our daughters from our custodyby child services.

This followed an argument I had with my in-laws, after which they made allegations of abandonment and drug use against me. The abandonment charges would eventually be dismissed, and the claims of drug use negated by slews of tests. But by that point, my daughters were already living with them, I was already homeless in a strange state without resources, and we were ordered to complete numerous requirements within 15 months. When their father and I did not complete those mandates in time and to the courts satisfaction, our parental rights were permanently severed. Our daughters were adopted out to their paternal grandparents.

When the removal first happened, my youngest had just been weaned from my breast; my sudden abduction from her daily life broke an unspoken covenant of love and trust between us. She has never received an explanation that she can understand. Its become clear to me that she is doing what so many children in this painful situation do: blaming herself, and transmuting the pain into self-harm.

Sadly, what my babies are experiencing is not uncommon.

I hated myself. Theres a lot of self-loathing because you feel like theres something wrong with you. Its like trying to fit a puzzle piece into a puzzle where it doesnt belong, recounted Pennie, who asked that she be identified by her first name only. Now 51, she was adopted out of the foster system by a Mormon couple at the age of 11, while her mother was undergoing psychiatric care.

I dont think [the adoption] was right. I feel my mother was vulnerable and they just kind of redistributed me to a wealthier [family] [but] you need more than clothes and food as human beings and human children.

The public is familiar with the concept that wrenching children from their families is harmful and wrong. When news broke about the Trump administration policy to separate children and parents at the Mexico-US border as a de facto punishment for seeking asylum, media responded with a flood of stories describing the extreme trauma inflicted.

These articles widely failed to address the parallels between the separations at the border and the separations within our borders.

The Associated Press reported childrens symptoms ranging from inconsolable crying, to chest pains, to delusions and night terrors, with the possibility of growing into depression or cancer in adulthood. Child psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert Kliman told the AP that he predicted, an epidemic of physical, psychosomatic health problems that are costly to society as well as to the individual child grown up. I call it a vast, cruel experiment on the backs of children.

Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, was quoted in an article published by the University of Michigan School of Public Health: We know very young children who are exposed to this type of trauma go on to not develop their speech, not develop their language, not develop their gross and fine motor skills, and wind up with developmental delays.

But these articles widely failed to address the parallels between the separations at the border and the separations within our borders. Through the so-called child welfare system, children are not only wrenched from their families suddenly and without regard to their needs and desires; they are also funneled through an expedited adoption scheme that leaves children forever wanting their parents. These adoptions are often conducted in less than two years, even when the only issue facing a family was poverty or substance use.

A huge problem in our field is that in our obsession to achieve permanency, we are often forcing families into arrangements they dont want, Vivek Sankaran, clinical professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School and director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic, told Filter. This is particularly acute in situations involving substance use, where it does take, as we all know, time for folks to heal and to recover and to address the trauma that might be contributing to an addiction.

As Sankaran observed, this timeline realistically leaves very little space for recovery from substance use disorder.

Enormous monetary boons, built into the foster system via the Clinton administrations Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), require agencies to file for termination of parental rights once a child has been out of home-care for 15 out of 22 months, or else risk losing funding. Exceptions exist, including when a child is in kinship care, like mine were; or when it is not in the best interests of the child to sever ties to their parents, which some argue constitutes the majority of cases. But agencies are not obliged to make those exceptions.

The severing of children from their families takes place in a whirlwind procedure paraded as an act of necessary saviorism. To me, adoption is ownership Your birth certificate is like a title to your car, a deed to your house. I feel like I was literally signed over like a product. It turns children into commodities, said Pennie.

And, as Sankaran observed, this timeline realistically leaves very little space for recovery from substance use disorder, which often involves the need to address co-occurring or pre-existing trauma and mental illness, and rarely results in total abstinence right away (if at all).

In fact, recent research out of Canada found that the act of separating mothers who use drugs from their children increased the incidence of chaotic substance use and non-fatal overdose. This was compounded for Indigenous mothers, whose overdose rates were doubled within the studys cohort.

Pennies story offers another example of the extreme harm imposed by child services on parents who use drugs; although her mother previously struggled with mental health concerns and used substances, it was only after losing her child that she became addicted to heroin.

They were silent for a moment. What do you say to someone who is telling you that they would prefer to endure rape again, rather than what youre doing to them?

Having undergone the violence of child removal and rapid, forced adoption, I know intimately how damaging the adoption system is to parents, particularly those struggling with trauma or substance use. During my required mediation prior to the termination filing, I looked the attorneys in the eye and told them that this was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Worse than the sexual and physical violence that caused the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that they had trotted out as proof of my parental unfitness.

They were silent for a moment. What do you say to someone who is telling you that they would prefer to endure rape again, rather than what youre doing to them?

Then, in a rather sheepish tone, the attorney for the state, a stand-in from the drug court system due to staffing issues, admitted that before the ASFA timeline, parents with addiction had a chance. But not anymore.

Kids want their parents, they want their mother This system has been allowed to develop to be a hammer and treat every case like a nail, said Tracie Gardner, vice president of public policy at Legal Action Center and a mother who has been directly impacted by this system. There is no subtlety, no assessment, preventative services that are weak, and there are few tools to deal with families where there is a parent struggling with their drug use. Its zero-tolerance, its abstinence-only, its punitive and its scorched-earth.

Of course, the harms of these forced adoptions extend well beyond the childs youth, and hurt other people besides the child and parent. When children are adopted outside of their family, they lose contact with their ancestry.

Pennie describes her birth certificate, which still bears the names of her now-estranged adopters, as a forgery. Though shes been able to reconnect with her family as an adult, she was raised apart from her sister and extended relatives; people who may not fulfill the role of a parent or primary caregiver, but still make up an important part of ones identity and growth.

Their adoption was committed with no thought to the network of love it would sever.

When childrens rights are terminated as to their parents, and parents rights terminated as to them, we put the memories and history of a child in the hands of a system that knows nothing about that family and compiles a scrapbook through government records, said Erin Miles Cloud, a former parent attorney and one of the co-founders of Movement for Family Power, a parent advocacy organization that did some pro bono work on my case. She described these physical scrapbooks, such as those created by workers in the New York City system, as an issue that is enormously under-discussed.

I have always wondered what memories they create about [the childs] family member, their parent, and how they navigated the War on Drugs, she continued. It perpetuates this insidious pathology with no actual healing and also no actual agency in the reckoning of memory, especially for young children who then become incredibly reliant on these other people to help them sift through some of their memories.

When children are forcibly adopted within families, as with my daughters, it permanently alters the topography of that family. My daughters often discuss missing their Aba, my mother, and their elder half-brother; both live across the country, where we had planned to return once their father stabilized. My aunts constantly mourn their inability to see them, and my daughters have virtually no relationship with my father, who also lives across the country. Their adoption was committed with no thought to the network of love it would sever.

Dinah Ortiz is a grassroots harm reductionist and parent advocate in New York City, who has written for Filter about the structural racism of the child welfare system, which includes disproportionate targeting of Black, Indigenous and Latinx families for surveillance and removal. Ortiz lost her own daughter to forced adoption in Florida 18 years ago. She had planned to place her newborn daughter with her brother and his wife while briefly incarcerated. But child services removed Ortiz baby immediately after birth due to concerns about her substance use, and ultimately mandated adoption by her brother against her will.

Ortiz described returning to drug use after her baby was taken as a means to numb the pain.

We were really, really close. Thats why I made the arrangement with them because we were very close, me and him and his wife, Ortiz recalled. Now, however, she no longer considers him family, opting to call him simply my daughters adopter. She has not spoken with the couple in almost two decades, since they cut off contact with her child.

Fortunately, her daughter sought her out at the age of 16 and they are working to rebuild their relationship. But nothing can undo the trauma and wreckage of those lost years. Ortiz described returning to drug use after her baby was taken as a means to numb the pain.

The foster system destroys families, destroys lives, destroys the very children they claim to be protecting, said Joyce McMillan, a directly impacted mother, activist and founder of JmacForFamiliesan advocacy organization geared toward the abolition of the child welfare system.

The violence of snatching a child from their parent as they scream mommy; the trauma of that gets forever sketched in their souls, she said. We talk about when people get shot and the hole it leaves; when a child gets removed from families it doesnt just leave a hole in the heart, it leaves shrapnel [in the form of] depression, in some cases mental breakdown, fear, loneliness [and] isolation.

For my family, this gruesome violation hangs over everything, all the time. When I am apart from my daughters, my life feels like a small, windowless room. When I am with them, I feel like a ghost, haunting a life that is no longer mine. I can look at them, hold them, smell them, play with them, but nothing I say or do really matters, because their lives are now dictated by someone else, someone whose values are completely at odds with my own.

I can also see the hurt of my absence, how they try to reckon with it quickly so they can squeeze as much enjoyment as possible from our few hours togetherbut it still spills out in declarations of self-hatred, or accusations that I dont love them.

Now my daughters have been given the same message: If you, too, struggle, you wont be worthy of parenthood, agency or a full life.

On the morning after a rare holiday sleepover, my elder daughter woke up crying relentlessly. Her eyes were wild with fear and pain. For nearly half an hour, no amount of comforting could quell her loud, frantic tears.

Finally, I was able to calm her enough so that she could croak out a single explanatory sentence: I dont want a new mommy. A few minutes of hugs and reassurances later, she finally revealed that shed dreamed her father and I were taken away, and I was replaced by a stranger.

When the state took my daughters, they confirmed my worst fears as an abuse survivor: that I was made lesser by having been the victim of sexual and physical violence, and am no longer worthy of participation in regular society because of it.

Now my daughters have been given the same message: If you, too, struggle, you wont be worthy of parenthood, agency or a full life.

What if, instead, they had been allowed to share in my recovery, to watch me struggle and work and overcome? This could have been an opportunity to teach them about resilience, resolve and recovery. Instead, it has become a powerful lesson in self-loathing. The state chased permanencybut the only permanency achieved is the grief that now permeates all of our lives.

Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Brico

Read more:

Forced, Rapid Adoptions Are a Weapon of the Drug War - Filter

As a medical and public health student at Northwestern, Ive witnessed the advances weve made in treating opioid use disorders and overdoses. A medication called naloxone (brand name Narcan) allows for seemingly miraculous saves by blocking the action of opioids, often bringing patients back from the brink of death.

Despite the increasing use of naloxone in Illinois, overdose deaths have continued to rise. The opioid crisis resulted in 2,233 deaths in Illinois in 2019 and has grown even worse during the stress and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

How can it be that deaths from opioid overdoses continue to decimate our communities when such incredible, life-saving medicine exists?

One answer is that, much like giving an anti-venom medication to someone bitten by a rattlesnake, the key is administering naloxone as quickly as possible. We recently completed a research study of opioid overdose deaths in Illinois using coroner report data from the Statewide Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System, which showed the majority of deaths occur before emergency services arrive. Life-saving work is being done by groups like Chicago Recovery Alliance by giving community members naloxone and teaching them how to use it. Yet even training community members wont save the lives of the many people dying alone in their homes, abandoned buildings, motels, gas stations and sidewalks.

Overdose prevention sites would be much safer places to use drugs than the isolated locations where our friends and loved ones are dying. These buildings have trained staff who can quickly administer naloxone. They can provide clean supplies like syringes to prevent HIV and HEP-C transmission and simple on-site testing services to determine whether drugs are contaminated by fentanyl or other dangerous additives. They also can support recovery by connecting people with social resources and medical treatment opportunities.

Canada has had official sites for years. Studies looking at these sites have shown massive decreases in deaths from overdoses. The first official site in North America opened in Vancouver in 2003. Since then, they have had millions of visits, reduced lethal overdoses in the surrounding area by a third and intervened in thousands of overdoses without losing a single life.

Despite the success of these sites internationally, the U.S. still does not have any official sites of our own. In our pursuit of a failed war on drugs, we have instead waged war on and stigmatized friends and loved ones, making it harder for them to get treatment. In the war-on-drugs mentality, the solution has been to arrest and imprison people struggling with substance use disorders. But if our own children or parents were struggling with opioid use, would we rather they use heroin alone in an abandoned building or in a safe environment?

Chicago has an incredible opportunity in front of us to save lives in our communities with evidence-based treatments. While some residents may be concerned about public safety, the creation of Canadian sites actually reduced public drug use, resident complaints, and discarded syringes in the surrounding areas.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker in January signed an executive order establishing a steering committee for addressing the opioid crisis. One result of its work is the ongoing effort to open an overdose prevention site in Chicago's West Side, where there were more than 2,500 fatal and non-fatal opioid overdoses in 2019.

Sanctioned overdose prevention sites are allowed to operate legally in Illinois. However, their success will require coordination and support from local political and law enforcement leaders. Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx has already come out in support of overdose prevention sites. Mayor Lori Lightfoot has not yet taken a public position.

Each of us can do our part by calling the mayor and our aldermen, asking them to support the creation of overdose prevention sites in Chicago. This is a crucial first step in saving lives and turning the tide on the devastation of the opioid crisis.

Robert Tessier is a fourth-year student at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he is earning his M.D. and MPH degrees.

Read more:

Opioid overdose prevention sites are overdue in Chicago - Crain's Chicago Business

Language included in the appropriation package approved by Congress and signed into law includes provisions repealing the longstanding federal ban on providing student aid eligibility to those with certain drug convictions.

As first reported by Marijuana Moment, provisions in the nearly 6000-page package amend a 1998 federal law that mandated those applying for student aid to disclose if they ever had a drug-related conviction, and barred hundreds of thousands of applicants from receiving funding. The new law strikes the subsection of the Higher Education Act that established the drug-related eligibility standard.

Rachel Wissner, co-interim executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), told Marijuana Moment: Over the last two decades, we have been fighting alongside other drug policy reform and education organizations to scale back the penalty. Now that the penalty has fully been repealed, SSDP looks forward to the opportunity to work with Congress and the new administration on broader drug policy reform that ensure those who have been most harmed by the war on drugs are not left behind. We celebrate that Congress has finally accepted that a drug conviction does not mean that someone should be denied access to higher education.

The new law also restores the eligibility of those incarcerated to apply for student aid (Pell grants). Those in prison have been ineligible to receive Pell grants since the passage of an expansive 1994 crime bill.

Commenting on the reforms, Rep. Robert C. Scott (D-VA), Chairman of the House Education Committee, said: Congress has a responsibility to expand access to quality higher education, which remains the surest path to the middle class. While this is not the comprehensive overhaul of the Higher Education Act, and there is still work to be done, this proposal will help millions of students.

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Congressional Package Repeals Ban on Student Aid to Those with Past Drug Convictions - Norml

The Marijuana Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, which was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on December 4 by a vote of 228 to 164, has been viewed by many drug policy reform advocates as a major victory. Among other things, the bill would decriminalize marijuana possession at the federal level.

However, some advocates have expressed concern at how the MORE Act may fall short of truly supporting social equity. For example, the version passed by the House includes a clause stating that if someone has a prior felony marijuana conviction, that can be used against them during the application process to obtain a federal permit to start a cannabis enterprise.

In order to better understand the acts promises and perils, Filter interviewed Queen Adesuyi, a policy manager with the Office of National Affairs of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA*). Adesuyi is one of the co-leaders of DPAs Marijuana Justice Coalition, and worked on the passage of the MORE Act.

Adesuyi described the MORE Act as not only historic but really monumental, pointing to the bills racial justice framing and the positive impact it will have on people impacted by the War on Drugs. She additionally described how the bills decriminalization provision will benefit veterans (who will be allowed to access medical marijuana through the Department of Veterans Affairs under the bill), people who rely on federal benefits (who can currently be denied benefits due to marijuana use), and people who currently face severe immigration-related consequences for marijuana use.

But Adesuyi was also frank about what she termed the problematic provisions of the bill, which she said were inserted by the House Ways and Means Committee after the bill made it out of the House Judiciary Committee. Our interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Lucia Geng: Could you talk about the significance of the MORE Act being passed by the House?

Queen Adesuyi: The MORE Act passing out of the House is not only historic but really monumental because, at minimum, we now have made it so that Congress can no longer address marijuana reform without talking about the really harmful racial disparities that came out of targeted policing and over-enforcement of marijuana laws. The House decided to address marijuana prohibition and voted to end marijuana criminalization on the federal level through this important lens, and that sets a precedent.

The initial campaigns around marijuana legalization in this country were, for the most part, race- neutral until DC. And we ended up seeing the consequences of that, for example, in Colorados initial years building out the legalization industry in that state. They were barring people with marijuana convictions from the industry, just flat-out. And that is a disgrace. And I think its reflective of what happens when you do policy work with a colorblind lens.

What parts of the bill were thrown in at the last minute? Why were they thrown in?

The bill that we built was reported out of the Judiciary Committee when the Judiciary Committee voted on this bill last November. About two weeks ahead of the [full House] vote, the Ways and Means Committee came back to the coalition and DPA with a round of revisions. There was an addition that they included that we were able to negotiate down. They wanted to include an increase on the excise tax from 5 percent to 25 percent, which would have been really devastating to small businesses. We were able to get that tax back down to 5 percent, and its an increasing tax, so I believe it goes up to 8 percent.

But I think one of the most painful additions, for me, was the felony exclusion language thats in there. Despite the fact that this bill was literally from its inception intended to try to get people who have been operating in the informal market to enter the regulated market, Ways and Means decided to include a way for someone with a felony federal or state marijuana conviction to be used against on an application process for a federal permit.

That really was an optics thingagain to placate nervous and shaky moderate Dems.

This is extremely painful because it really, really cuts at the foundations of this bill and the principles that have guided the advocacy that moved this bill along. But it was something that Ways and Means was adamant about. And given the timeline in terms of when they brought it to us, and some missteps in terms of prioritization of what to negotiate on, that kind of allowed for that exclusion to still be in there with the hope that it will no longer be there in the next iteration of the MORE Act.

The [Congressional] leadership requested that some amendments [regarding expungement and sentencing] be added to help them, in their minds, secure the vote for shaky moderate Democrats.

For expungement, they ended up carving out folks who were labeled as kingpins and convicted under the kingpin statutes, really as a way to seem like theyre not trying to give a pat on the back to quote-unquote traffickers.

On the resentencing side, it previously was open to anyone who is currently incarcerated for a federal cannabis offense. Leadership requested that they added a qualifier, nonviolent, in front of federal cannabis offense. And that really was an optics thingit didnt actually change anything because federal cannabis offenses are inherently nonviolent in and of themselvesagain to placate nervous and shaky moderate Dems, who are apparently concerned about the GOP putting out a billboard with the Willie Horton sentiment, where they can be accused of voting to release quote-unquote violent offenders.

Basically, this whole process showed us that we still have a long way to go in doing education in Congress around collateral consequences and the impact of them feeding into the dichotomy of nonviolent versus violent offenders. And in really working on moving members of Congress, in terms of their perceptions of people who sell drugs.

What would you say to someone who thinks that DPA should have maybe joined other advocacy groups (such as Minorities for Medical Marijuana) in not supporting the bill in its changed form?

I think thats a really great question. I would say to those folks that their concerns around the problematic provisions that got added at the last minute to the MORE Act are valid. We share those same frustrations with those provisions, and also feel really, really bad about how Democrats and the political process tried to hamper our principled efforts to try to bring marijuana justice to Congress.

It was really difficult to walk away from the entire vehicle because of the longer-term implications.

As folks who led this effort, as folks who have maintained the advocacy behind moving this effort, it was really difficult to walk away from the entire vehicle because of the longer-term implications that were able to see, in terms of our ability to actually move anything at all.

I dont want to minimize the impact of the problematic provisions that are in the MORE Act because they are significant. But one thing I would tell folks is that the Congressional Budget Office released a report that found that the MORE Act would generate nearly $14 billion in revenue. Thats nearly $14 billion of revenue that would go straight to community reinvestment and straight to people of color and people directly impacted by criminalization who are looking to enter the industry.

Theres some confusion about the money going to law enforcement. That is not true: The MORE Act does not give a single dollar to law enforcement. It also would cut federal prison funding by $1 billion. And it would reduce time served of currently incarcerated folks on the federal level for marijuana offenses and what would have been future incarceration. It cuts that time served by 73,000 person years. So the bill would save 73,000 human years of culminated incarceration.

Which future initiatives do you see DPA and other advocates taking on in this space?

One, were gonna definitely continue our legislative effort in the House. The bill passing out of the House despite all the ways that we would have wanted it to improvethat is still going to put us in a really great negotiating place and political place to work to get those provisions out and to strengthen the bill for next Congress.

Well be leading the effort to try to figure out what regulation can and should look like. And we also are working to try to influence the next administration to see if theres any actions that can be taken on the executive level to address pro-marijuana prohibition, especially as we see the Senate leader of the MORE Act sitting in the position of the vice president-elect. So were hoping that we are successful with influencing her and the administration to move the president-elect along, because as you might know, President-elect Biden doesnt support descheduling. At least, he hasnt said that publicly.

Marijuana legalization is not ending the War on Drugs, and you dont want members of Congress to get comfortable with that idea.

Were hoping to continue to build out support for reform beyond marijuana. As you saw in the election, we successfully fought through drug decriminalization in Oregon. And theres plenty of other states and jurisdictions that decriminalization would be viable in, and theres also support and talk throughout Congress about the issue around drug decriminalization. Its been so many years in the making, but we finally successfully got presidential candidates speaking about marijuana justice on debate stages, and speaking about marijuana in a way that should be extended to all substances. People should not be in jail or prison for drug use. And thats not just the case for marijuana.

We want to have the wins weve had with marijuana extended because thatll get us closer to actually dismantling the War on Drugs. Marijuana legalization is not ending the War on Drugs, and you dont want members of Congress and other policymakers to get comfortable with that idea.

* DPA previously provided a restricted grant to The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, to support a Drug War Journalism Diversity Fellowship.

Photograph by Martin Falbisoner via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 3.0

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How Some Problematic Provisions Got Added to the Historic MORE Act - Filter

PANIQUI, Philippines (Reuters) - Relatives of a woman and her son shot dead by an off-duty policeman in the Philippines called for justice at their wake on Tuesday amid public outrage over an incident that went viral on social media after it was caught on camera.

Sonya Gregorio, 52, and 25-year old son Frank Gregorio, were shot in the head on Sunday after a row over noise, triggering accusations from activists that President Rodrigo Dutertes war on drugs had created a culture of police impunity.

I lost a mother who was the most loving mother to us. I lost a brother who was also a very loving and caring brother. Its very hard for us, said Tasha Delos Santos.

I hope our family gets justice.

Duterte on Monday condemned the Tarlac shooting and said he only defends police who do their duty, warning there will be a hell to pay for rogue officers.

In a video recorded on a family members mobile phone, policeman Jonel Nuezca was seen engaging in a heated argument with the Gregorios over the use of a homemade cannon in Tarlac province, north of Manila. The devices, which make a booming sound, are typically used to celebrate New Year.

When Sonya wrapped her arms around her son as the row intensified, Nuezca shot her in the head before doing the same to Frank. Before fleeing, Nuezca shot Sonya Gregorio again.

Nuezca surrendered to police that night and faces two counts of murder. The government has promised a thorough investigation.

They werent criminals, they were the nicest family here, said neighbour Gonyong Liwanag.

Critics and rights groups say Dutertes talk of killing criminals and promises to protect law enforcement have emboldened police to commit and cover up murder. Police reject that.

Government data show that 5,942 suspected drug dealers have been killed by police since 2016. Rights group say that number is an understatement and accuse police of summarily executing users and pushers. Police say those killed had resisted arrest.

Reporting by Adrian Portugal; Writing by Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Martin Petty and Philippa Fletcher

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Family mourns Filipino mother and son shot by police over noise - Reuters

Personal possession and use of all drugs in Canada should be decriminalized immediately, but we need to go further. To combat the illegal market and save more lives, we need to legalize and regulate drugs. We should prioritize the provision of safe access to opioids given the toll the opioid crisis is exacting. Legalization and regulation are the options that cause the least harm.

The lessons of legalization and regulation of cannabis

Its been two years since recreational cannabis was legalized and regulated, something that once seemed impossible. Cannabis reforms have not been without problems, but they have been widely regarded as successful. The criminalization of individuals for merely using and possessing that substance has essentially ended. A drug long thought to be limited to the criminal element in dark alleys has been hauled into the daylight and bought and sold within a tight and transparent regulatory framework.

With legalization has come a fundamental shift in thinking that non-medical use of drugs should be addressed as a public-health issue, not with use of penal sanctions. People who use drugs should not be punished and they should get support if they need it.

Increasing support for decriminalization

There has been recent, significant momentum toward decriminalization of drugs for personal use. Those endorsing such reform include the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, The Canadian Association of Social Workers, many medical officers of health, including Bonnie Henry, the New Democratic Party and B.C. Premier John Horgan along with the Vancouver city council and Jane Philpott, the former minister of health. An August editorial in the Globe and Mail also voiced support for it.

The Prosecution Service of Canada has begun to pull back from prosecution for personal possession of drugs, limiting it to cases involving public safety, according to a directive it issued in August. Decriminalization combined with other harm-reduction strategies such as safe-injection sites can lower rates of fatal overdoses and HIV infection caused by tainted needles. It can also create a path to help for those who are dependent.

The positive impact of decriminalization is not theoretical. Portugal has had mostly positive results from its decision two decades ago to decriminalize personal possession and use of all drugs. There has been no significant increase in harmful use, including for kids; the country did not become a haven for people coming to it just to use drugs; HIV infections and drug overdoses have gone down.

A ballot measure in Oregon to decriminalize drugs passed in Novembers U.S. election with strong support. Norway is also proceeding to roll back penal sanctions for consumption of substances. Its time for Canada to follow suit and decriminalize drugs now.

Legalize to confront the illicit market

Decriminalization, however, does not address the illicit supply of drugs coming from ruthless criminals making billions of untaxed dollars and peddling tainted substances that cause sickness and death. Legalization and regulation confront that system of narconomics. Yet even just decriminalization has met with consistent opposition from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He has said repeatedly that legalizing and regulating cannabis is as far as he is prepared to go to reform laws dealing with illicit drugs.

Legalizing the sale of illegal drugs seems a bridge too far despite cannabis legalization. There is widespread acceptance that the war on drugs has been a failure. Consumption for some drugs has increased, the illicit market is thriving, and individual lives are ruined.

But many people who are open to arguments favouring legalization wonder how it would be done. How is it possible to create an acceptable legal market for all non-medical use of drugs? That question must be answered.

A recent effort to address this critical challenge was undertaken by the British think tank Transform Drug Policy Foundation with the publication in October of How to Regulate Stimulants: A Practical Guide. Transform focuses on the reform of laws that criminalize non-medical use of drugs. It is highly regarded and consulted with the government of Canada regarding the legalization of cannabis. It has published work on legalization. The prestigious Global Commission on Drug Policy has also published such reports. Because stimulants, especially cocaine, are widely used, the October report focused on these drugs. But its discussion about how to regulate effectively and responsibly can be applied to any substances.

The opioid crisis and legalization

The numbers are horrific. Within the COVID-19 pandemic the opioid epidemic has taken a deadly toll. In B.C. there were more than 100 illicit drug toxicity deaths a month from March to August of this year far more than in a comparable period last year (181 in June 2020 vs. 76 in June 2019). Data from Ontario indicate that the number of fatalities from opioids in that province increased by about 50 per cent this year over last year. In Alberta, related deaths from April to June this year were 302, significantly exceeding the previous three-month high of 211 in 2018. Urgent action is required to protect individuals from street drugs.

There is already something of a pathway to legalization of opioids in this country. Some police forces have stopped charging for simple possession and use of opioids, but the practice is uneven. Such lack of uniformity explains the increasing support for formal decriminalization. In addition, the federal government is permitting safe supply projects. In these instances, dependent individuals are given access to opioids so that they are not consuming street drugs, which can be toxic. But the future of such projects is uncertain, and we need more of them.

So in constrained and shifting circumstances there is a sort of legalization and regulation unfolding regarding opioids: some de facto decriminalization combined with some safe supply. But much more needs to be done and quickly.

There is room for debate about the details of legalization and regulation of non-medical use of drugs. Transform, the British think tank, focuses the debate by breaking down the regulatory scheme into components including production, distribution outlets, availability, higher- and lower- risk products. There is much in its October report to guide policy-makers if there is the political will to move forward with legalization and regulation. Transform is also clear about the goals of drug policy: improve public health, protect human rights and promote social justice, as mentioned in the executive summary of its report.

These components analyzed by Transform can be applied to the production and sale of opioids for non-medical use to sketch a route forward. As a starting point, provision of safe supply could be expanded and improved. A further step could be to allow doctors to prescribe heroin (an opioid) for those adults determined to use the drug despite counselling about its dangers. At some level this is a horrible suggestion, but it is better than having people get these drugs on the street from a criminal network that pays no taxes, has committed crimes for a thriving system of narconomics, and doesnt care whether the drug is tainted. In all of this we should remember that drugs were largely available with little legal restriction until the 1900s. Punishing people for using drugs was, in many ways, a project of the 20th century.

Expanding safe supply and prescribing heroin both fall short of full legalization of opioids. But together with decriminalization, they would end criminalization of people who use drugs, further confront the illicit market, and save more lives. After careful assessment of the impacts, further measures such as those suggested by Transform could be contemplated.

The least bad policy

Legalization of drugs is no cause for celebration. Its no panacea for all the harms caused by drugs, including the ones that are now legal. Its also not a basis for encouraging drug use. Legalization needs to be accompanied by widely available support for those who are dependent.

Many details must be hammered out, including the appropriate conditions for prescribing opioids for medical purposes. But when measured against the costs and pain of the current situation, legalization together with regulation is, as The Economist somberly put it back in 2009: The least bad policy.

Photo: Shutterstock.com, by Darwin Brandis

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Legalize and regulate non-medical use of all drugs, prioritizing opioids - Policy Options

A few weeks ago, I spent 27 on a record with the enticing title Live Drugs. I bought it because I am a fan of its creators, the Philadelphia-based rock group the War on Drugs, and also because I was in the midst of a pandemic-related phase of insomnia and anxiety and it seemed to offer the prospect of a bit of uplift. But the main reason was the prospect of some kind of reconnection with something I almost seem to have forgotten: live musical performance, and what its like to hear and watch a band with a multitude of other people.

Live Drugs was recorded in an array of places across the world over a period of five years; one review called it a grand love letter to live music. Its best moments suggest a kind of inarticulable dialogue between the group and its audience, something heard most spectacularly on the 12-minute evocation of 21st-century living titled Under the Pressure, when thousands of people passionately sing along not with the words, but the guitar part. They sound like a football crowd.

It takes a lot of human labour to create a moment like that, and right now all of that work is in a state of suspended animation. People who earn a living seeing to sound, lights and the transport of people and equipment are either unemployed or doing another job. Something similar applies to the string and horn players often hired by successful bands, who also play in orchestras and ensembles. The advertising sections of music magazines and Sunday supplements are smattered with announcements of gigs and concerts scheduled to take place from the spring onwards; having written off 2020, the people behind the UKs summer festivals seem to be tentatively starting to put next years run together. But no one knows for sure if any of these events are actually going to happen.

A comparatively small number of successful musicians like, one imagines, the War on Drugs may have used the last nine months to take stock and quietly work on new material. But for most, the Covid crisis boils down to struggle, anxiety and, in many cases, mounting debt. The UK Musicians Union reckons that 70% of its members are unable to do more than a quarter of their pre-pandemic work, and that 87% of musicians will this year earn less than 20,000. Thirty-four per cent are apparently considering leaving professional music altogether. About a third of the unions members do not qualify for any of the governments help for people whose professional lives have been upturned: in Scotland and Wales, at least some of the public money dedicated to emergency help for the arts has gone to individuals, but in England, the so-called Culture Recovery Fund is exclusively focused on organisations and venues.

For many musicians, all that remains as a source of income is the revenue from recordings. But if the conventions that govern paying people in this way have always been stacked against actual creators, the 21st century has made things even worse. The facts may now be well known, but that does not make them any less shocking: Spotify is estimated to pay about 0.0028 (or 0.28p) per stream to rights holders, a term that encompasses both massive record companies and artists who put out their own music; and on YouTube, the per-stream rate is put at a mere 0.0012. Thousands of musicians who have signed contracts with corporate record companies and ended up in debt to their overlords (or unrecouped) receive no money at all. Shut down live music, and the result for many will be instant penury. as Guy Garvey, the lead singer with the Mancunian band Elbow, recently put it: Musicians cant eat, they cant make the rent. We need to make the system better.

Culture is subject to the same basic economic rules as everything else. In 30 years of writing about music, I have seen it enough times: when the industry is subject to shocks, the victims tend not to be the big music companies, large-capacity venues or huge-selling artists but people and businesses on the edge, both financially and artistically. In recent years there has been sporadic panic about the arts increasingly being dominated by people from privileged enough backgrounds to enable them to ride out hardship. Here lies a danger that is too often overlooked: that starved of funds and deprived of the live element that represents its absolute foundation, what we used to call popular music will become elitist, wholly dependent on big money, and lousy with it.

Even in impossible circumstances, musicians still work transcendent miracles. In spite of this years grimness or, in some cases, because of it this has been a very good year indeed for records. The artists of the year, to my mind, are a mysterious British collective called Sault, who have released two albums thematically connected to the Black Lives Matter movement, seemingly conceived as sweeping song cycles, and full of brilliant tracks. Plenty of the other names on this years end-of-year albums lists are almost as revelatory. Some of the best musicians in there probably sell a comparative handful of records and CDs, count their streams in the tens or hundreds of thousands and, outside festival season, play gigs to small audiences. In other words, they live precariously and in times like these, their situation will verge on the impossible.

So which way back? Last week, I had a conversation with Mark Davyd, the founder and chief executive of the Music Venue Trust, the charity that represents 270 such establishments all over the country. He talked about piloting fast pre-gig Covid testing, which could establish within an hour whether a ticket-holder was infected with Covid-19, and anti-viral snoods that might be worn by audiences. The Musicians Union is pushing for a musical version of the eat out to help out scheme, so that public money might subsidise the takings lost when venues can only admit socially distanced audiences. Streaming needs to be fixed so that musicians earn money from it as a matter of right. And over and above occasional charitable donations, the corporate music industry should find a way of making a sustained contribution towards grassroots musicians survival. Talent is not best served by poverty, and creators and their associates ought not to starve.

The rest of us need to wake up at last to the fact that the expectation of free recorded music is now in danger of killing something that human beings cannot live without. If you have the money and some remaining Christmas spirit, you should log out of Spotify, go to either an online outlet or a bricks-and-mortar record shop, buy a few physical products, and contribute a little to the livelihood of a musician or two. Given the magic they conjure up, its a very small price to pay.

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Unless we start paying, making music will become the preserve of the elite - The Guardian

DENVER, Dec. 22, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Lantern, the leading on-demand cannabis e-commerce marketplace and home delivery platform in the U.S., has today announced plans to be the first on-demand cannabis delivery service to offer recreational delivery in Colorado, beginning early 2021. Residents of Aurora, whose City Council passed a vote in favor of recreational delivery on December 21st, will likely be the first in the state to access Lantern's services once the city finalizes the permitting process next year. Lantern is an independently operated subsidiary of Drizly Group, the largest online marketplace and delivery service for alcohol in North America and a market leader in Colorado.

Colorado authorized medical and adult-use cannabis delivery to commence in 2020 and 2021, respectively, but state laws require individual municipalities to opt in to delivery services. Although medical deliveries are currently permitted in Boulder, Superior, and Longmont, Aurora will be the first city in the state to allow recreational deliveries. Lantern's leading edge on-demand delivery model is first-to-market in Colorado and will enter new territories within the state as more municipalities approve recreational delivery in the coming year.

Once Aurora's local law goes into effect, customers over the age of 21 in Aurora will be able to conveniently place recreational cannabis orders online at LanternNow.com and have products delivered to their doorstep within an hour. Lantern's user-friendly platform enables new and returning customers to discover products that best align with their lifestyles and preferences. Local dispensaries will be able to list their full menus on Lantern's platform and drive consumer engagement and product discovery opportunities through Lantern's intuitive interface.

"Colorado consumers have been waiting for nearly two years for recreational delivery to come online and Lantern is eager to offer our best-in-class services to eager customers," said Meredith Mahoney, President of Lantern. "Our sister company, Drizly, has already built an outstanding following and reputation in the state and we are confident that Lantern will apply these same market insights to provide timely and reliable cannabis deliveries throughout the state."

Lantern supports the city of Aurora's vote to prioritize social equity business owners in the delivery market and commends the city for taking an important step toward undoing the harm that the War on Drugs has on BIPOC. Lantern takes its commitment to social equity in the cannabis industry seriously, and has implemented a robust incubator program in Massachusetts. Lantern will continue to dedicate time and resources to local community organizations working to help social equity business owners obtain licenses in the Colorado delivery market as well.

About LanternLanternis the leading cannabis e-commerce marketplace and delivery platform in the U.S. With the speed and convenience of on-demand delivery, Lantern partners with the best local dispensaries and cannabis brands to bring transparency, safety, and access to cannabis for both new and experienced consumers through intuitive, personalized shopping experiences. Lantern's best-in-class expertise in regulated industries helps dispensaries operationalize on-demand delivery, helping them to reach new customers, tap into key consumer insights, and diversify their businesses to grow sales. Lantern is an independently operated company within Drizly Group, the most popular and reliable online alcohol delivery platform in North America.

Media ContactNoah BethkeMATTIO Communications[emailprotected]

SOURCE Lantern

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Lantern To Become First Platform To Offer Recreational Cannabis Delivery in Colorado - PRNewswire

On Tuesday November 3rd, 2020, Arizona citizens voted in support of Prop 207, the Smart and Safe Arizona Act, that has been termed Recreational Marijuana. When we think of the term recreation, synonyms like fun, enjoyment, and pleasure come to mind. However, Smart and Safe is much more profound, going beyond what the term recreational marijuana would suggest by focusing on benefits that include the repair of community, political, social, and economic issues.

Dr. William Troutt is director of medical education for Harvest Health & Recreation.

Smart and Safe expands the previously limited legal use of marijuana for severe and specific medical conditions to include all responsible adult use. The intent was not just to restore civil rights and freedom of choice but more broadly to address major consequences of cannabis prohibition prison overcrowding with nonviolent offenders, economic and social barriers stemming from a felony conviction, racial and economic disparities in the justice system, friction between our law enforcement and communities, disallowance of a safer alternative to alcohol and tobacco use, and lacking resources for treatment of substance abuse.

In this light, the phrase recreational marijuana use does not seem to do justice to this landmark moment in history and our aspirations. However, when you look deeper at the origins and uses of the word recreation, it starts to feel quite appropriate. The term recreation has its foundation in health and healing. Marijuana benefitshave included restoration, curing of a person, to make a new, recovery from illness, to invigorate and to refresh. And now with Smart and Safe, industry and activists have found common ground in cannabis to address deep divisions and imbalances between our government, laws, communities, and people, with the promise of re-creation to restore unity, heal inequalities, invigorate economics, and revitalize faith in democracy.

I have been on the front line of this reconciliation in Arizona, first with the 2010 Arizona Medical Marijuana Act and now with the 2020 Smart and Safe Arizona Act. As with many others, my family, and my life, have been deeply impacted by the war on drugs. Now, I am seeing a path to recovery. It is being built through cooperation, understanding, tolerance, unity, medicine, and recreation.

I joined a start-up company in 2012, Harvest Health & Recreation. They asked me to share my knowledge of cannabis culture and botanical medicine, and to serve as an advocate for patients, caregivers, and the communities we serve. As Harvests Medical Director for the last eight years, I have collaborated with industry leaders, government representatives, business stakeholders, and medical organizations to advance cannabis programs and assist patients and our communities in their quest for safe, informed cannabis access. Personally, I have witnessed medical success stories, courage, and unity, which have rejuvenated my hope and optimism for the future. For thousands of years cannabis has been used for food, fuel, fiber, medicine, spirituality/religion, health, and leisure. And now in Arizona we can appropriately call its use recreation. I, for one, believe that this expanded access to legal cannabis for responsible adult recreational use by any definition is healthy for our communities.

Dr. William Troutt is director of medical education for Harvest Health & Recreation.

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These are benefits of recreational marijuana that are overlooked - AZ Big Media

The War on DrugsLive DrugsSUPER HIGH QUALITY RECORDS7/10

In September 2014back when he was merely a cantankerous musician and hadnt been accused of sexual misconduct, harassing music journalists onstage, or anything else worthy of populating his Wikipedia Controversies sectionMark Kozelek took issue with The War on Drugs. The Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon songwriter was playing (billed as the latter) at the Ottawa Folk Fest at the same time as the Philadelphia band, becoming irritable due to the fact he could hear them. I hate that beer commercial lead-guitar shit, Kozelek announced onstage. This next song is called The War on Drugs Can Suck My Fucking Dick. It wasnt, of course, but Kozelek did later record and release a track called War on Drugs: Suck My Cockan explication of a band he publicly described as sounding like Don Henley meets John Cougar meets Dire Straits meets Born in the USAera Bruce Springsteen. Hes not wrong. Thats exactly what The War on Drugs sound like. But, as Kozelek also said, thats not a criticism, its an observation.

Thats something that this, the bands first live album, only confirms. Spliced together from performances between 2014when they started touring for that years breakthrough third album, Lost in the Dreamand 2019before the coronavirus pandemic took its devastating toll on the music industryLive Drugs makes these songs sound even more lush, textured, and, yes, 1980s than they do on their recorded counterparts. In fact, theres a depth to these recordings thats rarely found on actual studio albums, let alone live ones. Just listen to the melancholy, heartwarming chug of Strangest Thing and its explosive yet muted beer commercial lead-guitar shit, or the dreamy skygazing of crowd favorite Under the Pressure, which is extended to almost twelve minutes and is full of both more vitality and vulnerabilityespecially in singer Adam Granduciels weathered, husky vocalsthan it has on Lost in the Dream.

In fact, while the band can sound rather one-dimensional on their actual albums at times, here, songs like Pain, Red Eyes, and Thinking of a Place all bloom into full, unrestrained life. And while their cover of Warren Zevons Accidentally Like a Martyr cant match the haunted-heart majesty of the original, it comes pretty close. Unlike most live albums, then, which tend to be geared toward people who are already fans of the band, Live Drugs actually serves as a decent primer for the uninitiated. And it certainly shows that Kozelek probably should have just kept his mouth shut and listened. He might have even enjoyed himself.

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FLOOD | The War on Drugs, Live Drugs - FLOOD Magazine

The next best thing to attending a live concert by a band you like is to listen to a recording of a live concert by the band. So when The War On Drugs (Twod) released an album, pithily titled LIVE DRUGS, this month, fans (such as this writer) exulted. Twods gigs are enjoyable, their already large soundscape expansively fills arenas, and theres never a dull moment. Now that most gigs have been cancelled owing to the pandemic, Twods move to release a live album couldnt have been timelier.

LIVE DRUGS is not the usual live album. Those happen to be recordings of a single or a set of gigs that are released as an album and normally are in toto reproductions of what a band plays at a concert. For their album, however, Twods frontman, Adam Granduciel, who sings and plays one of the two lead guitars for the band, sifted through around 40 hard drives full of recordings of the bands concerts from 2014-19 and selected some of the best tracks that he and a producer then sequenced to appear like a full gig. The result is a brilliant album that showcases the Philadelphia-based bands unique brand of music, in which neo-psychedelia meets and mates with heartland roots rock.

Twods albums are always filled with surprises. Granduciels vocals can remind you of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty all rolled into one. A little more than three years ago, this column had covered A Deeper Understanding, Twods last studio album. It was a great album and a good way to explore Twods psychedelia-meets-classic rock style. With LIVE DRUGS, however, they take their game to another level. The carefully chosen 10 songs have Granduciel in the spotlight. Nine of them are written by him; the lead guitar solos are mostly his. And the soundscape of each song expands as it unfolds.

A Twod song can begin innocuously, like a basic, no-frills roots rock track. But then, before you know it, the guitar solos kick in, and within minutes, your ears are on a totally different trip. Thats probably why critics tend to classify Twods music in the neo-psychedelic genre. On LIVE DRUGS, Granduciel and the co-producer, guitar techie Dominic East, have chosen songs that appear to segue from one to another as if they have been played during the same gig. Half of the songs, however, were part of the bands 2014 studio album, Lost In The Dream, which was Twods breakthrough album, bringing with it mainstream recognition and tons of fans.

LIVE DRUGS clocks in at just 70 minutes and that is perhaps the albums only shortcoming. It could have been longer, with more songs. Listening to Twod live, however, is always a treat. There is a bonus too. One of the 10 songs is a brilliant cover of the late Warren Zevons Accidentally Like A Martyr. Zevon, who died at 56 in 2003, was an influential singer and songwriter and the cover of one of his hits is like a tribute to the much admired musician.

But the song that stands out in the new album is the nearly 12-minute Under The Pressure. It brings to the fore Granduciels true genius as a songwriter and performer. It opens with a spaceyguitar riff that is as much a delight on headphones as on good stereophonic speakers and can easily transport the listener to a blissful musical heaven. And then Granduciel launches into the song (Well the comedown here was easy/ Like the arrival of a new day/ But a dream like this gets wasted/ Without you/ Under the pressure/ Is where we are/ Under the pressure/ Yeah, its where we are babe).

Twod began as a local indie band with fans mainly in and around Philly, but soon grew into a mainstream draw. Mixing noise rock style guitar with classic roots rock is not something you would normally expect a band to do, let alone pull off with lan. Twod does it effortlessly. When it began, Twod was a venture of Granduciel and Kurt Vile but after the first full-length album, Vile left the band and now has a flourishing solo career. Since then Twod has released three more full-length albums, and, of course, this years LIVE DRUGS.

Twods success as a band not only has much to do with Granduciels talent but with the fact that the bands music is so accessible. Older generations of listeners weaned on classic rock like the rootsy feel of their music and take to their improvisations and fuzzy, synth-driven lines as easily as younger listeners do. In that sense, their studio albums cut across the generation gap, appealing to a broad audience.

But it is their live performances that make Twod really stand out. LIVE DRUGS songs are not new, and they arent from very recent gigs. But the 10 songs on the album are essential for fans and a great place to start if someone isnt familiar with the band.

Five tracks from LIVE DRUGS to bookend your week

1. Under The Pressure

2. An Ocean In Between The Waves

3. Thinking Of A Place

4. Red Eyes

5. Accidentally Like A Martyr

First Beat is a column on whats new and groovy in the world of music.

@sanjoynarayan

Originally posted here:

A live treat from The War on Drugs - Livemint

Earlier this week, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) announced a major milestone and voted in favor of a recommendation from the World Health Organization (WHO) to remove cannabis and cannabis resin from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

The passing of the recommendation could prove to be a major catalyst for the global medical cannabis industry. From regulatory oversight to scientific research, the potential avenues for growth that are associated with the development are wide ranging and of significance.

The vote was closer than we expected, and 27 people voted in favor of the recommendation. There were 25 votes against the recommendation and the CND voted against five other recommendations.

The recommendations that were not approved by the CND include:

The recommendation that was passed by the CND is significant and acknowledges the potential medical benefits that are associated with cannabis. The passage of this particular recommendation could support medical cannabis legalization efforts around the globe and will monitor how it impacts the industry in 2021.

The outcome of the vote could start a process where countries re-evaluate how cannabis is classified on their respective lists of narcotics. It could also potentially pave the way for more research into the use of medical cannabis as a treatment for a variety of debilitating ailments and conditions.

Although most of the recommendations were not passed by the CND, we believe that the passage of one recommendation is an important milestone for the industry. We expect 2021 to be a period of growth for the international cannabis market and will monitor how other countries adapt to a changing market environment.

Authored ByMichael Berger

Michael Berger is Managing Partner of StoneBridge Partners LLC. SBP continues to drive market awareness for leading firms in the cannabis industry throughout the U.S. and abroad.

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After A Hard Fought Battle, Drugs Continue To Win The "War On Drugs" - Technical420 - Technical420

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

Attitudes around drugs have changed considerably over the past few decades. Voters approval of drug-related initiatives in several states in the Nov. 3 election made that clear:

New Jersey, South Dakota, Montana and Arizona joined 11 other states that had already legalized recreational marijuana. Mississippi and South Dakota made medical marijuana legal, bringing the total to 35.

The citizens of Washington, D.C., voted to decriminalize psilocybin, the organic compound active in psychedelic mushrooms. Oregon voters approved two drug-related initiatives. One decriminalized possession of small amounts of illegal drugs including heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines. (It did not make it legal to sell the drugs.) Another measure authorized the creation of a state program to license providers of psilocybin.

What is your reaction to these measures? Do you think more states or even the entire country should decriminalize marijuana? What about other drugs?

In This Election, a Divided America Stands United on One Topic, Jonah Engel Bromwich writes about the growing support to decriminalize drugs in the United States:

Election night represented a significant victory for three forces pushing for drug reform for different but interlocking reasons. There is the increasingly powerful cannabis industry. There are state governments struggling with budget shortfalls, hungry to fill coffers in the midst of a pandemic.

And then there are the reform advocates, who for decades have been saying that imprisonment, federal mandatory minimum sentences and prohibitive cash bail for drug charges ruin lives and communities, particularly those of Black Americans.

Decriminalization is popular, in part, because Americans believe that too many people are in jails and prisons, and also because Americans personally affected by the countrys continuing opioid crisis have been persuaded to see drugs as a public health issue.

Then, Mr. Bromwich explores the history of the war on drugs:

President Nixon started the war on drugs but it grew increasingly draconian during the Reagan administration. Nancy Reagans top priority was the antidrug campaign, which she pushed aggressively as her husband signed a series of punitive measures into law measures shaped in part by Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator.

We want you to help us create an outspoken intolerance for drug use, Mrs. Reagan said in 1986. For the sake of our children, I implore each of you to be unyielding and inflexible in your opposition to drugs.

Americas airwaves were flooded with antidrug initiatives. An ad campaign that starred a man frying an egg and claiming this is your brain on drugs was introduced in 1987 and aired incessantly. Numerous animal mascots took up the cause of warning children about drugs and safety, including Daren the Lion, who educated children on drugs and bullying, and McGruff the Crime Dog, who taught children to open their hearts and minds to authority figures.

In 1986 Congress passed a law mandating severe prison sentences for users of crack, who were disproportionately Black. In 1989, with prison rates rising, 64 percent of Americans surveyed said that drug abuse was the most serious problem facing the United States.

The focus on crack meant that when pot returned to the headlines in the 1990s, it received comparatively cozy publicity. In 1996, California voters passed a measure allowing for the use of medical marijuana. Two years later, medical marijuana initiatives were approved by voters in four more states.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

Do you think marijuana should be legal in the United States? Do you think the country should decriminalize the possession of small amounts of other drugs, like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines, as Oregon did this election cycle? Why or why not?

What do you think might be the potential dangers of decriminalization? Do you think it will increase the number of people abusing drugs? Will it downplay the threat that drugs pose, especially to children? Could it pose safety risks, like traffic accidents and violence? Which of these dangers would you be most worried about and why?

What do you think might be the benefits of decriminalization? Do you think it will encourage people to get treatment for addiction? Will it reduce drug violence, or keep more nonviolent people out of prison? Will it allow the government to regulate drugs, as it does alcohol and tobacco? Could it reduce government spending, stimulate the economy and create jobs? Which of these benefits would be most important to you and why?

In your opinion, do the benefits of decriminalization of drugs outweigh the risks? Why or why not?

How do you feel about drug use in your community and state? Do you know if there is a concern about addiction or overdose in your region? Do you think decriminalization would benefit your community?

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Should the United States Decriminalize the Possession of Drugs? - The New York Times

MEDELLN, Colombia - VICE World News sat down with Senator Ivn Marulanda to talk about his cocaine legalization bill, which is currently moving through Colombias congress.

After 40 years of U.S. - backed anti-drug policy that criminalizes the coca leaf, Marulanda and a group of members of congress want to change tack.

The bill attempts to create a legal industry that distributes cocaine to users for pain relief, not recreational use. Like that in Bolivia, it also hopes to bring hundreds of thousands of illegal coca farmers out of the shadows into a legal, homegrown industry.

VICE World News: So what does your bill propose exactly?

Senator Ivn Marulanda: It proposes that the state buy the entirety of Colombias coca harvest.

There are 200,000 farmer families linked to coca growing. The state would buy coca at market prices. The programs for coca eradication each year cost four trillion pesos ($1 billion). Buying the entire coca harvest each year would cost 2.6 trillion pesos ($680 million). It costs less to buy the harvest than to destroy it.

With that intervention from the government, two fundamental things would happen. First, you would bring 200,000 families into a legal sphere where they would no longer be persecuted by the state. Usually, these farm families end up displacing themselves, deforesting new areas, and re-planting coca while theyre running from the authorities. Second, Colombia is destroying around 300,000 hectares of forest per year. Its estimated that coca-growing families are responsible for 25 percent of that annual deforestation. Colombias ecosystems are the collateral damage.

What would the government do with all the coca leaves?

The state would supply raw materials to artisanal industries - primarily of indigenous origin - that would produce foods, baking flour, medicinal products and drinks like tea. Those ancestral industries in Colombia havent had the chance to develop because the raw material is stigmatized and persecuted by the justice authorities. So, on one hand, its about developing these industries. Indigenous groups have a strong relationship with the leaf because theyve taken care of it for hundreds of years.

Now, the coca leaf has other properties too. Studies show it has a significant amount of calcium. There are nutritional properties. And so there are opportunities to open up to industrial production. There are also ways to make fertilizers.

The other thing the state would do is produce cocaine. It would supply that cocaine to users. And then it would supply coca and cocaine to research groups around the world who could study it for analgesic (pain-killing) uses. It hasnt been easy to do that because it hasnt been easy for these research groups to obtain cocaine. So, this would mean companies would enter into contracts with pharmaceutical companies with state-of-the-art research and top security protocols to buy it in pure form from the state.

In Colombia, the personal consumption of cocaine is legal. Its legal because of a court ruling that recognizes personal consumption as a human right. In Colombia we have those freedoms and the state cant intervene. However, what we dont have is the legal cocaine to meet that demand. Instead, we have consumers who are in contact with organized crime groups who supply them cocaine in local drug markets. Its poor quality cocaine and its often mixed with unregulated substances. Its everywhere: in our schools, in universities, in parks and bars. Its in all these public spaces.

So this policy would mean cutting organized crime off from the coca leaf, and it would cut consumers off from organized crime. The Colombian state would distribute it to users under a public health program, effectively through physicians who would evaluate if a person is apt for taking cocaine for their pain. Do they have the right physical and mental conditions? Thats the question we would have to ask. And then it would be high-quality cocaine. Another important thing here is that not all consumers are addicts. Less than 10 percent of cocaine consumers are addicts.

How successful has Colombias war on drugs been?

Colombia has a military and police-driven drug policy that dates back to the 1980s, when drug-trafficking was the powerful weapon of the cartels. Colombias first reaction - and also the response of the international community - was to start a war on drugs. The war on drugs is a law-and-order policy against drugs that thinks of drugs as a criminal offence. Its also a persecution against the coca plant, the leaves of which are used to produce cocaine.

That policy has not changed since the 1980s. Actually, Colombias drug policy has only become more entrenched, more stubborn and more severe in its application. Were now in the year 2020. Yet Colombia exports 90 percent of the cocaine in the world today. There are about 1,500 tonnes that leave the country each year. And there are about 200,000 hectares of land under cultivation of coca. Were inundated with cocaine and inundated with deaths and violence. Weve lost sovereignty over Colombian territory to the dominion of organized criminal mafias.

Over this period of 40 years, Colombias anti-drug policy has become almost like a religion for two generations. Two generations that were born and raised with this way of thinking about drugs. But this policy is now part of our culture and dogma. Yet in 40 years, we havent had a real, honest conversation about this policy and its results. Its a policy thats been reinforced by the international community and above all the United States.

How would you decouple the cocaine trade from criminal organizations?

You have to remember the state has a large margin here. The state is spending $1 billion on eradication. Buying coca leaves would cost the state $680 million. Theres a strong fiscal margin and they could push up the price if they need to. And if you need more, youd have to feed the program with more public spending. But the important thing here is to save lives.

The thing is, we have to recover control over the state. Were losing control of the state to corruption, narcos in politics. Theyre in municipalities, in departments and in congress. All the way to the highest echelons of government.

Colombian Senator Ivan Marulanda at his home in Rionegro, Antioquia department, Colombia, on September 15, 2020. Photo by JOAQUIN SARMIENTO/AFP via Getty Images

What do you think the U.S. would think about a legal cocaine trade in Colombia?

The U.S. has been an important partner for Colombia.

Weve been going 40 years with a policy that costs billions of U.S. dollars with zero success and so much cost and destruction. Lets try out this other policy. Because something that hasnt worked in the last 40 years is something thats just not going to work.

The United States is just like Colombia. Were throwing away enormous quantities of money on the war on drugs in the garbage, instead of dedicating it to social and human development in order to improve peoples well being.

The scenario for relations between Colombia and the United States will be very different [under President-elect] Biden.

Does Colombia have the right to do what it wants with cocaine?

This is the thing. Anti-drug policy doesnt have the same effect for a country like the United States or a European country as it does for Colombia. Were the producers. That means this is destroying the lives of our youth, of our soldiers and police. The economy is totally disfigured because of this business. And look at the problems of corruption. Its brutal. Our current anti-policy is destroying Colombia.

There are countries in solidarity with Colombia on this issue. Colombia has all the right in the world to look for an exit from this problem. But I dont rule out the possibility that other countries want to implement a public health policy that would supply cocaine from the state to their consumers. They would buy from the Colombian state and distribute. And it would be distributed outside of the blackmarket.

What are the biggest obstacles and threats to this bill?

The first big obstacle is to open up the conversation among public opinion. This has been a giant taboo. Colombians are born and raised under this assumption that drug-trafficking is a war. Theres no information about coca and cocaine. So, with this bill we hope to open the conversation.

Right now, there are a lot of parties that hold power right now, and theyve gained that power by selling the war on drugs. Its their political flag and its won them lots of votes. Those parties - the ruling party Centro Democratico, the Conservative party, Cambio Radical - this has always been their traditional policy stance: to fight cocaine as a crime.

In our upcoming presidential elections in 2022, I hope that candidates get asked by the public: What do you think about the legalization of cocaine? Because thats never happened before in Colombia.

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Colombia Is Considering Legalizing Its Massive Cocaine Industry - VICE

Congressional Democrats want to amend a section of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, to end what they refer to as another form of slavery forced prison labor.

Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Rep. William Lacy Clay of Missouri introduced a joint resolution this week that would remove the 13th Amendments punishment clause, or language that excepted convicted prisoners from the ban on slavery and involuntary servitude.

Our Abolition Amendment seeks to finish the job that President Lincoln started by ending the punishment clause in the 13th Amendment to eliminate the dehumanizing and discriminatory forced labor of prisoners for profit that has been used to drive the over-incarceration of African Americans since the end of the Civil War, Clay said in a statement.

When it was ratified in 1865, the 13th Amendment made slavery illegal except as punishment for a crime of which one has been convicted, the amendments text reads.

The Abolition Amendment would strike that clause from the 13th Amendment and end forced labor among prisoners, the congressmen said. Work programs for prisoners would continue on a voluntary basis.

Avi Soifer, a professor and former Dean of the University of Hawaii at Manoas Richardson School of Law, told CNN that its unlikely that efforts to amend the constitutional amendment will succeed.

It may be more beneficial to institute partial remedies, he said, like the federal statute that outlaws voluntary and involuntary peonage, a type of servitude by which people who owe debts work until those debts are paid.

It thus could have immediate relevance in efforts to address the terrible ways that we now treat prisoners and those jailed because they are unable to make bail, said Soifer, a 13th Amendment expert.

Merkley and Clay, in their release, call the punishment clause in the 13th Amendment indisputably racist in origin and in impact.

Because the South relied on slave labor for its economy in the 19th century, that line in the amendment was used as a loophole to continue the forced labor of Black Americans who were imprisoned, according to the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, which works to end mass incarceration.

The punishment clause led to higher rates of arrests among Black Americans throughout the Jim Crow era to the War on Drugs in the 1980s, the congressmen said in the release, by effectively creating a financial incentive for mass incarceration renting forced labor of disproportionately Black prisoners.

Prison labor is a lucrative industry. NPR reported in July that as of the last federal count in 2005, over 1.5 million prisoners were working. UNICOR, a federal prison labor program, generates over $500 million in revenue every year, NPR reported.

But the practice exploits prison laborers, its opponents say. Many states, mostly in the South, dont pay inmates for working regular prison jobs, according to the Prison Policy institute, and the high end of their wages for regular prison jobs rarely exceed $1.

Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey, among others, have cosponsored the amendment, which has earned the support of social justice organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Color of Change.

Continued here:

Democratic lawmakers introduce a resolution to amend the 13th Amendment to end forced prison labor - KNBR

Dr. Jeffrey Singer, Guest Opinion Published 4:55 p.m. PT Oct. 16, 2020

Catch up on any news you may have missed. Wochit

If voters approve it, Measure 110 - the Drug Decriminalization and Addiction Treatment Initiative - will reduce possession of all Schedule I through IV controlled substances to Class E violations, punished by a $100 fine.

To qualify as a Class E violation, the amount of a drug an individual may possess cannot be greater than for personal use. Drug dealing or manufacturing would still be punishable.

This is a good start, but Oregonians should look to Portugal for an even better example.

In 2001, Portugal led the European Union in drug overdose deaths. Realizing that treating substance use as a crime was filling jails, fueling corruption, and failing to stop overdose deaths and disease spread, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. Resources for law enforcement were redirected toward harm reduction while drug dealing and manufacturing remain criminal offenses.

In the years since Portugals rate of HIV plunged, drug-related crimes plummeted, and Portugals drug overdose rate is among the lowest in the developed world. Today, a country that decriminalized all drugs nearly 20 years ago reports overdose deaths per million at less than one-thirtieth that of the United States. And while overall drug use by adults mirrors most of the European continent, teen drug use in Portugal has decreased relative to other EU countries.

Election 2020: Oregon's Measure 110 would decriminalize drug possession, expand treatment

Speaking before the Rhode Island General Assembly this past January, Dr. Jaoa Goulao, the architect of Portugals drug policy, explained that the program works because people with substance use disorder are not treated as criminals: If I smoke cigarettes and I get lung cancer, no one puts me in jail. Ill be offered treatment. Ill be treated with dignity even if it comes from my wrong behavior.

He also noted that law enforcement efficiency improved as police were freed fromtasks that were not reducing drug use. Drug users on the street now seek help from officers, who refer them to treatment programs.

Election 2020: Oregon's Measure 110 would decriminalize drug possession, expand treatment

Of course, not every illicit drug user has a substance use disorder. In fact, only 10 to 20%of adults over age 25 who use addictive drugs get hooked. It is perhaps with this insight that Initiative Petition 44 provides the option of a completed health assessment in lieu of a fine. This provides those who want help with an incentive to obtain it. Whats more, it directs expected taxpayer savings resulting from prisons no longer being filled with drug offenders to help fund treatment programs.

There is reason, however, to worry about what kind of programs will be offered.

Another view: Measure 110 would take away addiction treatment and cost lives

Policymakers often overemphasize abstinence-based programs, which have a disappointing track record and dont prioritize treatment with methadone and buprenorphine, which are much more effective.

Dr. Jeffrey Singer(Photo: Courtesy of the CATO Institute)

Oregon has a history of sparking nationwide changes. The Oregon Plan led to the 17th Amendment to the Constitution and the direct election of senators. Voting by mail began in Oregon in 1981. And while a small step in the right direction, this initiative may trigger the end of the destructive War on Drugs.

Jeffrey A. Singer, MD practices general surgery in Phoenix, Arizona, and is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He can be reached atjsinger@cato.org

Read or Share this story: https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/opinion/2020/10/16/decriminalize-possession-small-amounts-drugs-increase-treatment-funding-guest-opinion/3672033001/

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This November, Oregon can spark a withdrawal from the War on Drugs - Statesman Journal

Criminal justice reform has made significant advances during my time in the movement. But the continuing influence of the carceral lobby has also inflicted severe setbacks. As we work to create a more just system and society, we have to account and plan not just for the endgame, but for whats occurring in the moment.

As a speaker for the Law Enforcement Action Partnership and its current chair, let me first underline our opposition to police violence and our support for the resulting wave of nonviolent protests across the country.

These reactions to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbury and others create opportunities to transform policing. Whats largely missing are the strategic plans that could achieve not only that transformation but one of the entire criminal justice systemby engaging and convincing a majority of the population. Such strategies must anticipate the inevitable blowback from our opponents and those members of the public who support tough-on-crime policiespolicies that continue to be supported by the average Americans lack of understanding of the causes of crime.

Professor Patrick Sharkey made this point in a Washington Post piece about how defunding the police can work. He shared my concern that without adequately scaling and presenting model defunding programs, any ensuing rise in violence will see Americans of all races become more punitive, supporting harsher policing and criminal justice policies. Thats how we got to this point.

Crime data, often used selectively, can easily be deployed to fuel political rhetoric and maintain the status quo.

Because thats how the carceral lobby has always successfully driven home its message. They wont lack opportunity. Just last week, the Washington Post published another article, describing how crime rose unevenly when stay-at-home order lifted. Crime data, often used selectively, can easily be deployed to fuel political rhetoric and maintain the status quo.

There are many recent examples of how pro-carceral groups use the fear of crime to push back against reform. Take California, and the backlash against Proposition 47an initiative, approved by voters in 2014, that was designed to reduce incarceration while reallocating fiscal resources away from police and back into communities to make them safer. Despite the research reflecting that the backlash is unfounded, organizations like Keep California Safe have waged a public campaign against successful criminal reform. The result was the placement of a ballot initiative this election that would roll back gains made since the passage of Proposition 47.

Its not just California. You only need to look at the bail reform rollbacks or the fight to shield police disciplinary records in New York to understand the power and influence of the Police Benevolent Association and police unions across the nation.

Connected with an understanding of the formidable forces ranged against us, we also need to appreciate the reality of where public opinion currently standsand the many nuanced factors that inform these views.

Polling conducted since the death of George Floyd on how Americans feel about defunding the police, including Gallup and the latest Monmouth poll on race relations, reflects these complexities. The political data site 538 averaged four national polls conducted in mid-June, at the height of the protests, finding 31 percent in favor of defunding the police and 58 percent opposed.

In addition to asking the question on defunding, the Gallup poll also found:

When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they currently do in their area, most Black Americans61%want the police presence to remain the same. This is similar to the 67% of all US adults preferring the status quo, including 71% of White Americans.

Meanwhile, nearly equal proportions of Black Americans say they would like the police to spend more time in their area (20%) as say theyd like them to spend less time there (19%).

For sure, there are many valid counterpoints to such findings. Public opinion can changesupport for defunding, while well short of a majority, is much higher than in the pastand public opposition should not stop our advocating for whats right. The historical trajectory of public support for marijuana legalization, which rose from 25 percent in the late 1990s to 66 percent today, is a perfect example of how advocacy can change minds.

It may jar with our worldview, but denying that current reality doesnt help us.

We should work optimistically and think big, but I offer two cautions. First, that public support for reforms can go down as well as upjust as approval for marijuana legalization, having peaked at 28 percent in 1977 (according to Pew), fell off as the War on Drugs kicked in, then took two decades to recover to that level. And second, that we do need to do the hard work of persuading people.

It may jar with our worldview that even communities marginalized by systemic racism and policing practices just want good policing, not police abolition or defunding, but denying that current reality doesnt help us. Successful advocacy may take many years. If that proves to be the case with the national-scale establishment of non-law enforcement responses to crime, it is imperative that we achieve other things in the meantime.

We can both develop and advocate for sweeping policy changes, while simultaneously recognizing that even incremental reforms have made and can make crucial differences in peoples lives.

My own work in harm reduction and drug policy reflects this dynamic tension between how we plan for the ideal future while also addressing immediate needs of our communities by working within the politics of now. Reform is not linear, transforming an entrenched system rooted in punishment will not happen overnight, and we ignore public opinion at our peril.

How can we convince people who may fear the radical transformations we envisage? One important way is by demonstrating to them how unthreatening steps in this direction can beby designing and implementing policies that scale up non-law enforcement first responder resources while scaling down police budgets and reach. Proven successes of such measures, including enhanced community safety, can become winning arguments as we seek to advance further.

Change of this nature will require deconstructing the current system piece by piece, and starting in the areas where we already have consensus is logical.

We have to take the public with us every step of the wayby seeking inclusive community input on central questions like What are the Police for? and by developing consensus on the meaning of public safety and who should be responsible for it. I would suggest framing this by adopting the term community-led health and safetya concept that views crime reduction through a multi-disciplinary lens, centering the interdependence of social, cultural and socioeconomic factors on health and opportunity, as well as crime.

The dismantling and rebuilding of policing and its alternatives around community values and under community leadershipin ways that invest in people, not a system of punishment and abandonmentis a clear but complex goal, and one whose outcomes will look different in different contexts. Change of this nature will require deconstructing the current system piece by piece, and starting in the areas where we already have consensus is logical.

One area in which Americans have widely agreed for years is the failure of our drug policy. A 2012 Angus Reid poll found that only 10% of respondents believe that the War on Drugs has been a success, while 66% deem it a failure. Majorities of Democrats (63%), Republicans (63%) and Independents (69%) alike agree with the notion that the War on Drugs has not been fruitful. A 2014 Pew Poll showed that 67 percent favored treatment not jail for heroin and cocaine use. And a 2019 CATO poll reflected that 55 percent favor decriminalizing all drugs.

Defunding the drug war is clearly an action that will help us to dismantle policing practices that subvert our constitutional rights, entrench structural racism, corrupt police themselves and destroy the prospects of establishing community-led health and safety structures.

Despite advances like marijuana legalization, sentencing reform, Good Samaritan laws or Oregons current ballot measure to decriminalize drug possession, many politicians have been slow to respond to the public will to pull apart the drug war. Organizations like my own, the Drug Policy Alliance*, the National Harm Reduction Coalition and many others have worked to win these victories and speed these changes. But one program that has for years been making a real difference in the lives of people who use drugs, actually preventing them from being criminalized, is Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD).

LEAD essentially works by diverting eligible people who come into contact with police to social services, rather than jail and criminal charges. I have often written about LEAD, admiring the way it has worked, since 2011, within the reality of our current structures to help thousands of criminalized people right now, rather than postponing intervention until we can get laws changed.

I have always recognized it as a forward step, rather than an end goal, and one that should keep evolving.

LEAD is embedded within the very system that we want to changealbeit that is exactly where great harms can be preventedand initially focused on people who use drugs, rather than casting a wider net to include many other marginalized and criminalized groups. For these reasons, I have always recognized it as a forward step, rather than an end goal, and one that should keep evolving.

The architects of LEAD have always recognized this too.

The LEAD framework is all about reducing harm and shifting the paradigm through which our society has responded to marginalized people and vulnerable populations for decades, Chief Brendan Cox, director of policing strategies for the LEAD National Support Bureau and a LEAP speaker, told me. While police were the portal through which enormous numbers were detained and punished, change had to interrupt that flow of people to prisons and courtrooms. Not engaging the police would have abandoned those people.

The evolution that was always anticipated is happening. It has never made sense to condition access to high-quality care on police contact, and LEAD has always been structured to reduce police involvement, Cox said. LEAD has evolved, through partnership with communities across the country, from pre-booking police diversion, to police-centered pre-arrest social contact referrals, to the newly established Let Everyone Advance with Dignity, which allows community members to make direct referrals without any police involvement or approval. Public safety transformation can not happen overnight, yet through this continued shift, LEAD continues to further de-center the criminal legal systems role in providing life changing services to those most in need.

As we continue to reallocate law enforcement resources back to communities and to reduce the gatekeeping role of the police, I would suggest that LEADabove all in its emerging community referrals-based guiseshould eventually replace problematic drug courts, non-coercively offering services to a wide range of people in need.

But above all, were it not for LEAD, countless more lives would have been ruined by convictions, incarceration and criminal records.

So this is where I differ from some, though not all, of the views expressed by Filters Helen Redmond in her recent piece about LEAD. She described LEAD advocates belief in the potential for reconciliation and healing in police-community relations as naive. Yet to pin all our hopes on the rapid implementation of radical structural reform that doesnt currently enjoy majority public support, passing up chances to reduce the harms of the system in the interim, could be described similarly.

Kevin Sabet, the prominent opponent of marijuana legalization, likes to claim that legalizers promised legalization would end racial disparities in arrests. Only, we never said that. Racial disparities in marijuana arrests have sadly continued in many jurisdictions post-legalizationending racism, like transforming the criminal justice system, is a long haul, despite its urgency.

But what legalization has done is greatly reduce overall numbers of arrests, removing the harms of criminalization for many people, including, in absolute numbers, people of color. We havent reached our destination, but we have advanced.

Similar charges are sometimes leveled at LEAD, including by sources quoted in the Filter piece. It is right to note with concern that LEADs exclusion criteria regarding past convictions disproportionately affect people of color because of the systemic racism baked into the criminal justice system and wider society. That must be addressed. But did LEAD ever claim it would end racism in the system? It did not.

Keith Brown, a former LEAD project director, told Filter, All LEAD can do is mitigate or otherwise reduce the harms of racial disparities. It was a criticism of the program, but equally reflects some of what it can achieve: nowhere near everything we want, but still a meaningful difference to many peoples lives.

Neither does the existence of LEAD in any way hold back other forms of progress. I would argue the reverse. The programs role in changing the drug policy conversationincluding within the culture of law enforcement, with all the impact that may have on skeptical members of the publicshould not be underestimated. Examples include calls and support by law enforcement for the decriminalization of simple possession of drugs here and abroad, the need for a safe drug supply, safe consumption sites, drug checking services, the discussion of the failure of drug courts and incarceration, as well as the introduction of social contact referrals, moving people away from the justice system and toward community health and social services.

Helping people now, in whatever ways we can, is just as valid as thinking longer-term.

Many people in the harm reduction community express important concerns about every kind of incremental or imperfect reform. I do, too. It is vital that we air these criticisms, that programs are scrutinized with a view to improvement, and that we never lose sight of our ultimate goals.

But to frame radical and incremental reformsin the context of public opinion and our hard-earned experience of what it takes to winas enemies, rather than different points on the spectrum of positive change, is counterproductive and wrong.

Helping people now, in whatever ways we can, is just as valid as thinking longer-term. By viewing these approaches as complementary and mutually compatible, our movement becomes stronger and does more real-world good.

*The Drug Policy Alliance previously provided a restricted grant to The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, to support a Drug War Journalism Diversity Fellowship. LEAP was previously the fiscal sponsor of The Influence Foundation.

Image by neo tam from Pixabay

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Our Movement Is Strongest When We Aim HighAnd Work in Current Reality - Filter