Tag: Drug’s

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The NY Times’ Hypocritical Employee Drug Tests, Like Marijuana Prohibition, Need to End

Workplace drug testing is unjust and ruins lives. The following article first appeared on Substance.com:  Unless you’ve been in hiding, you’ll know that the New York Times made history last Sunday, July 27, when it launched a series of editorials calling for an end to marijuana prohibition. The first piece, “Repeal Prohibition, Again,” was a complete reversal of the Grey Lady’s hitherto cautious—some would say conservative—position on the drug war: “It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished. It has been more than 40 years since Congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit […] Read More

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Worldwide Protests Erupt Over the Racist, Failed War on Drugs

On June 26, people in over 100 cities in at least 46 countries will speak out against the war on drugs. It is difficult to overstate how much of a failure the war on drugs has been. By any reasonable standard it has done much more harm than good. Drug trafficking-related violence has soared, our prisons are stuffed with drug offenders (many of them non-violent), with minorities disproportionately represented. It is a costly, global economic disaster with economic gains from cannabis and other drugs restricted to the black market. Scientists are kept from studying cannabis, a plant that has proven to ease the suffering of countless medical patients—and those patients are forced to break federal law if they want to obtain their medicine. Even by […] Read More

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5 Reasons the War on Drugs Is a Costly Economic Disaster

A new report reveals obscene wastes of money and humanitarian disasters. The global war on drugs is the cause of some of the biggest public health and social justice disasters of our time, from violent, billion-dollar cartels to mass incarceration targetingcommunities of color and locking people up for profit. On top of everything, the drug war is shockingly expensive according to a groundbreaking report released May 7 by the London School of Economics. The report exposes the injustices of the drug war by examining its true costs. Five Nobel Prize economists, as well as national leaders and professors, weighed in, reaching the overall conclusion that policies need to move away from heavy law enforcement to public health and humanitarian-based efforts. The foreword of the report […] Read More

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5 Nobel Prize Economists Call for End to Failed War on Drugs

London School of Economics released a report calling for experimentation in drug policy. The war on drugs is a global disaster, ranging from mass incarceration to violent, billion-dollar cartels. It is a public health nightmare, and a social justice embarrassment that targets communities of color and locks them up for profit. When the UN General Assembly convenes its special session on drugs in 2016, it should take heed of a groundbreaking report released May 7, which exposes the injustices of the drug war. Five Nobel Prize economists have weighed in on the repercussions of the global war on drugs, outlining “the effects of prohibition on security, drug prices, rule of law and public health,” according to a press release. It concludes that governments would make better use […] Read More

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2014: How the Corporate Media and Journalists Perpetuate Lies and Misinformation About Drugs

Drug panics have real and damaging consequences. The following article first appeared on Substance.com:  Journalists are no less likely to take drugs than anyone else—indeed, in my admittedly anecdotal experience, they’re more likely to use. You’d think that this would make us especially skeptical both about federal policies that failed to prevent our own drug-taking and about extreme claims about drug users. But the press may actually be one of the biggest obstacles to reform. Instead of asking tough questions, reporters tend to simply parrot conventional wisdom—and reinforce the idea that the drug war is the only way, even when drug warriors’ claims contradict the evidence of the writers’ own lives. In the last month alone, we’ve seen several particularly egregious examples of mindless reporting—including one that […] Read More

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The Drug War Fuels Mass Deportation of Nonviolent Migrants

250,000 people have been deported for drug offenses in the last 6 years. The drug war has increasingly become a war against migrant communities. It fuels racial profiling, border militarization, violence against immigrants, intrusive government surveillance and, especially, widespread detentions and deportations. Media and politicians have tried to convince us that everyone who gets deported is a violent criminal, a terrorist or a drug kingpin. But a newly released, first-of-its-kind report shatters that notion, showing instead that the majority (some two-thirds) of those deported last year were guilty of minor, nonviolent offenses – including thousands deported for nothing more than possessing small quantities of drugs, typically marijuana. The report, an analysis of federal immigration data conducted by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, […] Read More

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The Most Unbelievably Absurd Argument Against Legal Pot, Yet

Legal marijuana opponents are getting increasingly desperate in their efforts to thwart legalization. Maryland is going green. Last week, the State Senate passed by a margin of 34 to 8 a bill that would decriminalize marijuana in the Old Line State. Governor Martin O’Malley – a potential frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination – said in a statement that he would sign the bill. He said:  “As a young prosecutor, I once thought that decriminalizing the possession of marijuana might undermine the public will necessary to combat drug violence… I now think that [it] is an acknowledgment of the low priority that our courts, our prosecutors, our police and the vast majority of citizens already attach to this transgression of public order and public […] Read More

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2014: Majority of Law Enforcement Officers Support Marijuana Policy Reform

Former cop: the war on drugs changed the very nature of policing for the worse. Though not conducted with the methodological rigor of the Pew poll that came out yesterday showing 54% of Americans support the legalization of marijuana and two-thirds believe drug policy should focus on treatment rather than prosecuting drug users, Law Officer magazine has provided LEAP a poll of its own showing an even more surprising finding: a majority of law enforcement officers also support marijuana policy reform. Though some of the provided answers seemed to overlap, the overall effect is one indicating broad support for change among the readership of the publication, 97% of whom indicated they are or had been in law enforcement.  Some of the most surprising results include 66% saying marijuana possession should […] Read More

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2013: Obama’s War On Pot

While the press has hailed the president’s “public health” approach, the White House has cracked down on cannabis. This article appeared in the November 18, 2013 edition of The Nation. In February 2013, three months after Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana, a sullen Gil Kerlikowske, head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), shared his regrets with the Canadian magazine Maclean’s. “The administration has not done a particularly good job,” he said, “of, one, talking about marijuana as a public health issue, and number two, talking about what can be done and where we should be headed on our drug policy.” People in mourning are given to melodrama, but Kerlikowske’s attempt to blame marijuana legalization on poor messaging was evidence of […] Read More