September 02, 2010
Mexico: What to Believe?
As someone who lived in pre-drug war El Paso between 1958 to 1963, I have great difficulty adjusting to the virtual tsunami of information about drug trafficking, murder, and corruption that has been emanating from Juarez since I began following the drug war in earnest in 1995. Not only have the numbers of alleged drug-related killings increased dramatically, so has the savage and brazen manner in which they are being carried out; to say nothing of the fact that pitched battles between government forces and narcotrafficantes are being fought deep in the interior.Even given their dramatic progression from levels reported as recently as 1995, there is general agreement that after newly elected President Felipe Calderon dutifully attempted to accommodate a Bush-Cheney call for a crack down on drug smuggling in 2006, things have become even worse: more savagery, more killings, and more disturbing evidence the Mexican government is losing control.
Even against that background, President Calderon is still claiming progress in Mexico's version of the drug war, based on the most recent arrest of another notorious drug lord. How long can such blindness persist without provoking a catastrophic failure of government South of the Border? More to the point: how might such a failure affect us?
And isn't this very reminiscent of our "successes" against the cocaine cartels and Pablo Escobar in the Eighties, to say nothing of claims made on behalf of body counts and the "light at the end of the tunnel" in an earlier war?
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)
August 31, 2010
Pot Prohibition: a complete history...
Tom Meyer, cartoonist, is one of the SF Chronicle's real treasures. His latest Sunday effort neatly summarizes the war on marijuana ...Posted by tjeffo at 08:15 PM | Comments (0)
The Importance of Demographics
My decision to accept the invitation of an Oakland cannabis “club” owner to do the required medical screening of people seeking a “recommendation” to use cannabis (and thus qualify as his customers) in compliance with Proposition 215 was motivated mostly by curiosity. I already had a strong belief that US marijuana policy was terribly misguided and harbored the naive conviction it could be “reformed” on the basis of logical arguments once the dimensions of its failure were understood by enough people. But I had no specific plan for how to bring that about.Even worse, I had no idea of how seriously that judgment understated our government's commitment to its self-induced drug problem or how daunting the idea of changing our drug policy might become.
In any event, it took a few months before I saw the required patient encounters as the opportunity for a unique study of illegal marijuana use. Even then, the task of designing such a controversial project on the fly while continuing to record data took more time than projected. Thus it wasn’t until early 2007, when I was analyzing data from the first four thousand applicants that I tumbled to the significance of their demographics, specifically their dates of birth.
The item itself was simple and straightforward, but its significance is profound and far reaching: only four percent of the first four thousand applicants seen were born before 1946. By default, the rest were all Baby Boomers or Post Boomers.
To fast forward: what that suggests to me at least, that our federal government has missed the significance of the youthful rebellion that suddenly became manifest in the mid-Sixties. Thus rather than attempting to understand and adapt to one of the the most important social developments of the Twentieth Century, America has remained committed to suppressing it with an amalgam of ad-hoc propaganda and repressive law enforcement; with tragic consequences.
The significance and complex ramifications of that hypothesis will be explored in future posts.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2010
How Quickly we (Pretend) to Forget
Back in January, I wrote: “Not only has the past been prologue, its cognitive errors and false assumptions have shaped the present in ways that were not- and probably could not could not have been- anticipated by our ancestors.” Even then, I didn’t realize how quickly Mexico would descend into chaos, how steep the descent would be, or how aptly it would make my point. Still unknown is the degree to which the critical implications of present reality would/will be lost on the American polity and its government.Simply put, how long can we pretend that the chaos in Mexico is not a consequence of drug war folly? Do we really believe that our government’s rigorous preference for the ridiculous euphemism of “drug control” over the more accurate term of “drug prohibition” will hide the fact that the creation of violent criminal markets is an inevitable consequence of prohibition policies, no matter how they are named?
How quickly we seem to have forgotten it was Operation Intercept, Nixon’s unilateral imposition of drug prohibition on Mexico and the US, that initiated the folly that's blossomed into today’s carnage.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)
August 22, 2010
Delusional Thinking is Alive & Well in California
The magazine section in today's San Francisco Chronicle featured 2 very different op-ed pieces, but each opposed the "legalization" initiative that will be considered by voters in November. That the Chronicle would do so didn't surprise me because its editors have never exhibited clear thinking on pot issues. Even though they are at the epicenter of the "Medical Marijuana" movement, they have yet to cover it intelligently. The following will be sent to them later today, but I'll be surprised if it's published...For nearly fourteen years after Proposition 215 passed in 1996, we have had a form of marijuana legalization: any resident over 18 able to acquire a signed “recommendation” from a licensed physician could become a “medical” user and receive a (disputed) measure of protection against arrest and prosecution under state law. Although fiercely resisted by all state law enforcement agencies and most politicians after qualifying for the '96 ballot, Proposition 215 passed handily and ultimately thrived despite the best efforts of its opponents and the manifest inability of its supporters to define “medical” use coherently.
“Pot docs” willing to sign recommendations were notably few and far between in early years, but now they compete blatantly on the internet and retail outlets ("dispensaries") selling “medical” marijuana now blanket the state despite the risk of raids by both local and federal police who often confiscate cash, product and equipment. Difficult to measure precisely, the medical gray market created by the proposition continues to grow; indeed, it was that growth, and the prospect of tax revenue replacing enforcement expenses that has helped place a “legalization” initiative (Proposition 19) on the November ballot.
As a physician who has been collecting data from an unselected stream of medical applicants for nearly nine years, I was not surprised by the very different, but equally meretricious arguments advanced by Dr. Cermak and Chief Manheimer in support of the status quo. Indeed, I have been reading similar arguments ever since discovering that both marijuana partisans and opponents share a preference for blind belief over informed skepticism.
My individual patients have not known how other applicants were answering the questions I’ve been asking as part of the standardized intake interview all undergo. Those “renewing” with me (some as often as five times) tend to understand why cannabis has been so helpful and are particularly good sources of information for that reason. I know its reliable because I’m the only one able to compare all answers. Although I have published my data statistically (to protect confidentiality) any other pot doc would be free to ask similar questions and publish their results; that’s how Science is supposed to work.
The never-verified assumptions of Doctor Cermak and Chef Manheimer are those of the drug war as adjusted to the preferences of their professional organizations.
The brand-new specialty of "Addiction Medicine" is entirely dependent on the drug war for its existence and for a definition of the entity it treats; there's no objective standard for “addiction.” It may exist, but cannot be identified precisely enough to justify the coercive abstinence-only methods insisted upon. Also, the historical record of every criminal prohibition policy is one of abysmal failure. The most useful approach would be to look at all drug use as a characteristic human behavior that should first be understood before being subjected to one-size-fits all "treatment."
Perhaps Dr. Cermak should ask himself just why "marijuana" became so popular with adolescents in the Sixties and why its illegal market continues to grow inexorably despite the best efforts of Chief Manheimer and others.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)