Did you have the talk?
Tag: the war on (some) drugs
Court Brief Slams DEA’s ‘Indefensible’ Rationale For Firing Agent Over Positive THC Test Attributed To CBD Hemp Product
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) fired a former agent based on an “unjustifiable, unlawful, and inexplicable” rationale after he tested positive for THC after using CBD products that were marketed as being derived from federally legal hemp, an attorney argued in a new brief in a federal court case challenging the removal.
Anthony Armour—described by DEA itself as an “outstanding” special agent during his 16-year tenure—was terminated in 2019 following a random drug screening that revealed traces of THC metabolites. He admitted to taking CBD for chronic pain as an opioid alternative—and he turned over the products he believed to be federally legal under the 2018 Farm Bill—but DEA upheld his firing even upon appeal.
In a brief submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit this week, the former DEA agent’s attorney, Matt Zorn, challenged a series of arguments from the agency, asserting that it relied on “undeniably flawed evidence” to support its claim that Armour unlawfully used marijuana by consuming a CBD product he believed to be within the federal definition of legal hemp.
“This is all indefensible enough. But [DEA’s response] disturbingly sheds new light on how an outstanding DEA agent landed a draconian punishment for an unintentional act,” the brief says. “Deep in the Response, the government notes that DEA intended to remove Armour regardless of his intent, outstanding service, and remorse. DEA would have removed Armour from federal service even if he were just negligent in purchasing CBD products.“
“DEA could have charged Armour whatever it wanted under its guidelines. Likewise, it can fashion whatever drug policy it desires,” it says. “But DEA put Armour on a pedestal and charged him with use/possession of marijuana and never proved the charge. Instead, it took unjustifiable, unlawful, and inexplicable shortcuts.”
The ‘Monster’ Isn’t the Drug, It’s the Prohibition
If you remember headlines about angel dust and crack, you know that drug panics are nothing new. From time to time an intoxicating drug is rediscovered or newly synthesized, or old ones are consumed in new ways, leading to public fascination and forecasts of doom. We’ve seen that recently with widespread attention paid to fentanyl and tranq, and a recent article in The New York Times about “super meth” and “polysubstance use.”
The November 13 Times piece headlined “‘A Monster’: Super Meth and Other Drugs Push Crisis Beyond Opioids” consists of a high panic to substance ratio. As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum pointed out, “super meth” is not new, but represents a return to making methamphetamine from phenyl-2-propanone (P2P) the way the Hell’s Angels did in the past before illicit manufacturers started deriving it from pseudoephedrine. Now that allergy medications containing pseudoephedrine are strictly controlled, underground labs have returned to old techniques.
Well, of course. Black market operators always innovate to work around laws and law enforcers.
The rest of the of the article, on the simultaneous consumption of several drugs, is equally unremarkable, though outcomes remain as unfortunate as ever.
Maryland Republicans Want To Let Police Search Cars And People Based On Smell Of Marijuana, Which Is A Legal Product
Republican lawmakers in Maryland are aiming to undo a law that prevents police from stopping or searching people and vehicles based merely on the smell of marijuana, claiming the measure has put motorists at risk and took away an important tool used by law enforcement to seize people’s firearms.
The effort is one of five legislative proposals that the Maryland General Assembly’s Joint Republican Caucus unveiled this week as part of its public safety agenda for the coming legislative session, which runs from January to April of next year.
“There is no doubt about it, people using cannabis while riding in or operating a vehicle makes our roads less safe,” House Minority Whip Jesse Pippy (R) said at a press conference Tuesday. “The Drug Free Roadways Act of 2024 will remove the prohibition from stopping and searching vehicles due to the odor of cannabis.”
Biden’s Justice Department Says Marijuana Consumers Are ‘Unlikely’ To Store Guns Properly In Latest Defense Of Federal Ban
The Biden administration has once again found itself in federal court defending a ban preventing people who use marijuana from buying or possessing firearms, arguing that historical precedent “comfortably” supports the restriction and that cannabis consumers with guns pose a unique danger to society, in part because they’re “unlikely” to store their weapon properly before using marijuana.
In a brief submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on Wednesday, attorneys for the Justice Department responded to a series of prompts from the judges, asserting that the firearm ban for marijuana consumers is justified based on historical analogues to restrictions on the mentally ill and habitually drunk that were imposed during the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification in 1791.
The federal government has repeatedly affirmed that those analogues, which must be demonstrated to maintain firearm restrictions under a recent Supreme Court ruling, provide clear support for limiting gun rights for cannabis users. But several federal courts have separately deemed the marijuana-related ban unconstitutional, leading DOJ to appeal in several ongoing cases.
For the case before the Third Circuit, the government is defending the ban against Erik Matthew Harris, who was convicted of violating the federal statute prohibiting the possession of a firearm by a person “who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.” As the Daily Caller first reported, Harris’s legal representation also submitted a supplemental brief to the court on Wednesday that broadly disputes both the substance of the conviction under the statute, as well as the idea that there are relevant historical analogues to uphold the existing ban.
Indonesia’s President Urges Biden To Lift FDA’s Kratom Import Restrictions, Advocacy Groups Say
In a meeting with President Joe Biden this week, the president of Indonesia urged the administration to lift a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) alert that broadly restricts imports of kratom to the U.S., according to a pair of advocacy groups.
Indonesia is one of the primary international exporters of kratom, a plant native to Southeast Asia that’s used for pain relief, managing the symptoms of opioid withdrawal and other purposes. The plant is currently unscheduled under U.S. law, but FDA issued an import alert in July that has seriously limited kratom imports from Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo met with Biden for a bilateral meeting at the White House on Monday. According to the American Kratom Association (AKA) and the Kratom Coalition, Widodo used the opportunity to request administrative action to remove the FDA restrictions, emphasizing the economic and environmental consequences of the current kratom import policy for Indonesia.
The White House referred Marijuana Moment’s request for comment to the National Security Council (NSC). A spokesperson for NSC said they have “nothing to add on the Leaders’ conversation beyond the joint statement and fact sheet released on Monday” that do not explicitly mention kratom.
Health Benefits Provider Will Cover Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy In States Where It’s Legal
A Massachusetts company that bills itself as “the first and only licensed provider of psychedelic health plans” announced on Tuesday that it will cover psilocybin-assisted therapy in states where it’s legal.
“Given the evidence of effectiveness seen in clinical trials in the U.S. and elsewhere, we have decided to give our employers the option of including psilocybin-assisted therapy in their benefit plans,” said Sherry Rais, CEO and co-founder of Enthea, a third-party health insurance benefits administrator. “Oregon and Colorado have already legalized the use of psilocybin, and we expect others to do so next year.”
Enthea announced earlier this year that it would cover ketamine treatment nationwide. The nonprofit previously worked with soap company Dr. Bronner’s last year to offer psychedelic-assisted therapy to workers through their employee health plans.
Enthea said this week that it plans to expand its standards of care to include adult use of psilocybin “in combination with psychotherapeutic support.” The company expects to publish the change to its provider network sometime in the first quarter of next year.
The goal, Enthea said, is to be able to cover psilocybin-assisted treatment by mid-2024.
“We have had our eye on the potential benefits of psilocybin therapy since we founded our company,” Dan Rome, Enthea’s co-founder and chief medical officer, said in a press release. “We are very encouraged by published results as well as what we hear from practicing therapists, and are confident that this brings an important new option for combating mental illness.”
Enthea has said its services will expand further to include therapies with other substances, such as MDMA, “as they are approved.”
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designated MDMA as a “breakthrough therapy” in 2017, and the substance is now on track for FDA consideration next year following successful Phase 3 clinical trials published in September in the journal Nature that found that MDMA-facilitated talk therapy reduced symptoms in patients with moderate to severe PTSD.
Medical Marijuana Legalization Led To Reduction In Frequent Use Of Nonmedical Prescription Opioids, Study Finds
Legalizing medical marijuana is associated with a “lower frequency” of nonprescribed pharmaceutical opioid use, according to a study published this month in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction.
While the decrease was rather small—between about 0.6 percent and 1.5 percent for regular to frequent opioid use—and was concentrated in people who met diagnostic criteria for cannabis use disorder, the researchers said it could signal “substitution effects with partial replacement of opioids by cannabis.”
The research team, from the schools of public health at Rutgers and Columbia universities as well as the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy, said the results highlight “the importance of identifying tradeoffs of cannabis legalization as an intervention to reduce opioid-related harms.”
The study used national survey data from 2004 to 2014 to examine nonmedical prescription opioid (NMPO) use—specifically, prescription opioids used without a prescription or in a manner other than prescribed.
Despite the decrease in regular and frequent opioid use, the study also found that medical cannabis legalization (MCL) was associated with a 2.1 percent increase in the occasional use of nonmedical prescription opioids, defined as between once and 12 times per year.
Top GOP Ohio Lawmaker Says There’s No Need To Rush Changes To Voter-Approved Marijuana Legalization Law, Despite Governor’s Call For Quick Action
A top GOP Ohio lawmaker says there’s no need to rush changes to the state’s voter-approved marijuana legalization law, despite the governor’s insistence on getting revisions enacted before possession and cultivation become legal next month. Meanwhile, another Republican legislator has already come out with a bill to change the law by redirecting millions of dollars in cannabis tax revenue toward supporting law enforcement training.
Just one day after meeting with Gov. Mike DeWine (R) to discuss potential amendments to the statutory cannabis law that voters passed at the ballot last week, House Speaker Jason Stephens (R) said on Tuesday that the areas they’re looking to change don’t come into play for nearly another year, meaning there’s no reason lawmakers need to ram them through before the basic legalization provisions become effective on December 7.
Specifically, the governor, Stephens and Senate President Matt Huffman (R) have been talking about potential revisions focused on mitigating youth consumption, reallocating certain tax revenue and increasing resources to prevent impaired driving.
“To do that in the next couple of weeks, it’s going to be a real challenge to put forth such a large program that quickly,” Stephens said, as The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported.
Another state lawmaker, Rep. Cindy Abrams (R), isn’t wasting any time as she proposes her own changes to the legalization law, however. A bill she introduced last week, shortly after voters approved the marijuana measure, would use $40 million in cannabis tax revenue annually to support a law enforcement training fund. Any revenue in excess of $40 million per year would then be distributed according to the statutory initiative.
“The voters did approve Issue 2, and they had their idea of what the tax money was going to be used for,” Abrams said at a press conference on Tuesday. But she questioned if voters “really even know what they actually voted for.”
The New York Times Credulously Embraces the ‘Super Meth’ Theory
A story about polysubstance use in today’s New York Times mentions “super meth” four times: once in the headline, once in a subhead, and twice in the body text. “A decade or so ago, Mexican drug lords figured out how to mass-produce a synthetic ‘super meth,'” Times reporter Jan Hoffman writes. “It has provoked what some researchers are calling a second meth epidemic. Popular up and down the West Coast, super meth from Mexican and American labs has been marching East and South and into parts of the Midwest.”
Yet Hoffman never explains what “super meth” means. Instead she links to a widely cited 2021 article in The Atlantic by journalist Sam Quinones. In that piece, which is based on Quinones’ 2021 book The Least of Us, he posits that methamphetamine derived from phenyl-2-propanone (P2P), the dominant method nowadays, is more potent and more hazardous than methamphetamine derived from pseudoephedrine, a process that became less common after the U.S. government restricted access to that precursor.
If that were true, it would be yet another illustration of prohibition’s tendency to make drug use more dangerous: By cracking down on cold and allergy medications containing pseudoephedrine, the government pushed production abroad and encouraged traffickers to use P2P instead, which, according to Quinones, made the resulting methamphetamine purer, more addictive, more physically harmful, and more likely to trigger “mental illness”—so much so that, according to the headline over his Atlantic article, it might not even make sense to “call it meth anymore.” But although Hoffman evidently considers Quinones a credible source, he never offered a plausible reason to believe any of that.
As drug historian David Herzberg notes in a Washington Post review of Quinones’ book, “Quinones has no laboratory or epidemiological evidence that P2P meth is different from ephedrine-produced meth—the ‘super-meth’ theory is based entirely on anecdotes.” Herzberg adds that “journalists were writing equally terrifying things about ‘crack’ cocaine and ephedrine-based meth (and heroin) back in the 1980s and 1990s.”
Quinones himself is hazy on the scientific basis for his theory. “No one I spoke with knew for sure” why “P2P meth” was “producing such pronounced symptoms of mental illness in so many people,” he says.
Claire Zagorski, a paramedic who teaches harm reduction at the University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy, questions the assumption underlying that question. “We have no evidence supporting the idea that the meth currently on the market is meaningfully different at a population level,” she writes in Filter, “or that P2P-produced meth is any more or less neurotoxic than ephedrine meth.” Nor is that surprising, since “all meth actually has the same chemical makeup,” and “the only difference is the production method.”
Hoffman avers that “super meth” packs “a potentially lethal, addictive wallop far stronger” than ephedrine-based meth. But on the face of it, you would expect the latter method to produce more potent methamphetamine—exactly the opposite of what Hoffman and Quinones are claiming. An “ephedrine/pseudoephedrine reduction,” the Drug Enforcement Administration notes, yields “high quality d-methamphetamine,” the psychoactive isomer, without unwanted l-methamphetamine. The P2P method, by contrast, “yields lower quality dl-methamphetamine,” a combination of the two isomers.
Quinones concedes that P2P-derived meth is not actually a new thing, noting that “the Hell’s Angels and other biker gangs” used this method before phenyl-2-propanone, which was placed on Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act in 1980, became harder to come by. In his telling, the key development in the marketing of P2P meth happened sometime around 2006, when Mexican cartels figured out how to “separate d-meth from l-meth,” which he describes as “tricky” and “beyond the skills of most clandestine chemists.” In reality, Zagorski says, “isomer separation is fairly teachable” and “not all that mysterious”:
The cleanest and most straightforward way to remove the L from the psychoactive D isomer is capillary electrophoresis. This process involves feeding a meth sample into a small capillary tube and exploiting differences between the two isomers that cause one to “stick” to the tube’s coating while the other continues on. Anyone with around $4,000 can do this with via a capillary electrophoresis machine, which automates the process to minimize human error and labor.
However challenging the process, it is necessary only because the P2P method yields an inferior mixture compared to the “high quality d-methamphetamine” produced by the pseudoephedrine method. Either way, Zagorski notes, the goal is something like “pharmaceutical-grade meth, the regulated version of which is sold under the brand name Desoxyn.” Yet that “FDA-approved prescription form” of the drug “doesn’t cause ‘cerebral catastrophe'” involving the “violent paranoia, hallucinations, conspiracy theories, isolation, massive memory loss, [and] jumbled speech” that Quinones describes.
Unfazed by the lack of such symptoms in patients who take Desoxyn, Quinones asserts that “methamphetamine is a neurotoxin” that “damages the brain no matter how it is derived.” Still, he says, “P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe.”
Why would that be? “One theory is that much of the meth contains residue of toxic chemicals used in its production, or other contaminants,” Quinones writes. “Even traces of certain chemicals, in a relatively pure drug, might be devastating.”
The problem, in other words, is not that P2P meth is especially pure but rather that it contains potentially “devastating” contaminants. Maybe.
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