Dennis McKenna on the illegality of psychedelics…
Tag: the war on (some) drugs
Florida Attorney General Defends Firing Of Corrections Officer For Using Medical Marijuana To Treat PTSD
A case filed with the Florida Supreme Court tests whether the Department of Corrections properly fired a corrections officer because of his use of medical marijuana while off work.
Florida’s First District Court of Appeal upheld the firing, but Samuel Velez Ortiz now argues before the state Supreme Court that the action violates both the Florida Constitution’s sanction of medical marijuana and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rulings establishing a broad right to bear firearms.
The state Public Employees Relation Commission upheld the firing, reasoning that his medical marijuana use rendered him unqualified to carry a firearm—a condition of his employment—under federal law prohibiting use of the drug.
A petition that Velez Ortiz’s attorneys filed with the state Supreme Court cites 2022’s New York State Rifle Pistol v. Bruen, in which the justices in Washington established a public right to carry firearms outside the home for self protection. Subsequent rulings by a federal trial judge in Oklahoma and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the right of sober persons to carry guns even if they smoked marijuana on other occasions.
“This lower court’s [First DCA] opinion permits a sanction on medical marijuana patients, which results in loss of employment for being a qualified patient and strips a person’s right to bear arms for being a qualified patient,” it says. “The opinion states because he uses medical marijuana ‘he cannot lawfully possess a firearm. Each time he does, he is committing a felony.’”
The brief notes that Velez Ortiz was a qualified medical marijuana user because of his PTSD and never worked while under the influence. A random drug test flagged him for cannabis metabolites.
FBI Report Says 3 In 10 Drug Arrests Are For Marijuana, But Agency’s Inconsistent Data Hinders Policy Analysis
Arrests for marijuana made up nearly a third of all drug arrests in the United States in 2022, according to a newly released report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). As with last year’s report, however, inconsistencies in the data and recent changes to the agency’s methodology make it difficult to draw year-to-year comparisons or meaningful conclusions about cannabis and broader drug enforcement trends.
The data, according to FBI, comes from more than 11 million criminal offenses reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, which is submitted by 13,293 law enforcement agencies and 2,431 other agencies whose jurisdictions comprise more than 90 percent of the country’s population.
“Of the 18,884 state, county, city, university and college, and tribal agencies eligible to participate in the UCR Program, 15,724 agencies submitted data in 2022,” the bureau said in a press release about its annual 2022 Crime in the Nation statistics.
Because not all agencies provide data for the complete reporting periods, FBI explains in a methodology section of its website, the bureau calculates estimated crime numbers, essentially extrapolating “by following a standard estimation procedure using the data provided.” In terms of total reported arrests for “drug abuse violations,” for example, FBI said there were 766,595 arrests. The estimated number of arrests for drug abuse violations, by contrast, is 907,958.
Those numbers, however, aren’t consistent throughout the FBI report. In a section on arrests by region, FBI said there were 726,746 total drug arrests in 2022—nearly 40,000 fewer than its top-level number. In an analysis of historical trends, meanwhile, FBI reported just 633,576 drug arrests in 2022. A section on racial breakdowns says there were 714,442 drug abuse violations.
Other sections list “drug/narcotic offenses” for the year at 1,459,460, the number of arrestees for drug/narcotic offenses at 787,347 and the total number of drug/narcotics offenders at 1,755,788. The agency further said there were 902,482 crimes involving a person’s suspected use of drugs other than alcohol in 2022.
FBI’s press office did not immediately respond to an email from Marijuana Moment requesting clarification on the conflicting numbers.
After Smelling Legal Marijuana In New York, Colombian President Denounces ‘Enormous Hypocrisy’ Of U.S.-Led Drug War
Unveiling Colombia’s new national drug policy recently, President Gustavo Petro recalled smelling the odor of marijuana wafting through the streets of New York City during a recent visit to the U.S., remarking on the “enormous hypocrisy” of legal cannabis sales now taking place in the nation that launched the global drug war decades ago.
“Marijuana is sold today in Times Square,” Petro said, according to a translation of his speech. “It smelled on all the streets, all the way around the corner, and they sold it…like any other product. I suppose they charge taxes and that New York City or the state of New York lives partially from them.”
“That’s where the war on drugs began,” Petro continued, calling out the U.S.’s lead role in globalizing the drug war more than 50 years ago. “How many people have been imprisoned? How many people have died? Because undoubtedly illegality brought violence.”
If Ohio Voters Pass Marijuana Legalization Measure, Senate President Says He’ll Push For ‘Reviewing It And Repealing Things’
As early voting in Ohio kicked off this week, Republican state senators passed a resolution urging residents to reject an adult-use marijuana legalization initiative on the November ballot. But if the cannabis reform measure passes, Senate President Matt Huffman (R) also warned that GOP lawmakers may seek to scuttle some of its core components.
If Ohio voters approve Issue 2, he said during a speech on the Senate floor this week, “this initiated statute is coming right back before this body.”
“We’re going to have a mental health crisis on our hands,” if legalization becomes law, Huffman cautioned. “We are going to pay for this for years and years and years, and it’s only going to get worse.”
Huffman later clarified to local reporters that he wouldn’t seek to repeal the legalization plan entirely if it’s approved by voters, saying that he would instead “advocate for reviewing it and repealing things or changing things that are in it.”
He specified that he’s concerned about some of the measure’s provisions, including one that would funnel put a portion of state tax revenue from legal marijuana toward financial assistance and technical support for people who apply for cannabis business licenses under the initiative’s social equity program.
In his speech to colleagues, however, the Senate president took aim squarely at legalization.
“If Issue 2 passes, there will be more teenagers in the state of Ohio committing suicide,” he warned. “And our reaction to that will not be, ‘Let’s make marijuana illegal,’ because by that time, more people will be making lots of money. It will be, ‘Maybe we should hire drug counselors, get into the schools, talk about kids not taking drugs.’ But by then it will be too late. It’ll be even more part of our culture. And no, I’m not a scientist, but I’m a person who can look at facts and listen to scientists and know that that’s true.”
“If it’s in your home, if people can purchase it for you, if adults can purchase it for you,” he added, “children are going to have this more often.”
German Lawmakers Delay Marijuana Legalization Bill Debate Due To Conflict In Israel
German lawmakers say that initial consideration of a bill to legalize marijuana will be delayed until at least next week due to the ongoing conflict in Israel that’s shifted international attention—though one legislator outlined a revised schedule that still puts the country on track to enact the first part of the government’s legal cannabis plan by early next year.
While Germany’s federal parliament, called the Bundestag, was scheduled to take up the cannabis reform legislation for a first reading on Friday, the scheduled debate has been postponed until next week, according to Carmen Wegge and Dirk Heidenblut of the Social Democratic Party.
They said the “global political situation” is the reason for the delay, but lawmakers “will make sure that everything gets done somehow in the next week,” according to a translation.
Ohio Senate Urges Voters To Oppose Marijuana Legalization On The Ballot, Citing Anti-Drug Talking Points
As early voting kicked off in Ohio on Wednesday, the state Senate passed a GOP-led resolution urging voters to reject a marijuana legalization measure that’s on the ballot.
Introduced by Sens. Mark Romanchuk (R) and Terry Johnson (R), and cosponsored by 14 other Senate Republicans, SR 216 lists a parade of horribles that lawmakers say would befall the state if the cannabis ballot initiative known as Issue 2 becomes law.
“The proposed statute authored by the commercial marijuana industry,” it says, “does not serve the best interests of the people of Ohio, will bring unacceptable threats and risks to the health of all Ohioans, especially children, will create dangers in the workplace and unacceptable challenges and costs to employers, will make Ohio’s roads more dangerous, will impose significant new, unfunded costs to Ohio’s public social services, and serves only to advance the financial interests of the commercial marijuana industry and its investors.”
Nearly three in five state voters said they support adult-use legalization in a poll commissioned by the campaign and published late last month. That’s consistent with the results of other recent independent surveys.
The Senate’s dire warnings, which do not cite any supporting data, represent a selective reading of the available evidence around marijuana legalization.
The resolution asserts, for example, that marijuana “is a ‘gateway’ drug, and research shows that four out of ten regular marijuana users go on to experiment with other drugs,” claiming—apparently inaccurately—that drug overdoses “have been the leading cause of injury and death in Ohio” since 2007. It says that “33,000 Ohioans have died of drug overdoses between 2011 and 2020.”
According to Ohio’s Department of Health, however, COVID-19 has so far killed more than 42,000 people in the state.
New Interactive Federal Map Shows How States Rely On Marijuana Tax Revenue To Fund Public Services
A new map published by the U.S. Census Bureau details the proportion of state revenue made up by marijuana tax money, and in some cases, the figures are eye-popping.
In Oregon, for example, roughly $1 in every $20 the state made during some recent time periods came from legal cannabis transactions. According to the federal data, marijuana taxes comprised 4.67 percent of Oregon’s total revenue in the first quarter of fiscal year 2023, 4.7 percent in the first quarter of 2022 and 5.21 percent in the third quarter of 2021.
While Oregon by far relied heaviest on marijuana tax dollars, other states—including Michigan, Illinois, Alaska and Colorado—consistently saw marijuana revenue make up at least 1 percent of state income over the past two years.
Fentanyl’s littlest victims: Dozens of babies, toddlers die in Missouri and Kansas
The boy’s tiny lifeless body lay on a bed last year inside a home along The Paseo. When Kansas City police officers found 2-year-old Cillian Miller in August 2022, he was wearing only a green T-shirt and was naked from the waist down. Most of his body was covered in a blanket except his feet, which were already discolored, court records show. Strewn throughout the home were new and used syringes, glass pipes and “multiple strips of foil with apparent burnt residue.” One pipe was left underneath a partially eaten McDonald’s cheeseburger on the dining room table. And somewhere inside that home, the child came across fentanyl. Tests would later show the little boy was yet another victim of the drug ravaging the nation and taking hundreds of lives in the Kansas City area. In KC, and across both Missouri and Kansas, dozens of little children have died from the illicit drug in the past three years, The Star has found in an ongoing investigation into the toll fentanyl has taken on our community. This report on our youngest victims launches an extensive project that will include community outreach and stories about the broader impact of fentanyl on the Kansas City area and the challenges of policing the problem. Unlike other drug crises, including crack, these children aren’t suffering from debilitating addictions because their parents were using; they are dying of actual fentanyl overdoses. The babies and toddlers — ages 4 and under — have come across the synthetic opioid and its residue in their homes, inside hotel rooms and even at a city park. Their deaths have largely gone unnoticed, ending up as statistics inside annual state reports on child deaths or in records kept by county medical examiners. Most of the attention on fentanyl has focused on teens or young adults and the awareness that “one pill can kill.”
Human Use Of Cannabis—For Food, Fiber And Psychoactive Effects—Stretches Back Millennia, New Report Says
A new paper in the European Journal for Chemistry traces the history of cannabis through “thousands of years of contact with mankind,” noting the plant’s legacy as a source of fiber, nutrition, medicine, spirituality and pleasure.
At the same time, it notes that cannabis “is perhaps one of the greatest controversies in contemporary humanity” and a key driver of the modern war on drugs.
The paper, “From ancient Asian relics to contemporaneity: A review of historical and chemical aspects of Cannabis,” was written by Gabriel Vitor de Lima Marques and Renata Barbosa de Olivera, of the pharmacy department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.
The cannabis plant appears to have first been used for its fiber, as a material for ropes and other manufactured goods, the authors wrote. Use of hemp fiber dates back to approximately 10,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia and to roughly 6,000 and 5,000 years ago in China and Kazakhstan, respectively.
Ancient peoples considered cannabis one of the five main grains, along with rice, soy, barley and millet, the paper continues. And once stalks were processed into hemp fibers, they became durable materials for ropes, sails and boat rigging, clothing, paper, animal husbandry and more.
“Used as a stunner to facilitate the capture of fish,” it says, “Cannabis is possibly the first plant to be cultivated for non-food purposes.”
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