Tag: the war on (some) drugs

Cops and Reporters Are Still Hyping the Halloween Threat Posed by Strangers With Cannabis Candy

It’s October, which means it is time for alarmist cops and credulous reporters to start warning parents about the purported menace of cannabis edibles in trick-or-treat bags. KSNT, the NBC affiliate in Topeka, Kansas, got a jump on that annual rite last month, when it amplified a “community advisory” from the St. Mary’s Police Department about “THC-infused gummies and snacks marketed to children ahead of the holidays.”

That framing is misleading in at least two ways. First, it assumes that producers of marijuana edibles that resemble popular candy brands are targeting children, who cannot legally buy such products even in states where adults can, as opposed to nostalgic grownups with a sweet tooth. Second, it implies that nefarious adults are apt to distribute THC treats on Halloween, requiring extra vigilance by parents who already worry about the danger allegedly posed by needles, glass shards, or poison that might be lurking in their kids’ candy hauls.

The KSNT story features a photograph of cannabis candy made in California, where medical marijuana was legalized in 1996, followed by recreational marijuana in 2016. At a glance, the package looks a lot like cherry-flavored Airheads Xtremes, a blatant trademark violation that surely is cause for concern at Perfetti Van Melle, which makes the genuine article. But the package carries several clues that the product is not intended for children. The front includes a “medicated candy” descriptor, along with a state-mandated cannabis label and a statement of THC content. A label on the back warns: “Contains Cannabis, A Schedule I Controlled Substance. Keep out of Reach of Children.”

KSNT nevertheless describes the product as “disguised THC candies.” Citing police, it says “the THC edibles are very dangerous in the hands of children and are disguised as popular brands such as Air Heads, Fruit Gushers, Sour Skittles, Sour Patch Kids, Buzzy Peaches and Cherry Blasters.” The implication is that the manufacturers want to trick kids into getting high, although it’s not clear why that would be a sensible business strategy. And while the reference to “the holidays” implies that the risk of dangerous confusion is especially acute around Halloween, the article cites no evidence to support that premise.

That’s par for the course with Halloween-related warnings about cannabis edibles, which police departments and news outlets have been issuing for many years despite a dearth of actual incidents involving malicious distribution of such products to children. “Doctors are warning about the risks of dangerous drugs being mistaken for candy,” WLS, the ABC affiliate in Chicago, reported last year. “Those incidents increase around Halloween, especially now with some drugs looking more and more like colorful treats.”

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US Signs Deal That Will Allow Military Deployments to Ecuador

The Biden administration has quietly struck a deal with Ecuador to deploy troops to the country and patrol the waters off its coast to combat drug cartels, the Washington Examiner reported on Friday.

Select members of Congress were informed of the agreements on Wednesday during a closed-door briefing with Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, who was in Washington to sign the deals.

The State Department did not publicize the agreements, but a State Department official confirmed the deals were signed in comments to the Examiner. The maritime deal will allow the US Coast Guard to patrol waters off Ecuador’s coast, an area where Colombian cartels transport cocaine.

The second agreement outlines the terms by which the US troops could be deployed to Ecuador, known as a status of forces agreement. The details of the agreement are not known, and it’s also unclear if it means a US troop deployment is imminent.

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California Governor Signs Bills To Let Doctors Prescribe Psilocybin And MDMA If They’re Federally Rescheduled And To Change Marijuana Testing Rules

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has signed a bill that would allow doctors to immediately start prescribing certain currently illicit drugs like psilocybin and MDMA if they’re federally rescheduled, and he also approved separate legislation to amend THC variance testing requirements for marijuana.

The governor signed off on the measures—which are just two of more than a dozen cannabis and drug policy reform proposals on his desk—on Saturday.

AB 1021, sponsored by Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks (D), Isaac Bryan (D) and Corey Jackson (D), says that, if the federal government reschedules any Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), California health professionals will automatically be able to legally prescribe and dispense it.

This could be especially relevant to the psychedelics psilocybin and MDMA, which have been designated as breakthrough therapies by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and are expected to be approved for medical use as early as next year.

Following a recent Phase 3 clinical trial, a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature last month found that treatment with MDMA reduced symptoms in patients with moderate to severe PTSD. The findings mean federal regulators could consider approving the drug for wider use as soon as next year.

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SEALs, Other Navy Special Warfare Troops To Be Randomly Tested For Performance Enhancing Drugs

The Naval Special Warfare (NSW) Command will begin randomly testing its personnel for performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), following allegations that such drugs are in widespread use among the Navy’s special warfare community.

Rear Adm. Keith Davids, the commander of NSW, announced the command will introduce incremental, random force-wide urinalysis testing starting in November.

“My intent is to ensure every NSW teammate operates at their innate best while preserving the distinguished standards of excellence that define NSW,” Rear Adm. Davids said in a Friday press statement.

NSW is most known for its Navy SEAL teams but the command is also responsible for training and deploying Special Warfare Combatant Crewmen and Explosive Ordnance Disposal technicians.

Illicit substances have been a persistent concern throughout the military, even in the special operations community. Some leaders have balked at testing regimens for performance-enhancing drugs because they are often highly specialized and costly and require contracting through a limited number of labs that do such work. The military services have done occasional tests when they perceive a problem with an individual service member, but they must get special permission from the Pentagon to do routine, random testing.

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Exclusive video captures smoke shop raid in Philadelphia

Authorities across the region are cracking down on illegal marijuana operations.

Law enforcement raided a total of five smoke shops in Philadelphia and South Jersey.

Police said some of the shops were allegedly selling to minors.

Only the Action News Investigative Team was there as officers with the Philadelphia Police’s Narcotics Unit raided a home and smoke shop on the 6000 block of Lansdowne Avenue in Overbook on Monday.

This shop was one of three in the city raided for allegedly selling illegal marijuana products.

The other two are on the 2200 block of South 21st Street in South Philadelphia and the 7900 block of Verree Road in Fox Chase.

Police took out boxes of evidence from the Overbrook shop, and two men were arrested and taken away in handcuffs.

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THE SCIENCE IS CLEAR: MARIJUANA IS SAFER THAN TOBACCO

Nearly twice as many Americans believe that smoking cigarettes is more hazardous to your health than smoking marijuana. They’re right.

Numerous studies assessing the long-term health impacts of cannabis smoke exposure belie the myth that marijuana is associated with the same sort of well established, adverse respiratory hazards as tobacco.

For example, federally funded research at the University of California, Los Angeles compared the lifetime risk of lung cancer among more than 2,000 long-term marijuana smokers, tobacco smokers, and non-smokers.

Investigators determined that those who regularly smoked cigarettes possessed a 20-fold higher lung cancer risk than non-smokers. Those who only smoked marijuana had no elevated risk.

“We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer,” the study’s lead author explained. “What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect.”

More recently, a team of health experts writing in the journal Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases reported that neither former nor current cannabis smoking “of any cumulative lifetime amount” was associated with COPD progression or development.

Other studies indicate that cannabis smoke and tobacco smoke aren’t equally carcinogenic and that subjects who exclusively smoke cannabis have less exposure to harmful toxicants and carcinogens than tobacco smokers. Some researchers have also theorized that cannabinoids’ anti-cancer activities may offset some of the harms otherwise associated with inhaling smoke.

According to the findings of recent paper published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, “It is increasingly clear that cannabis has different effects on lung function [compared] to tobacco and the effects of widespread cannabis use will not necessarily mirror the harms caused by tobacco smoking.”

A separate review paper, published recently by researchers affiliated with the University of Arkansas, is even more blunt. “The data on marijuana contrast starkly with the consistent demonstration of injury from tobacco, the greatest legalized killer in the world today,” they concluded. “Any possible toxicity of marijuana pales in comparison.”

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Despite Debunking, Rainbow Fentanyl Myths Continue

In 2022, fears erupted over “rainbow fentanyl,” brightly colored fentanyl pills that were said to be designed by drug traffickers to lure innocent children into taking opioids. Parents were warned to be on the watch for the pills—especially in their children’s Halloween candy stash.

A warning from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) released last August warned that the increasing presence of brightly colored pills “appears to be a new method used by drug cartels to sell highly addictive and potentially deadly fentanyl made to look like candy to children and young people.”

“Rainbow fentanyl—fentanyl pills and powder that come in a variety of bright colors, shapes, and sizes—is a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults,” added DEA Administrator Anne Milgram.

However, it was startlingly easy to debunk panic over rainbow fentanyl. As it turns out, drug dealers have plenty of willing adult customers. So why would these they try to lure children, a customer base with no money of their own? And why would dealers give away valuable stock to do so?

“I’m skeptical that [dealers] would try to target children where there is not an existing market,” Sally Satel, an addiction psychiatrist and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Reason‘s Lenore Skenazy in 2022. Considering the high risk of overdose in children, Satel added that “few would survive and come back for more.”

Just as there are adult reasons for vape companies to sell flavored vape pods, which were the subject of another panic, there are adult reasons for dealers to color their fentanyl—namely, to “brand [their] stuff.”

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Give Small Business a Fighting Chance Against Mega Marijuana

The SAFE(R) Banking Act vote and the Biden administration’s review of the federal status of marijuana have garnered headlines and applause from many drug reform advocates and cannabis industry leaders. But without congressional action to protect small businesses, federal marijuana reform threatens to give an unfair advantage to a handful of national corporations while hobbling thousands of local farmers and neighborhood shopkeepers.

Under current law, state-licensed marijuana companies are denied the use of basic financial services. That means no checking accounts, no tax credits, no small business loans. For the cannabis industry’s emerging billion-dollar corporations, that’s not a problem. They’re able to expand and gobble up smaller companies (and their licenses) using private equity money and funding rounds in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Small businesses can’t compete on that scale. Unless Congress acts, the Biden administration’s plan to merely reschedule marijuana is likely to supercharge the rise of national cannabis conglomerates while strangling local community-scale businesses.

This should be a bipartisan win-win. Support for small business and marijuana legalization are two rare issues where Republican and Democratic voters find common ground. A recent Gallup poll found Republican support for legalization now tops 51 percent, while 81 percent of Democrats want to end pot prohibition. Both parties compete to be seen as the one true BFF of Main Street mom-and-pops.

And yet party leaders on both sides are poised to embrace a lose-lose. In a study recently published by Ohio State University’s Drug Enforcement and Policy Center, we found that America’s $26 billion legal cannabis industry is quickly consolidating into the hands of a few well-financed national players. In 2018, the seven largest multistate cannabis companies accounted for only 3 percent of the legal industry’s annual revenue. By the end of 2022, that share had grown to nearly 18 percent.

If the trend continues, the cannabis industry might soon resemble America’s beer industry: a market dominated by a handful of global corporations with small businesses competing for an ever-shrinking slice of the pie.

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The Truth About Ron DeSantis’ Fentanyl Horror Story

The second Republican debate of the 2024 presidential campaign cycle took place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Wednesday, and at various points throughout the night the topic turned to drug policy.

The candidates argued over the proliferation of fentanyl—the synthetic opioid significantly more potent than morphine or heroin that is often found mixed with other narcotics purchased on the black market. Specifically, the candidates squabbled over who would most aggressively weaponize the military and federal power in an attempt to prevent illicit fentanyl from reaching American shores.

Some of the candidates deployed anecdotes gleaned from the campaign trail of people whose loved ones died of fentanyl overdoses in order to justify increasingly oppressive drug policy. But Gov. Ron DeSantis’s example is much more complicated than he let on.

“In Florida, we had an infant, 18 months [old],” DeSantis said. “Parents rented an Airbnb, and apparently the people that had rented it before were using drugs. The infant was crawling, the toddler was crawling on the carpet and ingested fentanyl residue and died. Are we just going to sit here and let this happen, this carnage happen in our country? I am not going to do that.” As he has in the past, DeSantis used the story to illustrate the need for tougher drug and immigration policy, up to and including shooting people as they cross the border with Mexico.

DeSantis’s campaign did not respond to a clarifying question by press time, but he seemed to be referring to Enora Lavenir, the 19-month-old daughter of a French couple vacationing in Wellington, a small Florida town near West Palm Beach. The Lavenirs rented a four-bedroom house through Airbnb, where on August 7, 2021, Enora’s mother Lydie Lavenir found her unconscious and foaming at the mouth. Paramedics rushed the girl to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Last year, the Lavenirs filed a wrongful death suit against Airbnb, the property’s owners, and the most recent previous renter. The lawsuit has since been amended to add additional defendants including HomeAway, the parent company of Vrbo, another home-rental service through which the prior tenant rented the house. According to the lawsuit, “the medical examiner detected a lethal level of Fentanyl in Enora’s blood and determined that her cause of death was acute Fentanyl toxicity. Toxicology readings indicated a quick death, ruling out the possibility that Enora came into contact with Fentanyl anywhere else but in the Airbnb rental.”

Contrary to DeSantis’s statement at the debate, the lawsuit does not claim that Enora was “crawling on the carpet and ingested fentanyl residue.” In fact, the suit does not speculate exactly how Enora came into contact with the drug; it merely alleges that Airbnb and Vrbo have “known for years that drug use is prevalent in [their] properties” and “that drugs, paraphernalia, and residue are frequently left behind in rentals, that there is a substantial risk of them being left behind, and that when they are left behind they pose a fatal risk to future guests, including children and infants.”

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