Tag: the war on (some) drugs

New Hampshire House Passes Bill to Legalize Marijuana With No Taxation or Regulation

Last Thursday, the New Hampshire House passed a bill that would legalize marijuana for adults in the state, despite ongoing federal cannabis prohibition. Unlike most legalization efforts, the bill would not create any tax or regulatory program.

Rep. Kevin Verville (R) and three fellow Republicans introduced House Bill 360 (HB360) on Jan. 9. The legislation would remove marijuana from the state’s list of banned substances and strike provisions in current law that refer to criminal penalties for cannabis-related offenses. The proposed law would not create any kind of tax or regulatory program for marijuana. It would effectively become legal to possess, cultivate, buy, and sell cannabis just like tomatoes.

People under 18 in possession of marijuana would be subject to a substance misuse assessment. People between 18 and 21 would face a violation for simple possession, effectively decriminalizing marijuana for that age group.

The bill includes provisions to allow people with past marijuana convictions to have their records expunged.

On March 16, the House rejected the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee’s “inexpedient to legislate” report by a 210-160 vote, and then passed HB360 on a voice vote.

The House has also passed a bill that would legalize marijuana with a regulatory and tax structure for commercial sales and cultivation.

Verville called his approach “simple” and “short.”

“When bills get complicated and they get long and they get confused, people vote against them,” he told Marijuana Moment. “This is the shortest, easiest way to affect the change that the majority of our constituents want—and that is the legalization of cannabis.”

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The growing Chinese investment in illegal American weed

A few days before Christmas, a joint law enforcement task force found nearly 9,000 pounds of cannabis worth almost $15 million during a raid in a suburban neighborhood in Antioch, Calif.

The California Department of Cannabis Control believes that the four houses searched in the bedroom community 45 minutes outside San Francisco were linked to China.

Mexican cartels have a long history of importing, growing and redistributing illicit cannabis in the United States. But Chinese investors, owners and workers have emerged in recent years as a new source of funding and labor for illegal marijuana production.

What is known — from interviews with state law enforcement officials, experts on the international drug trade, economists and lawmakers — is that the number of farms funded by sources traceable back to Chinese investors or owners has skyrocketed. Chinese owners and workers have become a larger presence at illegal grows in Oklahoma, California and Oregon, they say.

In Oklahoma, close to 3,000 of the state’s nearly 7,000 licensed marijuana farms have been flagged for suspicious activity by law enforcement over the last year. Those operations are now being investigated for obtaining their licenses fraudulently and/or for selling into the illicit market, according to Mark Woodward, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

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The DOJ Says Marijuana Use, Which Biden Thinks Should Not Be a Crime, Nullifies the Second Amendment

President Joe Biden thinks it is unfair that people convicted of simple marijuana possession face lingering consequences for doing something that he says should not be treated as a crime. Biden cited those burdens last October, when he announced a mass pardon of low-level federal marijuana offenders, which he said would help “thousands of people who were previously convicted of simple possession” and “who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities as a result.” Yet the Biden administration, which recently began accepting applications for pardon certificates aimed at ameliorating those consequences after dragging its feet for five months, is actively defending another blatantly unjust disability associated with cannabis consumption: the loss of Second Amendment rights.

Under federal law, it is a felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, for an “unlawful user” of a “controlled substance” to possess firearms. The ban applies to all cannabis consumers, even if they live in one of the 37 states that have legalized medical or recreational use. That disability, a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled last month, is not “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”—the constitutional test established by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The Justice Department recently filed a notice indicating that it intends to appeal the decision against the gun ban for marijuana users.

The Biden administration’s defense of the ban relies on empirically and historically dubious assertions about the sort of people who deserve to exercise the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Among other things, the Justice Department argues that “the people” covered by the Second Amendment do not include Americans who break the law, no matter how trivial the offense. It also argues that marijuana users are ipso facto untrustworthy and unvirtuous, which it says makes them ineligible for gun rights.

According to the Biden administration, the original understanding of the right to arms included exceptions broad enough to encompass people who consume any intoxicant that legislators might one day decide to prohibit. It says the law criminalizing gun possession by cannabis consumers is analogous to laws targeting “intoxicated” people who carry guns in public places.

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Massachusetts’ Tobacco Ban Went as Badly as You’d Expect

In November 2019, Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to ban the sale of all flavored tobacco and nicotine products, including flavored electronic cigarettes and menthol cigarettes. Four additional states have since imposed flavor bans on some products and similar policies are under consideration in many other jurisdictions. Such bans are popular among legislators and anti-smoking groups, but the latest data from Massachusetts highlight the ban’s unintended consequences. The state’s experiment in prohibition has led to thriving illicit markets, challenges for law enforcement, and prosecution of sellers.

Massachusetts’ Multi-Agency Illegal Tobacco Task Force publishes an annual report providing insight into how the state’s high taxes and flavor prohibitions affect the illicit market. As opponents of the flavor ban predicted, the law has incentivized black market sales of menthol cigarettes and flavored e-cigarettes (“ENDS,” or “electronic nicotine delivery systems,” in the parlance of regulators). “The Task Force identifies the cross-border smuggling of untaxed flavored ENDS products, cigars, and menthol cigarettes as the primary challenge for tobacco enforcement in the Commonwealth,” according to the report. “Inspectors and investigators are routinely encountering or seizing menthol cigarettes, originally purchased in surrounding states, and flavored ENDS products and cigars purchased from unlicensed distributors operating both within and outside the Commonwealth.”

The Massachusetts Department of Revenue reports conducting more than 300 seizures in FY 2022, compared to 170 in 2021 and just 10 in 2020. Many of these involve substantial amounts of products and missed tax revenue. For example, a single search warrant yielded “a large quantity of untaxed ENDS products, [other tobacco products], and Newport Menthol cigarettes affixed with New Hampshire excise tax stamps” representing an estimated $940,000 in unpaid excise taxes.

Revenue officials are seizing so many illicit products, in fact, that they are running out of room to store them. The “Task Force’s increased investigative and enforcement activities during the past year have led to the seizure of large quantities of illegal tobacco products, resulting in a strain on the Task Force’s storage capacity,” says the report. But fear not, they are working on leasing additional space “that will significantly increase storage capacity and allow for continued increased enforcement.”

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Vermont Bill Would Legalize Psilocybin Despite Federal Prohibition

A bill filed in the Vermont State House would legalize the use of psilocybin – the psychotropic substance in “magic mushrooms,” setting the stage to nullify federal prohibition of the same in practice and effect.
A coalition of 31 Democrats and one Republican led by Rep. Joseph Troiano (D) filed House Bill 371 (H371) on Feb. 24. The legislation would amend existing state law by removing criminal penalties for the “possessing, dispensing, or selling” of psilocybin. The bill would also establish a Psychedelic Therapy Advisory Working Group for continued research into the beneficial effects of psilocybin.

Psilocybin, often referred to as “magic mushrooms,” is a hallucinogenic compound found in certain mushrooms. A number of studies have shown psilocybin to be effective in the treatment of depression, PTSD, chronic pain and addiction. For instance, a Johns Hopkins study found that “psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer.”

Efforts to legalize psilocybin in Vermont follow a successful ballot measure that decriminalized a number of drugs, including heroin and cocaine in Oregon. In 2022, Colorado voters passed a ballot measure decriminalizing several naturally occurring psychedelic substances. At least 14 cities including Detroit, Michigan have decriminalized “magic mushrooms.”

Psychedelic decriminalization and legalization efforts at the state and local levels are moving forward despite the federal government’s prohibition of psilocybin and other psychedelic substances.

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Studies Link Marijuana Legalization to All Sorts of Positive Public Health Outcomes

Legalization linked to fewer suicides, traffic fatalities, and opioid deaths. A new paper on the public health effects of legalizing marijuana finds “little credible evidence to suggest that [medical marijuana] legalization promotes marijuana use among teenagers” and “convincing evidence that young adults consume less alcohol when medical marijuana is legalized.” And that’s just the start of the positive pot news contained in the paper, which was published this month in the Journal of Economic Literature.

The paper reviews previous research on the public health effects of legal weed, including studies published between 2013 and 2020.

These days, 36 states have legalized medical marijuana and 18 states have legalized recreational marijuana, study authors D. Mark Anderson and Daniel I. Rees note. This has spawned all sorts of concerns about potential public health issues, from promoting the use of marijuana—or other substances—among teenagers to worry about crime, traffic fatalities, and more. But across a range of measures, the evidence is inconclusive at worst and very often quite positive.

For instance: it becomes clear that medical marijuana laws aren’t driving an epidemic of marijuana use among minors. In fact, some researchers have even “found a negative association between [medical marijuana laws] and youth marijuana use.”

Likewise, a 2019 paper found recreational marijuana legalization associated “with an 8 percent decrease in the odds of any marijuana use among high school students and a 9 percent decrease in the odds of frequent marijuana use among high school students.”

Anderson and Rees suggest one possible explanation for the decreased use findings is that “it is more difficult for teenagers to access marijuana when drug dealers are replaced by licensed dispensaries that require proof of age.”

But some small studies have shown a correlation between recreational marijuana legalization and increased teen use. “Researchers will have to wait until more years of post-legalization data become available before drawing firm conclusions about the relationship between [recreational marijuana laws] and youth marijuana use,” the authors say.

The effect of legalization on adult marijuana use is also inconclusive. Using surveys that asked adults about their use, one study found “no evidence of a relationship between [medical marijuana laws] and marijuana consumption among adults,” while another found them associated with a 4–7 percent increase in past-month adult use and recreational legalization linked to a 30 percent increase in use.

Of course, data about the effect of legalization on adult use is complicated by the fact that legalization might make more people comfortable admitting marijuana use in surveys.

Anderson and Rees also say that it’s “difficult to gauge” the effect of marijuana legalization on opioid deaths and on several other public health measures, including mental health, traffic fatalities, workplace health, and crime. Still, there are a lot of positive indicators in the research.

The authors note that “several studies have produced credible evidence” that medical marijuana legalization may reduce the number of opioid-related deaths. However, one 2019 study “confirmed the negative association between legalization and opioid-related mortality…for the period 1999–2010, but found that this association became positive when data for the years 2011–17 were added to the analysis.” The authors suggest that this could be “due to the changing nature of the opioid epidemic. Perhaps marijuana and prescription pain medications are substitutes, but marijuana and heroin are not.”

Recent research on recreational marijuana legalization and opioid deaths has been promising. Another 2019 study found recreational legalization associated with a 14 percent decline in opioid-related deaths, and a 2020 study “found that the legalization of recreational sales was associated with a 16–21 percent decrease in opioid-related mortality.”

In addition, there is “strong evidence that legalizing marijuana discourages the use of alcohol, especially binge drinking.”

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Biden Admin Proposes New Rules That Would Make It Harder for Americans To Get Certain Medications

Telehealth’s days are numbered as the COVID-19 pandemic wanes, at least for powerful painkillers and medications prescribed to treat ADHD.

Changes to pandemic era telehealth guidelines have been proposed by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The proposal would require at least one physical visit to a doctor before patients could be prescribed opioids like OxyContin or Vicodin.

The rule change limiting telehealth prescriptions would also apply to attention deficit treatment drugs like Adderall and Ritalin.

The New York Post further reported:

The Biden administration moved Friday to require patients see a doctor in person before getting attention deficit disorder medication or addictive painkillers, toughening access to the drugs against the backdrop of a deepening opioid crisis.

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The Underground Abortion Pill Network Is Booming

At least 20,000 packets of abortion pills were shipped to people in the United States in the six months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, two sources with knowledge of the situation told VICE News. 

The suppliers of these estimated 20,000 packets are neither abortion clinics nor abortion telehealth organizations, but instead operate outside of the U.S. legal health care system. The demand for their pills, as well as their success at shipping them out undetected, are evidence of the thriving underground abortion network that has sprung up since Roe’s demise devastated access to abortion clinics. 

Meant to be used by people who want to induce their own abortions, these pills—and the people who supply them—are in a legal grey area. Self-managing an abortion is only banned in a few states, but experts have long warned that if a prosecutor is determined to press charges for it, they’ll find a way.

“People have always self-managed abortions and will always self-manage abortion. We’ll have to continue to fight back against all of the bans and restrictions that are being implemented on people,” said Christie Pitney, a licensed nurse practitioner, a midwife with Forward Midfwery, and co-founder of Abortion Freedom Fund, a fund for telehealth abortions. Referring to self-managed abortion, she added, “it’s just going to grow more and more.”

Pitney works with both Aid Access, an organization that mails abortion pills to states where abortion is legal, through providers like Pitney, and to states where it is not, through a doctor who is based overseas. When she started working at Aid Access, where she legally provides abortion pills to people in two states, Pitney estimated that she used to help roughly 60 people get access to abortion pills each month. Now, she said she helps “hundreds” per month.

“Those are specifically for myself, not even the whole organization,” said Pitney, who confirmed to VICE News that at least an estimated  20,000 abortion pills were shipped between the June 2022 Roe decision and December 2022. 

Aid Access is not one of the suppliers included in the 20,000 estimate, suggesting that the true number of abortion pills that have been mailed out through covert channels since the end of Roe is even higher. A recent study of Aid Access also found that the organization received almost three times as many requests for help after Roe was overturned, compared to before a draft of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe leaked in May 2022. The biggest increases in requests came from people in states that have banned abortion.

Since Roe’s demise, at least 13 states have enacted near-total abortion bans. Data from the Society of Family Planning found last year that, in the two months following Roe’s demise, there were 10,000 fewer in-clinic abortions in the U.S. 

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