10 Million Americans Busted for Pot: Enough is Enough

[dreamdancer]

What would cops do without weed? For one thing, they'd sure spend a lot less time arresting and processing petty pot violators. How much time? For starters, however long it took to bust the estimated 739,000 Americans arrested for minor pot possession in 2006.

That's according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, which reported last week that a record 829,625 Americans were arrested for violating marijuana laws last year. Of those arrested, 89 percent of those were charged with simple pot possession -- the highest annual total ever recorded and nearly three times the number of citizens busted 15 years ago.

Yet to hear local law enforcement spin it, busting small-time potheads isn't their priority. The record number of busts, they claim, is simply a reflection that record numbers of Americans are now smoking pot.

But don't tell Drug Czar John Walters that. After all, the czar just claimed earlier this month -- at a press conference announcing the release of the federal Office of Applied Studies (OAS) 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health -- that pot use has been declining for the better part of the past five years.

Predictably, both the cops and the drug czar are playing fast and loose with the facts. Yes, in fact more Americans are now admittedly consuming pot today than in 1991 (so much for the past 15 years of the so-called "war on drugs"), but this increase is hardly proportional to the dramatic spike in overall pot arrests.

As for Walter's comments, while the survey did indeed report a minor decline in adolescents' self-reported use of pot, it further reported a minor uptick in the total number of Americans who report using marijuana regularly, from 14.6 million in 2005 to 14.8 million in 2006.

Of course, a less than 2 percent increase in pot users from '05 to '06 doesn't explain why pot arrests jumped more than five percent from a then-record 786,545 to today's total. Or why the overall number of annual pot arrests has gone up every consecutive year but two for the past 16 years.

Perhaps the explanation is two-fold. It's plausible that the federal government is -- and always has -- greatly underestimated the number of Americans who use pot. (Does anyone really believe that cops are busting -- on average -- five percent of all pot smokers each year?) It's also plausible that an outgrowth of the ever-growing number of cops on the street (and citizens' increasing number of interactions with them) is inevitably leading to more and more pot arrests. However, regardless of the explanation, it seems remiss for police and politicians not to acknowledge this growing trend and its burdensome fiscal and perhaps even cultural implications.

The bottom line: Since 1990 over 10.4 million Americans -- predominantly young people under age 30 -- have been busted for pot. Thousands have been disenfranchised, tens of thousands have been unnecessarily sent to "drug treatment," hundreds of thousands have lost their eligibility for student aid, and perhaps an entire generation (or two) has been alienated to believe that the police are an instrument of their oppression rather than their protection. These are the tangible results of the government's stepped up war on pot -- results that go beyond the FBI's record numbers, and it's high time that politicians and the general public began taking notice.

http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/63988/

 

[PazVerdeRadical]

you see 10 million victims, they see 10 million "clients"

 

[SmokeyPufmaster]

Yea how else they gonna fill that empty prison space they keep building. It's another money making operation, why stop it.

 

[nycdfan042]

^^ yea dont the governt ment need like 40K a year to keeep a prisoner in jail?? so it costs the state 40k per head a year to keep him in jail. i read that somewhere....it actually costs the state money to keep em in jail.....that just blows my mind....24 hr world of liqur guns hoookers coke n death.....on a masive scale...were just ****n ****ed thats all....they dont want us growing plants worth as much as gold per ounce..thats another question..lets say its legal tomorrow....well what does that do to the price of quality ganja?? wil there be big large corpo nazi scum names like marlboro dank and merritt chronic filtered lights...??? if so id rather keep it illegal

 

[SmokeyPufmaster]

I know one thing marlboro and the like would certainly add additives to help ruin our health and keep us addicted. Everything's money, not a damn thing funny.

 

[Chamba]

here's an interesting article about drugs in the US I read in the slate.com

it's an online news magazine with lots of interesting articles

http://www.slate.com/id/2175730/entry/2175732/

jurisprudence: The law, lawyers, and the court.
American Lawbreaking
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12345from: Tim Wu
(Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who Controls the Internet?)

That Other Drug Legalization Movement
Posted Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007, at 8:03 AM ET

The motto of the Web site Erowid Experience Vaults is "You Cannot Deny the Experiences of Others." Erowid is the Web's best known site for recording drug experiences. Thousands of contributors describe in vivid detail their experiences with this or that pharmaceutical, creating something like a Zagat Guide for the discriminating drug user.

Erowid makes for an engaging read, if you've ever wondered what taking PCP is like ("began to feel weird. … my head detached and wriggled itself backward through some plants"). There are some surprises, such as the commonly noted observation that heroin is "overrated." But what's particularly interesting about the Experience Vaults is how many of the drugs reviewed there aren't actually classic "illegal drugs," like heroin or cocaine, but rather pharmaceuticals, like Clonazepam.

That's because over the last two decades, the pharmaceutical industry has developed a full set of substitutes for just about every illegal narcotic we have. Avoiding the highly charged politics of "illegal" drugs, the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, and citizens have thus quietly created the means for Americans to get at substitutes for almost all the drugs banned in the 20th century. Through the magic of tolerated use, it's actually the other drug legalization movement, and it has been much more successful than the one you read about in the papers.

Since 1970 and the beginning of Nixon's war on drugs, the Justice Department has regulated drugs likely to be abused under the Controlled Substances Act, which categorizes such drugs into five "Schedules." Those in Schedule I—the most tightly controlled—are supposed to have a "high potential for abuse," and "no currently accepted medical use in treatment." These drugs cannot be prescribed by a doctor. Those in Schedules II through V can be prescribed, and that is what makes all the difference.

Since the beginning of the war on drugs, the "formal" drug decriminalization movement has focused on trying to change the status of marijuana, often through state referendums. While in the late 1970s and late 1990s advocates were quite hopeful, the extent of real legal change they've achieved must be described as relatively minor. Certainly, several states have passed medical marijuana laws, which provide doctors and patients with an immunity when the drug is used for medical purposes. And some cities, like Seattle, do not arrest people for possessing small amounts. But there's been no significant change in federal drug laws, or in the political conversation surrounding them, in decades. A leading presidential candidate from either party endorsing a "free weed" movement seems unimaginable. And beyond marijuana, the drug legalization movement barely even makes an effort.

That's why drug legalization is happening in a wholly different way. Over the last two decades, the FDA has become increasingly open to drugs designed for the treatment of depression, pain, and anxiety—drugs that are, by their nature, likely to mimic the banned Schedule I narcotics. Part of this is the product of a well-documented relaxation of FDA practice that began under Clinton and has increased under Bush. But another part is the widespread public acceptance of the idea that the effects drug users have always been seeking in their illicit drugs—calmness, lack of pain, and bliss—are now "treatments" as opposed to recreation. We have reached a point at which it's commonly understood that when people snort cocaine because they're depressed or want to function better at work, that's drug trafficking; but taking antidepressants for similar purposes is practicing medicine.

This other drug legalization movement is an example of what theorists call legal avoision. As described by theorist Leon Katz, the idea is to reach "a forbidden outcome … as a by-product of a permitted act." In a classic tax shelter, for instance, you do something perfectly legal (like investing in a business guaranteed to lose money) in order to reach a result that would otherwise be illegal (evading taxes). In the drug context, asking Congress to legalize cocaine or repeal the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 is a fool's errand. But it's far easier to invent a new drug, X, with similar effects to cocaine, and ask the FDA to approve it as a new antidepressant or anxiety treatment. That's avoision in practice.

Are the new pharmaceuticals really substitutes for narcotics? The question, of course, is what counts as a substitute, which can depend not just on chemistry but on how the drug in question is being used. But as a chemical matter the question seems simple: In general, pharmaceuticals do the same things to the brain that the illegal drugs do, though sometimes they do so more gently.

As many have pointed out, drugs like Ritalin and cocaine act in nearly the exact same manner: Both are dopamine enhancers that block the ability of neurons to reabsorb dopamine. As a 2001 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded, Ritalin "acts much like cocaine." It may go further than that: Another drug with similar effects is nicotine, leading Malcolm Gladwell to speculate in The New Yorker that both Ritalin and cocaine use are our substitutes for smoking cigarettes. "Among adults," wrote Gladwell, "Ritalin is a drug that may fill the void left by nicotine." Anecdotally, when used recreationally, users report that Ritalin makes users alert, focused, and happy with themselves. Or as one satisfied user reports on Erowid, "this is the closest pharmaceutical *high* to street cocaine that I have experienced." In the words of another, "I felt very happy, and very energetic, and I had this feeling like everything was right with the world."

The Ritalin/cocaine intersection is but one example. Other substitutes are opoid-based drugs available in somewhat legalized versions, with names like Vicodin and OxyContin.* Clonazepam and valium may not be exact substitutes for marijuana, but they all seem to attract users seeking the same mellowing effects and loss of some forms of anxiety. In short, the differences between pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs may ultimately be much more social than chemical.

So, as the FDA has licensed chemical substitutes for what were once thought to be dangerous drugs, does that mean roughly the same thing as the legalization of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin? Not exactly. Drugs prescribed are usually taken differently than recreational drugs, of course, even if at some level the chemical hit is the same. More broadly, the current program of drug legalization in the United States is closely and explicitly tied to the strange economics of the U.S. health-care industry. The consequence is that how people get their dopamine or other brain chemicals is ever more explicitly, like the rest of medicine, tied to questions of class.

Antidepressants and anxiety treatments aren't cheap: A fancy drug like Wellbutrin can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $2,400 a year. These drugs also require access to a sympathetic doctor who will issue a prescription. That's why, generally speaking, the new legalization program is for better-off Americans. As the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reports, rich people tend to abuse prescription drugs, while poorer Americans tend to self-medicate with old-fashioned illegal drugs or just get drunk.

The big picture reveals a nation that, let's face it, likes drugs: Expert Joseph Califano estimates that the United States, representing just 4 percent of the world's population, consumes nearly two-thirds of the world's recreational drugs. In pursuit of that habit, the country has, in slow motion, found ways for the better-off parts of society to use drugs without getting near the scary drug laws it promulgated in the 20th century. Our parents and grandparents banned drugs, but the current generation is re-legalizing them. That's why Rush Limbaugh, as a drug user, is in a sense a symbol of our times. He, like many celebrities, is a recovering addict. But with Limbaugh being somewhat outside of the 1960s drug culture, the medical marijuana movement was not for him. Instead, Limbaugh, the addicted culture warrior, has become the true poster child of the new drug legalization program.

 

[SmokeyPufmaster]

WOW! To sum that all up. It's all about money, not a damn thing funny.

Next to insurance companys, the pharmaceutical industry is the richest.

 

[Guest]

rush limbaugh what a scumbag junkhead...

 

[FRIENDinDEED]

well simply put, theyve got 10 million so far , so theyve got 10 BILLION more to go, gotta keep on growin' our sons and daughters need to be taught the truth about cannabis, and we need to pass the legacey of knowledge and truth along to them as a birth right. the information is there, medically , logicaly, legaly, historicly

far as i can see this thing has started, been going on for while now and its obvious they , just like we, are in it for the long haul. and honestly they cant win plain and simple.

 

[The Uncola]

Great Erowid article. Yep the fix is in so to speak, as Big Pharma attempts to make the classic "drugs of abuse" irrelevant by creating substitutes. Hasn't worked out that well with MJ though. Those prisons are going up so fast that it will take more than just unlucky potheads to fill them. I'm thinking of political dissidents at the moment.....

BTW, I've been to Kathmandu and the surrounding mountains and I highly recommend them!

 

[marx2k]

In the 40's, 50's, 60's, prisons would send prisoners to day labor. Chain gangs and such. It was a great thing for most farmers as they needed the cheap labor. So what ended up happening is was that more non-whites were arrested in order to fill that need.

We (America) need more individuals in prison especially NOW since all of the country is in desperate need of _legal_ cheap labor since Mexicans are being thrown out and business owners and property owners are getting fined for pandering to illegal immigrants (though that is being challenged in several states right now). So it's not surprising that prisons are being filled at a record rate.