Tag: war on drugs
Why Should a Drug be Illegal or Legal? Part Two: Harm to Others
Why Should a Drug be Illegal or Legal? Part One: Self-Harm
Why Should a Drug be Illegal or Legal? Part Three: Costs and Benefits of Implementing Drug Bans: Video Sources
I used to support legalizing all drugs. Then the opioid epidemic happened. German Lopez. 2017 9 12. Vox. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/20/15328384/opioid-epidemic-drug-legalization Dopesick Reinforces These Pernicious Misconceptions About Opioids, Addiction, and Pain Treatment Jacob Sullum. 2021 11 17. Reason. Two Courts Debunk Widely Accepted Opioid
Why Should a Drug be Illegal or Legal? Part Two: Harm to Others: Video Sources
Substance Use and Intimate Partner Violence: A Meta-Analytic Review 2016. Bryan M. Cafferky, Marcos Mendez, Jared R. Anderson, and Sandra M. Stith. Psychology of Violence. https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/59511278/Cafferky_201820190604-60960-qtu1qv-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1643220750&Signature=JmFWS~QkCg86Icul9oqw-3Sz9j5uO~LzKP~HsVRSKQtNbZcNthwDy3nCgpG9yKXqPN2J2hs4tBs5pXVaD7cqLr9OXk9MDuEs37O1A0-c1-ZxX7EWjD16pZdSF3uKci5vDn4Geu2DhSduZ-Jqd~qkfmjK~NJybrESL7vvuiyszzVMhd~XjwQUQKw-PDdYiOY8qMD4oA~ecbZKCSVF~Rmxm5aFaYmnHAtWJb6Xc221n2SG5db3vXeECkCW3Ym09t7YAkY2b-Sg~sjKhHe3vGbUVcPkSj3aMKjsjBuA~mGK6xynPEQkGlmRJ0Htg22yJsh02QBtbqf51KqlGMKsk0L4uA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA ALCOHOL USE IN FAMILY AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Ashlee Curtis et al. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1111/dar.12925 The Role of Illicit
Why Should a Drug be Illegal or Legal? Part One: Self-Harm: Video Sources
Comparative risk assessment of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and other illicit drugs using the margin of exposure approach Dirk W. Lachenmeier and Jurgen Rehm. 2015. Scientific Reports. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/ Margin of exposure European Food Safety Authority. https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/margin-exposure What Are Margin of Exposure (MOE) and
He Faces 10 Years to Life for Selling Pot, a Legal Business in Most States
“Jonathan Wall, a 26-year-old cannabis entrepreneur, has been confined at a federal supermax facility in Maryland for nearly 20 months, awaiting a May 2 trial that could send him to prison for life. Wall is accused of transporting more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana from California, where cannabis is legal for recreational use, to Maryland, which allows only medical use.
Wall’s case illustrates the draconian penalties that can still be imposed on people for selling pot at a time when most states have legalized marijuana businesses. As far as the federal government is concerned, all of those businesses are criminal enterprises. But depending on how federal prosecutors choose to exercise their discretion, selling pot can make you millions of dollars as a state-licensed supplier, or it can send you to prison for decades.”
‘This Is Crack 2.0’
“In 2018, the Trump administration issued an emergency order that would make it easier to prosecute people for selling so-called fentanyl analogues, drugs that share the same chemical structure of the powerful synthetic painkiller that has helped to fuel the nation’s opioid epidemic. Even as the Trump administration began embracing criminal justice reforms and opioid treatment elsewhere, the temporary order was part of a wider law-and-order crack down on new variations of the substance that had been flourishing in illegal drug markets.
The move was small, but significant. With little fanfare and debate, it gave federal prosecutors across the country sweeping new authority to charge people for federal drug crimes, triggering onerous mandatory minimums without the usual scientific process to determine whether the novel new drugs people peddled were even dangerous.
Yet, it wasn’t just a Trump phenomenon: On Thursday, Congress reauthorized the fentanyl copycat order for the sixth time — and the fifth time since Joe Biden’s inauguration — with broad bipartisan support, extending it to the end of this year. Instead of opposing the stricter enforcement, Biden favors making the order permanent — a move civil rights groups, public health researchers, criminal justice reform experts and other critics argue would further embolden federal law enforcement authorities and disproportionately affect low-income defendants of color. Opponents say it would usher in a remarkable change in drug law, one that criminalizes thousands of substances, some that haven’t even yet been developed, and set a precedent that could eventually extend to other drug categories.”
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“Federal authorities usually go through a multistep checklist to classify, or schedule, an individual drug into a certain category, which then determines how easily it can be researched and whether it merits criminal penalties. Some fentanyl analogues have already been individually tested and scheduled. But the 2018 order puts fentanyl copycats, which can include thousands of substances, into the government’s strictest drug control category — Schedule I, which also includes heroin, marijuana, LSD and ecstasy — without that scientific review. This represents the first time an entire category of drugs has been scheduled based on chemical structure alone.
In some cases, those fentanyl analogues can be more powerful than fentanyl, which is in the slightly less restrictive Schedule II category. But in other cases, analogues can be harmless or even potentially therapeutic. The FDA has testified that at least one new, potential overdose-reversal agent has fallen victim to the class-wide scheduling order.
Prosecutions for fentanyl-related substances soared during the Trump administration as the substance became more ubiquitous. The number of people prosecuted for and convicted of fentanyl-analogue crimes was nearly non-existent in 2016, but grew to 233 in 2019, according to data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Nearly 70 percent of those prosecutions targeted Black and Hispanic people, many of them street dealers rather than major drug kingpins, according to the government data.”
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“some defense lawyers worry the impact might be bigger than the data show. Based on her conversations with defense lawyers and independent research, Patricia Richman — national sentencing resource counsel at the Federal Public and Community Defenders, which represents indigent clients in federal cases — argues that many more people are likely being charged under the emergency order. Federal authorities have yet to release updated data on how the law has been used since 2020.”
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“Meanwhile, the opioid crisis has worsened: Drug overdose deaths have reached record levels, topping more than 100,000 in the 12 months ending in September 2021 with death rates among Black people catching up to rates among white people. By June of last year, synthetic opioids, which include fentanyl and related substances, accounted for 65 percent of all drug overdose deaths, representing a massive increase from just a few years earlier.”
The war on drugs puts a target on China
“The bulk of the illegal synthetic opioids that reach the U.S. are sourced in China by Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels. They buy from legitimate and illicit Chinese suppliers through “purchases made on the open market, smuggling chemicals hidden in legitimate commercial shipments,” the 2020 DEA National Drug Threat Assessment noted.
Successful bilateral cooperation in combating the fentanyl flow peaked in May 2019 when Xi responded to U.S. pressure by making all forms of fentanyl subject to production controls and anti-trafficking measures. That prompted a drastic reduction in direct shipments of fentanyl and related compounds from China.
But Mexican cartels and their Chinese suppliers quickly pivoted to the export and processing of unregulated chemicals that can be processed into synthetic opioids. The Chinese government moved to block that trade in June by adding six fentanyl precursor chemicals to the list of substances requiring government approval. Chinese suppliers responded by marketing the unregulated raw materials for precursors.
“Drug trafficking organizations adapted to the PRC’s [regulatory controls] of all fentanyl-related substances, and now appear to have increased the purchase of fentanyl precursors from the PRC to manufacture fentanyl in Mexico, indicating a pronounced shift in how fentanyl is trafficked into the United States,” a State Department spokesperson told POLITICO.
The response from Chinese chemical producers and exporters underscores the challenges of regulatory fixes that don’t keep up with the ability of the industry to skirt those laws.
“[Chinese suppliers] are acting like water, they’re just finding the gaps and cracks in the law,” said Bryce Pardo, drug policy researcher at RAND Corp. “They have gone on to [synthetic opioid component chemicals] that are used in all sorts of other medications and other commercial applications that can never be controlled because it would be way too burdensome for industry and genuine consumption purposes to control these other kinds of chemicals.”
On the Hill, China’s role as a drug chemical supplier for illicit synthetic opioids has become a political lightning rod, particularly for lawmakers from states such as Ohio that are suffering soaring increases in synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths.”
Cops Thought Sand From Her Stress Ball Was Cocaine. She Spent Nearly 6 Months in Jail.
“Add stress balls to the list of innocuous items that have landed innocent citizens in jail due to shoddy police work and unreliable drug field tests.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled last week that two Atlanta police officers are not entitled to qualified immunity from a civil lawsuit brought against them by Ju’zema Goldring for malicious prosecution. Goldring says the officers falsely accused her of jaywalking and cocaine trafficking, based on a field test of a powdery substance inside a stress ball she had in her purse.
Goldring spent nearly six months in the Fulton County jail because she couldn’t afford bail and told local news outlet NBC 46 that she was occasionally put in solitary confinement. What’s more, she was left in jail for four months after a crime lab concluded that the mysterious powder was sand, not cocaine.
According to the 11th Circuit’s opinion, Atlanta police officers Vladimir Henry and Juan Restrepo stopped Goldring on October 10, 2015, for allegedly jaywalking. Goldring claims she wasn’t jaywalking. In any case, the officers took Goldring to the police station and proceeded to cut open a stress ball they found in her purse and test the powdery substance inside using a Nark II field test for drugs.
As Reason reported earlier this year, such drug field test kits are manufactured by several different companies and are used by police departments and prison systems across the country. The test kits use instant color reactions to indicate the presence of certain compounds found in illegal drugs, but those same compounds are also found in dozens of known licit substances. And although the tests are fairly simple to use, they’re still prone to user error and misinterpretation.”