Ryan Cooper

This is the tyrannical injustice from the Obama administration that I find most inexplicable:

Got a cold, and can't be bothered to jump through the increasingly obnoxious hoops to get some cold medicine? Witness this awesome paper from, apparently, the Journal of Apocryphal Chemistry: A novel and straightforward synthesis of pseudoephidrine from readily available N-methylamphetamine is presented. This practical synthesis is expected to be a disruptive technology replacing the need to find an open pharmacy. Nice to know that good old American spirit of innovation is still alive and well.

Check it out: Obviously not nearly enough policy-wise, but rhetoric-wise he's miles away from the drug warrior frame. From here it's only a short step to evidence-based, rather than punishment-based, drug strategy.

Half of America now supports legalizing pot. That number exceeds the approval ratings of President Obama, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and every GOP candidate running for president. -- Radley Balko .

I'd like to codify my idea to de-Schedule I the psychedelics.  The characteristics for Schedule I are as follows: 1) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse. 2) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States. 3) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision. The first qualification is preposterous for every major psychedelic save perhaps ketamine, which is already Schedule III anyway.  This should be obvious.  The minor ones (such as 5-MeO-DMT) are basically unknown in the literature, but that shouldn't give the DEA license to schedule as they see fit.  If you look at their declarations ( see here for example), they usually use new drugs' similarity to existing badly-scheduled drugs as evidence toward putting them in Schedule I (by the transitive property of bullshit ). The DEA, like police organizations everywhere, tends to try and maxi...

As per my earlier post on Terry Pratchett's wrenching, moving documentary, here's Dr. Stephen Ross on the end of life: Today I want to talk about a project of ours at NYU using psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy to treat end-of-life distress in people with cancer. I also want to talk about where Americans die—generally, I think we die in the wrong place in this country—and about the domains of palliative care and what that means. Additionally, I want to discuss spirituality and the phenomenology and prevalence of end-of-life distress and the link between spiritual states as potential buffers against end-of-life distress and psilocybin as a potential modality for increasing spiritual states in patients coping with such distress. This is via Bob Jesse , a researcher on psilocybin, who posts over at the RBC.  I find it interesting how that is Mark Kleiman's home as well—for those of you don't know, Kleiman is sort of the resident drug policy concern troll, a reliable ant...

Watch the full episode . See more Ken Burns. The whole prohibition era raises some interesting questions.  There's the obvious comparison to the current war on drugs, but I'd like to set that aside for a moment.  Consider just pharmacological properties.  Conventional people react with stunned disbelief if you rate alcohol's effects as comparable to that of other "hard" drugs.  The reasoning seems to be that since alcohol is legal, then there must be some kind of medical rationale behind it. That is, of course, utterly bogus.  Alcohol is one of the more dangerous drugs—serious abuse can damage nearly every major body system , while just the other month the Lancet rated alcohol as the worst drug in existence .  And yet, somehow modern countries seem to handle widespread alcohol consumption without societal collapse.  The reason is entirely biological coincidence.  Alcohol doesn't deserve its own category as the moronic "drugs and alcohol" ph...

Watch the full episode . See more Ken Burns. This is a great series so far.

Interesting throughout : My primary research field is cancer drugs, but my teaching brings me into the realm of drugs of abuse, simply because so many of those drugs are naturally-occurring. So, my views must be taken in that perspective. In the US, I think that it is morally difficult to justify the legality of addictive drugs like alcohol and tobacco while restricting other psychoactive compounds. I do not advocate for other drugs to be used recreationally. I just feel that US laws need to be consistent. Our experiment with criminalizing alcohol was an abysmal failure that fostered organized crime. Our continued experiment with criminalizing other drugs has been equally a failure. However, I am very much against a libertarian argument that society should be free to determine what they want because, frankly, many drugs impair one's decision-making ability. But I like your question: many drugs declared illegal for recreational use are among the most useful therapeutics for pain, ...

Ezra Klein asks a question : The Global Commission on Drug Policy recently reported back. What it said was what most everyone who's looked into this issue already knew: "The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world." A new approach, one based more on realistic interventions than martial metaphors, is needed. The news, however, was who was saying this: Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. Former secretary of state George P. Schultz. Former president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardozo. Former secretary-general of the United Nations Kofi Annan. Former president of Switzerland Ruth Dreifuss. And many more important "formers." So here's my question: What alignment of political forces and events would be needed for America to seriously rethink its drug laws? Would it have to begin in the states? Is it something a law-and-order Republican needs to do? The last few years has seen a ...

Mark Kleiman reasserts his role as the resident drug policy concern troll: The grandiloquently-named Global Commission on Drug Policy has issued its final press release report. Not a new idea to be found; just recycled legalization talking points. Not surprising, with a commission long on celebrity but short on relevant expertise and a staff of “advisers” drawn entirely from within the “drug policy reform” cocoon. I wouldn’t mention it, except an academic colleague asked me at lunch Friday about the “new United Nations report about the failure of the war on drugs,” and a Canadian network called and asked me to join in a debate on the report (invitation withdrawn after they asked me whether I was for or against decriminalization and I answered simply “No”). So it looks as if the decision to put resources into press relations rather than analysis has paid off. This is a petty and irritating misrepresentation of the report. Let's take a look at the executive summary:...

From wandering Mike Powell, here's a great look at the coca leaf: The coca leaf has been an integral part of Andean culture for centuries. It’s sacred among indigenous people (consider my hot dog example, but with “communion wafers”). Coca has important medical properties, such as fighting altitude sickness, especially useful to those living in the mountains. Since pre-Incan times, the coca leaf has been used in religious ceremonies, brewed into teas, and chewed as a mild stimulant. A stimulant about on the same level as coffee. But then Europeans “discover” South America, rush in, rape the Andean nations of their natural resources, murder and enslave its indigenous people, and install themselves as kings and presidents. And then, just to further piss on an already humiliated people, they take the Andes’ most important and sacred plant, and figure out how to distill cocaine from it. After discovering that their new drug can be deadly, they freak out and declare that cocaine mus...

Morphine   Yglesias was talking about Michael Gerson being a obnoxious moral scold the other day and how he seems to be saying that alcohol should be (re)banned.  He's right, Gerson is a clown.  But his post contained this introduction: I suppose you could talk me out of this view, but it seems to me that the costs of full heroin legalization would far exceed the benefits. There’s a lot wrong with America’s current drug policies, but it’s also good that we don’t have heroin ads on Saturday morning cartoons, there’s no Heroin Lobby on the Hill, and you can’t buy heroin at the 7-11. That all seems pretty clear cut to me. It's worth going back to look at 19th century America, when basically all opiates were legal. This is from the Consumer's Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs , for my money still the best single overview of the drug issue: The United States of America during the nineteenth century could quite properly be described as a "dope...

I think that, on balance, Obama has been a relatively decent president, especially compared to the possible alternative.  But it's important to point out when he flagrantly breaks promises, like his basically complete embrace of the Bush security state .  In that same vein, this is absolutely despicable : Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, but that has not stopped a fuzzy industry of marijuana farms and dispensaries from rising to serve the 15 states that allow the drug to be used for medical purposes. Under President Obama, the federal government had seemed to make a point of paying little attention — until now. As some states seek to increase regulation but also further protect and institutionalize medical marijuana, federal prosecutors are suddenly asserting themselves, authorizing raids and sending strongly worded letters that have cast new uncertainty on an issue that has long brimmed with tension between federal and state law. This has been building for som...

Speaking of the war on drugs, Yglesias (ironically enough), pivoting off a post on the economics of prostitution, lays out a fundamental difference between the technocratic- and the moral-minded: ...a big part of the point of prostitution prohibition laws is to express social disapproval of prostitutes and prostitution . Indeed, people seem generally quite unconcerned about whether prostitution is occurring someplace out of sight and out of mind. But they want to reserve the right to strongly disapprove of both the prostitution and especially the prostitutes. You can analogize a person who engaged in a form of sexual or commercial conduct of which you disapprove by referring to that person as a “whore.” It’s an insult. Its insult status reflects and upholds a social consensus that whores are bad people, not just that whoring is a kind of undesirable nuisance. In conversations with conservatives about the war on drugs, the debate often runs aground on precisely this territory. A drug...

One area where I part company with the likes of Yglesias, Mark Kleiman, and (apparently) Josh Marshall, is their unfortunate paternalistic tendencies.  It must be said that this kind of view is fairly common amongst the liberal intelligentsia, and is something I find really irritating.  It's wishy-washy, it's incoherent, and it's very often passive-aggressive.  Marshall provides the latest example : More generally though, I just don't know if I think marijuana should be legalized at all. Maybe it's that I'm getting into my 40s. And maybe I'm a hypocrite. I of course know people who smoke grass. And I don't have any problem with it. Decriminalized? Yes, I think probably so. But that's not the same as legalization. It's very different actually. And let me be clear that I think our drug laws are catastrophic. They create endemic violence first in our major cities and now along the borders and it's led to generations of Americans rotting in pris...

I don't have much to add on who to vote for in the coming election that isn't probably mostly encapsulated by the letter next to their name on the ballot.  I do, however, want to strongly encourage California voters to vote YES on Proposition 19.  It's high time we had a dramatic confrontation over drug policy, and the fact that Mark Kleiman is in full concern troll mode over it is only a good sign.  Nicholas Kristof is making sense here : I dropped in on a marijuana shop here that proudly boasted that it sells “31 flavors.” It also offered a loyalty program. For every 10 purchases of pot — supposedly for medical uses — you get one free packet. “There are five of these shops within a three-block radius,” explained the proprietor, Edward J. Kim. He brimmed with pride at his inventory and sounded like any small buinessman as he complained about onerous government regulation. Like, well, state and federal laws. But those burdensome regulations are already evaporating i...

Radley Balko had an interesting essay in Reason the other day about too much democracy in the justice system: In 1970 one in 400 American adults was behind bars or on parole . As of 2008, the number was one in 100 . Add in probation, and it's one in 31. The number of people behind bars for drug crimes has soared from 40,000 in 1980 to about half a million today. States today spend one of every 15 general fund dollars on maintaining their prisons. According to the King's College World Prison Population List (PDF), the U.S. is home to 5 percent of the world's population but nearly a fourth of its prisoners. Judging by these official numbers, America's incarceration rate leads the developed world by a large margin, although it's doubtful that authoritarian regimes such as China's are providing accurate data, especially about political prisoners. But among liberal democracies, the competition isn't even close: As of 2008, the U.S. incarceration rate was ...

When I was in high school, I was heavily into the anti-tobacco movement. It was a founding time for me, and though I don't regret those days (tobacco companies did and do things that are utterly reprehensible), my thinking has definitely evolved considerably since then. I think that what started as a legitimate campaign against sleazebag advertising and murderous delaying tactics of tobacco companies has gradually taken a sheen of moral disapproval of all tobacco use, smoking or no, and I believe free adults should be allowed to poison themselves in whatever way(s) they see fit. (It's an extreme view, I suppose, but lets set that aside for now.) However, smoking still remains about the only form of drug use where one can passively kill innocent bystanders. Thus—though I think it has gone a bit far in some places—I understand and basically support regulations restricting smoking in public places. But that argument does not apply to non-smoking forms of tobacco like dip (...