Pee in this cup...

USA Today had two articles today both about drug testing and both by Donna Leinwand. The first features a New Jersey Principal extolling the effectiveness of testing students, while offering pretty poor examples.

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“Steffner says, she's a cheerleader for random drug testing of students. She tells other principals about the testing program she helped oversee for the past two years at Hackettstown High School, a 700-student campus in northern New Jersey.

During the program's first year, 10% of Hackettstown's students were tested randomly from a pool of students who took part in after-school activities or who drove to school. One student tested positive, she says. Last year, 25% of the students were screened. No one tested positive.” (From one positive to none, the war of drugs can be won)

“The results show testing deters teen drug use, Steffner says: "It works in the workplace and it works in the military. Why wouldn't it work in a school?"”

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Principal Steffner, how are your textbooks? Your teacher’s salaries? Your funding for after-school activities which have been shown to actually prevent drug use in the first place? Where did you gain this magical ability to rationalize causation without any evidence that it was this wholly intrusive policy that lead to a massive reduction in students use of drugs?

Principal Steffner, didn’t Time Magazine run an article not five days ago about how businesses are turning away from drug testing employees, largely because the tests don’t help? We went down this road in 1986 when President Reagan called on business to fight the war on drugs. Let not go down that same costly, ineffective road again.

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“Little research has been done on testing's impact on student drug use because it's difficult and expensive to study, says Lloyd Johnston of the Monitoring the Future study at the University of Michigan, which surveys 50,000 students a year. And yet, concern about student drug use — including recent increases in the use of prescription drugs and steroids — has led hundreds of systems to embrace testing.”

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Two things here. Dr. Johnston was also quoted in the ACLU booklet, Making Sense of Student Drug Testing: Why Educators Are Saying No, “[The Study] suggest that there really isn’t an impact from drug testing as practiced… I don’t think it brings about any constructive changes in their attitudes about drugs or their belief in the dangers associated with using them.”

If a study funded by the federal government says that the testing doesn’t work, why does the Bush administration want to throw away $15 million on a plan that doesn’t actually protect children from drug abuse?

The second part, and most important point is this. The same study that said that drug testing doesn’t work also pointed out something that is a continual problem. ALCOHOL! In the 2005 Monitoring the Future Study, 47% of 12^th graders had used alcohol in the last 30 days, compared to less than 20% for marijuana. Alcohol is out of the blood stream in hours, cocaine and amphetamines in a few days, but marijuana can take up to month. What do you think kids are going to switch to when you start testing?

The second article, entitled “More Schools Test for Drugs” weakly asserts that there is a growing number of schools stepping up to save the children.

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“In the 2005-06 school year, 373 public secondary schools got federal money for testing, up from 79 schools two years ago, U.S. Department of Education records show. The government has not tracked the rise of locally funded programs as closely, but the White House estimates that an additional 225 schools have them.

President Bush has asked Congress to increase grant money for testing by 45% next year, to $15 million.

The number of public secondary schools with testing programs remains a tiny percentage of the 28,000 such schools nationwide. Many districts have been reluctant to impose drug testing, fearing they could face challenges in state courts. Several states' constitutions include privacy rights that go beyond what federal courts have granted, says Graham Boyd, director of the ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project in Santa Cruz, Calif.”

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If you have two poorly planned ideas that intrude upon privacy, and you get two more poorly planned ideas that intrude upon privacy, you have a 100% increase in your poor ideas. Point is, just because more schools are doing it, doesn’t hold a candle to the fact that most everyone else is not! They realize that drug testing doesn’t work, undermines the trust between students and faculty, and is only a feel good response to a serious problem of teen drug abuse.

Framingham High School Policy Allows Seizure and Search of Cell Phones.

Students at Framingham High School were fuming over a new school policy that allows administrators to seize cell phones and search their contents. The policy, administrators say, is to improve security and stop the sale of drugs and stolen goods, but students said that the edict is an invasion of privacy. The rule complies with federal law, which says a school can conduct searches when there is "reasonable suspicion" that a student has contraband.

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Just another reason to create animosity between students and faculty, or youth and adults. Even if this new policy is enforced to extremes there's not too much that would come about of searching cell phones. It is certainly not going to bring an end to drug use at the school. And if a student is being searched under "reasonable suspicion" for possession of contraband, how is looking through the contact list of a cell phone going to find it?

We reserve the right to look through the cell phone," Principal Michael Welch said. "It would be no different than if a student were to have a notebook. We ha’ve had instances of graffiti. We ha’ve looked through a notebook and found identical instances of graffiti."

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I would say its quite different Principal Welch. You just want to look through the contact lists and play Columbo with other administrators. Better yet, maybe its the picture galleries from camera phones that your interested in. Find a picture of a student smoking marijuana on a cell phone and suspend him/her from school or extra-curricular activities. You could probably suspend students that are just in the background of the picture as well. The same would probably be true about pictures considered to be of sexual nature.

Stop alienating students and treat them as your equals. It is as if none of these teachers might have some contraband in their homes or cars, or maybe even in their pocket at school. Shouldn't the policy apply to them as well?

In other Framingham news from earlier this week, shockingly high bacteria counts from animal feces in Learned Pond have dropped far enough to reopen the beach, according to the Board of Health. Testing showed E.coli bacteria at 2,800 parts per million -- nearly 12 times the acceptable maximum limit for safe swimming....

Maybe it's from all the bullshit coming out of Framingham High School...

Obsess Much?

Citizens against Government Waste released a report claiming that the Drug Czar's "obsession" with marijuana has led to failure of addressing "harder drugs". The report can be read here in PDF.

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The White House Office of National Drug Policy (ONDCP) has wasted billions of taxpayers' dollars since its formation in 1988 on ineffective and counter-productive policies that fail to meet the agency's core objectives, according to a report released this week by the non-partisan Washington, DC think-tank Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW).

"The federal government and the ONDCP have chosen to ignore evidence suggesting that the methods being used in the war on drugs are not effective," the report says. "[T]he federal government has become so obsessed with marijuana use that it is spending money unwisely.

"The government has thrown more than $1 billion at a campaign that has only succeeded in increasing the number of teenage marijuana users," the report states, noting that reviews of the media campaign have found that it often encourages - rather than discourages - cannabis use among viewers.

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The ONDCP is not as concerned with reducing the few possible harms associated with marijuana but are obsessed with altering the opinion of youth and American's in general that marijuana is in fact a useful medicine or at least a safer alternative for enjoyable recreation.

We know they are lying and find most of their TV ads more amusing than anything else. The ONDCP commercials never contain any facts or realistic scenarios, because there aren't any that really support their claims. So they make up ads about teenage girls that smoke pot and become pregnant, or another teenager that apparently made a hat out of ground beef after smoking a joint (he may have some other issues aside from marijuana use that should be looked into...). The ground beef ad is probably the best I've seen because it ends in the worst possible effect of marijuana use...ARREST.

Citizens Against Government Waste issued a similar critique of the ONDCP last year, calling the agency a "federal wasteland" that fails to show objective results.

The ONDCP: Not as useful as you thought.

Oh Calvina...

A couple of weeks ago I was watching The Drug Years on the Sundance Channel, when the ever vigilant warrior in the War on Drugs, protector of America and outspoken, opinionated executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation Calvina Fay reaffirmed her tactlessness and obtuseness when she declared something akin to "Some people say the war on Drugs is failing and we should give up. To me, that's like saying we haven't found a cure for AIDS and cancer so we should stop our medical research."

Despite the irrationality and ignorance of such a brass statement, I’m almost tempted to agree to an extent. Please do not misunderstand my point, here. Unlike the search for a cure to cancer and AIDS, the Drug War has had purely negative and deleterious effects on individuals and society at large. Despite spending billions of dollars every year, and locking up hundreds of thousands of non-violent, otherwise law-abiding citizens, there has been no progress or improvement in solving the nation’s drug problem. True, despite decades of research, cancer and AIDS still kill millions of people each year. However, progress is being made. New treatments and drugs are discovered on a continual basis, making the lives of those afflicted with these ailments more bearable and enjoyable. What headway has been made in the thirty year-long, ineffective War on Drugs?

Wherein lies my agreement, then? I support a search for a cure, much to the chagrin of Ms. Fay, involving further research into the therapeutic value of many drugs in the medical arena. Cannabis has been shown to effectively help many patients left weak and wasting away after chemotherapy and other current treatments for cancer and AIDS. It has other properties that help mitigate pain and nausea associated with the drug cocktails prescribed to many patients with these ailments. People with other diseases such as glaucoma and multiple sclerosis can also benefit from the use of marijuana.

Of course, Ms. Fay and her supporters would have us believe that legalizing the medical use of cannabis and other drugs would lead to an increase of use among the general population. However, in 1999 the Institute of Medicine concluded that, “At this point, there are no convincing data to support this concern. The existing data are consistent with the idea that this would not be a problem if marijuana were as closely regulated as other medications with abuse potential.” The current prohibition policies in America take control of these substances out of the government’s hands. Legalizing the medical use of these drugs would put the supply in the hands of physicians and doctors instead of street-dealers, greatly reducing the supply to children and the possibility of abuse. Furthermore, as the IOM said, “this question is beyond the issues normally considered for medical uses of drugs, and should not be a factor in evaluating the therapeutic potential of marijuana…”

All substances, including morphine (an opiate closely related to heroin) and cocaine, already legally prescribed and used by doctors, have the potential to be misused and abused. However, drugs that can ease the pain and suffering of millions should be administered and regulated. But, doesn’t that send the wrong message to children – that it is ok to use drugs? Would a better message be sending seriously ill people with terminal diseases to prison instead of allowing themselves and their doctors to determine the best possible treatment?

There is indeed a drug problem in this country. It’s called prohibition. Calvina Fay was right in saying the War on Drugs is failing. She was wrong in saying we should stop medical research for a cure to the plagues of cancer and AIDS. We should, however, broaden the scope of our research to include honest investigation into the therapeutic potential of drugs for medical use. Doctors, not “I-know-better-than-you” Congressmen and women, are the only qualified people to determine what should and should not be used to help their patients cope with illness. Yet, with the unsuccessful Hinchey-Rohrabacher Medical Marijuana amendment yesterday, it appears that many politicians feel truly ill people need a prison sentence more than their medicine. So, does compassion still mean anything on Capitol Hill? Of course, compassion for prison guards, parole officers, police, and their jobs; not for seriously ill people who only want to make their lives better.

Soccer Moms for Sensible Drug Policy

Having trouble talking with mom and pop about drug policy? This editorial, written by a Republican mother from Colorado, offers all the right arguments for why conservative soccer moms should support the repeal of marijuana prohibition. The entire piece is a must-read, but here are just a few choice quotes:

Politicians whisper quietly behind closed doors about the insanity of the drug war. Neither party, however, has had the courage to take a stand against prohibition publicly. Just imagine if the $2 billion invested in these ads - or the billions more spent prosecuting peaceful marijuana users every year - had been diverted instead into tuition grants for needy students or back to taxpaying parents who could directly invest in college funds.

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Democrats and Republicans alike believe they would gain nothing by advocating an end to prohibition, but both have failed to consider that they might just gain votes if they could learn to speak to mothers about drugs in a way that they could relate to.

Parents across America are trying to find a way to fund college. By legalizing marijuana, taxing it, and turning this revenue into college scholarships and treatment programs, the future of every child could be just a little bit brighter.

[snip]

At the end of the day, our government knows it cannot enforce marijuana prohibition. In the absence of being able to do so, it sends the damaging message to our young people that marijuana should be illegal simply because "I'm the government, and I said so." Moms know better - and may ultimately be the single key to bringing sanity back to American drug policy.

Well said, Jessica.

Link

Call Congress right now for medical marijuana patients

Last week I told you about the important medical marijuana amendment that Congress is getting ready to vote on. Well, the time is NOW! The House will vote this Wednesday, June 28, on whether or not the DEA should be able to spend money arresting seriously ill patients in states that have made medical marijuana legal.

We need you to call your member of Congress RIGHT NOW and urge them to support this sensible and compassionate amendment.

Here are the instructions and phone script that the Marijuana Policy Project put out:

"It's easy: Just call the Capitol switchboard operator at (202) 224-3121. Give the operator your zip code and ask to be connected to your U.S. House member; you don't even need to know your U.S. representative's name to do this.

When the receptionist for the congressperson — not the Capitol switchboard operator — answers, say something like: "Hi, this is [name]. I live in [city], and I'm calling to ask that my representative vote for Congressman Maurice Hinchey's medical marijuana amendment to the Justice Department's spending bill, which I understand will be considered on the House floor in a few days. The amendment would prohibit the Justice Department from spending taxpayer money to arrest medical marijuana patients in the 11 states where medical marijuana is legal."

Please call now: (202) 224-3121"

If you don't call, who will?

My Mom is Not a Criminal

Tell the Feds to Stop Arresting the Seriously Ill

My mom suffers from multiple sclerosis, and – on her doctor’s recommendation – uses marijuana to alleviate the painful symptoms of her disease. Luckily, our state legislature in Rhode Island just passed a law to protect seriously ill medical marijuana patients like her from arrest.

But alarmingly, the federal government still classifies my mother as a criminal and reserves the right to put her in jail just for trying to ease her pain.

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on an amendment to stop the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration from spending any money to arrest medical marijuana patients in Rhode Island and the ten other states that have made the compassionate choice to allow doctors to make medical decisions for their patients.

People like my mom need you to take action now and tell Congress to respect states’ rights to protect the seriously ill. To make it as easy as possible for you, our allies at the Marijuana Policy Project have created a prewritten letter that you can quickly edit and send to your member of Congress. All you have to do is click over to http://action.mpp.org

This amendment has been voted on for the past three years and it keeps getting more and more support. Last year, we got 161 votes out of the 218 we need. We can pass the amendment this year and finally stop the federal government’s war on medical marijuana patients – but not without your help.

My mom and other people suffering from serious illnesses need you to take action today.

Please do your part and send a letter to your member of Congress by visiting http://action.mpp.org

From my family to yours,
Tom Angell
SSDP Campaigns Director

Witness the Drug War Firsthand in Colombia

I'm passing the following message on from Witness for Peace's Erik Cooke. This is an exciting opportunity being jointly offered by SSDP and WFP. (Some of you may remember that Erik used to be SSDP's legislative director.)

Witness the Drug War Firsthand in Colombia

Friends,

We all know that the Drug War is an abysmal failure in the U.S.: gleaming new prisons, hysterical government propaganda, invasions of privacy, racial discrimination, and a massive waste of taxpayer dollars.

But, the impact of the Drug War in the U.S. is only part of picture.

Another Drug War is being waged even more violently in South America. This war fumigates subsistence crops along with coca. This war inflames a 40 year-old civil war in Colombia. This war classifies impoverished farmers as narcotraffickers. This war sends military aid to human rights abusers. This war has helped cause the largest internal displacement in the world. This brutal war is the same one that we all fight so passionately against here at home.

Witness for Peace has teamed up with Students for Sensible Drug Policy to host a delegation to Colombia, this August, to witness firsthand the devastating implications of the Drug War in Colombia. Led by Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies, myself, and in-country guides, during this delegation, you will have opportunities to meet with experts, U.S. and Colombian government officials, farmers, human rights leaders, and many others drawn into this struggle. You will visit communities that have been impacted by U.S. military aid and anti-drug efforts. You will also gather tools and understanding that will enable you to educate your policymakers on how U.S. policy is impacting Colombia. Most importantly, you will experience the irrefutable physical impacts of U.S. policy – on the people, the land, and the government.

Yes, this Drug War is an awful reality that we have inherited. However, we have the power and the responsibility to correct this horrible injustice. The first step in that process is to understand what forms injustice takes.

You can find the flyer for the delegation, including dates and costs, at: www.witnessforpeace.org/pdf/del_col_ssdp_aug_06.pdf.

If you need further information on the situation in Colombia or about the delegation, please be in contact with me by phone at 202-547-6112 or by email at erik@witnessforpeace.org.

I challenge and urge each of you to strongly consider signing up for this delegation. You will return changed.

In solidarity,
Erik

P.S. Witness for Peace offers several other delegations, on a variety of themes, to not only Colombia, but also to Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and an upcoming Bolivia delegation. For more information visit http://www.witnessforpeace.org/travel/schedule.html.

Souder Sees Blind People

Our good friend Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), no longer content with denying financial aid to hundreds of thousands of students with drug convictions, is pushing a plan to blind Colombian peasants. According to a report in In These Times, Souder sponsored a provision to a recently passed House bill that requires the fungus Fusarium keratitis to be sprayed in a "major drug producing country" such as Colombia in an effort to eradicate drug crops. Unfortunately, in addition to destroying coca crops, Fusarium also destroys the human cornea.

According to the story:

On April 16, the New York Times ran a full-page ad from contact lens producer Bausch and Lomb, announcing the recall of its "ReNu with MoistureLoc" rewetting solution, and warning the 30 million American wearers of soft contact lenses about Fusarium keratitis. This infection, first detected in Asia, has rapidly spread across the United States. It is caused by a mold-like fungus that can penetrate the cornea of soft contact lens wearers, causing redness and pain that can lead to blindness - requiring a corneal replacement.

Souder and co-sponsor Dan Burton (R-IN) seem to be alone in thinking that blinding Colombian peasants is an effective means of controlling drug crops. The article mentions various government agencies opposing the use of Fusarium, including the State Department, the USDA, the CIA, the DEA, and the ONDCP:

The DEA stopped funding Fusarium research in the United States during the early '90s after it learned that Fusarium infections can be deadly in "immunocompromised" people - not only AIDS patients and those with other illnesses, but also those who are severely malnourished. The University of the Andes in Bogotá has recently reported that 12 percent of Colombian children suffer from chronic malnutrition. Spraying this fungus on a vulnerable population could be perceived as using a biological weapon.

The CIA has been against the use of Fusarium to kill drug crops since at least 2000. At that time, one official told the Times, "I don't support using a product on a bunch of Colombian peasants that you wouldn’t use against a bunch of rednecks growing marijuana in Kentucky."

Mark Souder has once again proven himself to be the most hysterical drug warrior in Congress, devoid of all logic and reason when it comes to anything concerning drugs. In this case the government's own anti-drug agencies have enough sense to realize that causing a public health crisis in one country does is not an acceptable means of addressing a perceived public health crisis in this country. If this provision does become policy, perhaps we can convince Souder to support supplying medical marijuana to relieve the intra-ocular pressure of the newly blinded Colombians.

To find out just how heartless the "distinguished" Congressman from Indiana really is, you can read the entire article here.

A college try

Libby at LastOneSpeaks has an account from Jackl (who is a frequent commenter here) about an encounter he had with former ONDCP official Andrea Barthwell at his college reunion. Apparently, Barthwell gave a talk intended to bolster support for the War on Drugs, but failed miserably.

Barthwell's talk was billed "A Rational Drug Policy for Contemporary America" and the seminar brochure noted that "reunion weekend is a time for reflection and those who were at [the college] during the 60's and 70's participated in a great cultural change that was pivotal in the development of modern drug policy" and that the seminar would "examine the impact of the 60's and 70's on contemporary drug policy...as the nation has moved from the 'War on Drugs' metaphor to a public health approach, to prevention, intervention and treatment...", including, perhaps, Barthwell "recall[ing] her campus experiences", something of interest to my SSDP colleagues who asked I take notes on this point especially.

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The whole idea, as she explained it, was that you wanted to set up interventions like drug testing (the traffic cones) so students would not go over the cliff of drug experimentation, abuse and addiction. In these slides we also realized that medical marijuana is a dangerous fraud because of the much greater harm potential of today's super-duper high potency cannabis than the cannabis smoked by boomers back in the day, and the false legitimacy conferred upon the drug by the "medical" claims.

Barthwell repeatedly referred to this as a "recipe for disaster" for the kids and society at large, although she did not explain the precise nature of this "disaster", except by offhand anecdotal references to unnamed kids spiraling down into addiction and ruining their lives, etc. But, kids being kids and some not abstaining after drug education efforts, if they did go over the cliff, according to Barthwell, there would be an "ambulance" of intervention and treatment at the bottom to help them, illustrated by a Powerpoint with an ambulance photoshopped onto a shot of the base of a cliff.

[snip]

According to Barthwell, adult "recreational" use is also the ultimate source of evil because it is what allows the black market in illegal drugs to exist and be maintained to serve as a trickle-down supply to impressionable kids. Kind of like the guilting logic used by ONDCP a couple of years back in those Super Bowl ads to claim drug users and their black markets support international terrorists and are responsible for drug gang murders in Colombia or something.

The audience in the small lecture hall seemed to be getting increasingly impatient during Barthwell's rambling and simplistic talk. I could see my friend M. across the aisle begin to bristle when Barthwell was discussing why teen drug use was bad because it afforded pleasure to kid's brains and was fashionably (for kids) anti-authoritarian. M. remarked later during lunch that if we had presented term papers which were as free of facts and full of gauzily vague, undefined speculations as Barthwell's talk, we would have been roundly chastised by our intellectually demanding professors (as well as receiving C-'s to F's for our feeble efforts), that's how far off the expected high content Barthwell's talk was.

Click over to LastOneSpeaks to read the whole thing.

Tags: drug warriors