Partisan Republican Drug Czar must resign

As we reported earlier, Congressional investigators have uncovered White House e-mails and documents showing that the U.S. Drug Czar and other staffers from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) spent taxpayer money traveling around the country to campaign for embattled Republicans in the months leading up to the 2006 elections.

In an e-mail from ONDCP White House liason Doug Simon, he commends Karl Rove for orchestrating the operation, and thanks other members of his office, including Drug Czar John Walters, "because they actually had to give up time with their families for the god awful places we sent them."

With such disdain for those districts coming from the Republican administration, is it really any wonder that Democrats swept Congress last November?

And it is not only offensive that an someone charged with crafting sensible policies to address the serious harms of drug abuse and drug prohibition would waste government resources and time on partisan politics, it is a blatant violation of the federal Hatch Act.

Hrmmm... political appointees abusing their office for partisan purposes. Sound familiar?

Please join us in calling for the Drug Czar to resign in the wake of this outrageous scandal. Just enter your e-mail address below and the rest of your info on the following page. A letter will be sent directly to the Drug Czar. And your members of Congress - who control ONDCP's budget - will be copied on the message.

Email Address:

Even if the Drug Czar doesn't listen to us, our lawmakers who are CC'ed on our messages will have to. Take action now!

BREAKING: Drug Czar spending YOUR money on helping friends win elections

It's 91 degrees Fahrenheit in the District of Columbia. And I have a feeling it's about to get a whole lot hotter for "Drug Czar" John Walters.

Today, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (one of my personal favorite committees), announced that the Office of National Drug Control Policy spent taxpayer money trying to get friends of the Bush administration elected last year.

At the request of Sara Taylor, the former White House Director of Political Affairs, John Walters, the nation’s drug czar, and his deputies traveled to 20 events with vulnerable Republican members of Congress in the months prior to the 2006 elections. The trips were paid for by federal taxpayers and several were combined with the announcement of federal grants or actions that benefited the districts of the Republican members.

A November 20, 2006, memo from Ms. Taylor summarizes the travel Director Walters took at her request. An agency e-mail sent the following day describes how Karl Rove commended the historically nonpartisan Office of National Drug Control Policy and three cabinet departments – Commerce, Transportation, and Agriculture – for “going above and beyond the call of duty” in making “surrogate appearances” at locations the e-mail described as “the god awful places we sent them.” Other documents include an e-mail from the Interior Department to Ms. Taylor’s predecessor stating: “these folks need to be reminded who they work for and how their geographical travel can benefit this President.”

...and his friends.

Walters is probably having a bad day. Not only is Congress likely going to cut his office's advertising and drug testing budget as they've done for the past several years, but Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman sent Walters a laundry list of demands related to the political motivations behind his travels.

Recite after me, Johnny. "I don't recall being aware of.... I don't recall being aware of..."


[Thanks, Sanho]

Harry Pothead: The Sorceror's Stoned

I need to be honest here: The seventh Harry Potter book is coming out on Saturday, and between now and Friday at midnight when I will be sporting a wizarding cape and lining up at Barnes & Noble (I think I'll dress up as a Death Eater to cause a hullabaloo), I plan on reading the first six books. Thus, it is really difficult to make a legitimate drug policy blog post without bringing Harry into it.

I'm not so embarassed about that, not even the cape part. What is embarassing is the fact that, circa 2000, I wrote a story entitled "Harry Pothead: The Sorceror's Stoned." I posted it on fanfiction.net along with my other really horrible stories about Legend of Zelda, Harry Potter, and the X-men. (No, I am not providing a link here. Go find it yourself.) If you are not familiar with fanfiction.net, that's okay; you live a relatively normal lifestyle. If you are familiar, then you are laughing heartily with me right now. Or at me. I don't mind.

It was basically reefer madness, Hogwarts style. I had forgotten what D.A.R.E. had taught me about how to ingest marijuana, so I simply made it "magical" marijuana so powerful that just being in a greenhouse with it could get you buzzed. I did, however, remember D.A.R.E.'s claims about the drug's effects. As in Reefer Madness, one mere toke got Jimmy I mean Harry hooked. Here are some excerpts:

From Chapter One, in which the plant is introduced in Herbology class and Hermione is too stoned to answer Professor Sprout's question:
"Marijuana, also known as 'pot', is a powerful, illegal drug that can be smoked or eaten. Its effects include dizzyness, violence, hallucinations, aggression, and loss of coordination. Using, holding, buying, or selling marijuana results in jail time and suspension from school," Lavender answered, sounding like she'd swallowed the D.A.R.E. workbook. [I actually did consult my old workbook for this.]

In chapter two, Harry gets hooked through a series of events involving innocent curiosity and a freak wand accident. Deus ex machina like whoa.

In chapter three, Draco Malfoy makes fun of the crazy things Harry did while high and consequently gets punched in the face by an unusually aggressive Harry.

Chapter Four and thankfully the final chapter, in which Fred and George Weasley drug everybody as a prank and the strung out Professor Trelawney saves the day thanks to her high tolerance:
"YOU DRUGGED UP DRACO MALFOY?" Hermione thundered, looking like a crazed angry rhinocerous. Then she started laughing insanely at something behind the Weasley twins.
"Yo dudes, what's shakin'? I'm feelin' some bad vibes, man," Snape said. He was wearing tie-dyed robes and his oily hair hung over his face.
"Yes we did, Hermione," George whispered. "But we didn't stop at just ONE little Slytherin first year... we had lots left, why waste it?" Everyone who heard this statement either eyed their goblets suspiciously or spat out their pumpkin juice in horror.
"Whoa, dudes!" Snape jumped in alarm as everyone sprayed him with their spat-out pumpkin juice. "Love and peace, man, love and peace."

Make of it what you will.

There was going to be a sequel, Harry Pothead and the Scent Dogs from Azkaban. That fic would probably more serve the drug policy reform side than the anti-drug propaganda side. Perhaps I shall redeem myself by writing it, or a different and more hilarious version of the original... but then I'd have to redeem myself again just for writing fanfiction, so I dunno. (Said the girl who's going to a midnight release in costume. Seriously, what do I have to lose?)

You know what's awesome?

I'll tell you what's awesome. What's awesome is pulling into the parking lot of your town police department, accidentally planting your drug policy bumper stickers in front of the surveillance camera, walking in to report a destroyed mailbox (lame), and handing the officer an invitation to the 2007 International Drug Policy Reform Conference. Oh, oh, and the best part is having him look at you through that tinted window trying to figure out if you're trying to swindle him. No sir. Not swindling. Look me in the eye, no swindling here.

It would probably be more effective if I were myself a police officer, but I did give a brief explanation and I did see him read the quote on the back of the postcard: "Of the hundreds of conferences I've attended in my career, this was the best." -Norm Stamper, former Seattle police cheif, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. And he did say thanks.

Seems unlikely that a little postcard will change the guy's mind about drug policy, especially since it's relatively early in his career, but I've been carrying those damn invitations around since they gave 'em to me at the SSDP National Office. So now I'm being the Johnny Appleseed of drug policy reform. Or the Jehovah's Witness, but with less doors slamming in my face.

So, what would you do with a pile of colorful, 5 1/2 x 8" invitations?

P.S. The summer '07 edition of SSDP's newsletter is out, didya read it?

Pot growers are terrorists now

People who bought drugs used to be terrorist sympathizers; now pot growers are themselves terrorists. From Record-Searchlight, "Drug czar gives warning":

The nation's top anti-drug official said people need to overcome their "reefer blindness" and see that illicit marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and safety, as well as to the environment.

Dear John Walters,

1. Please stop calling people terrorists when they are not, by definition, terrorists. Misusing and overusing words causes them to lose meaning, which is a shame when it comes to words like "life" and "love" and "freedom" and "peace" as well as words like "terrorist" and "infidel" and "jihad" and "crusade." Don't pervert words, it's what caused or at least kindled most of history's problems.

2. Nobody plants corn in national forests. Nobody would grow marijuana in a national forest if it were legal. You can holler about drugs all you want - I mean, you're the drug czar, I understand - but don't go hollerin' about the environment when it is in fact prohibition that causes the most environmental degradation via illegal growing, nasty lab chemicals, interdiction efforts, etc.

3. Perhaps you believe that guns kill people, or perhaps you're more of the mind that people kill people. Either way, whether it's guns or people or people with guns or the devil that kills people, marijuana doesn't kill people. You cannot poison someone with weed; you cannot fashion a cannabis plant into a lethal weapon (unless maybe you strangle someone with a hemp rope?). Sorry. People operating high up in the black market tend to have guns, and are often criminals drawn by profit and undaunted by risk. It's prohibition, and it's currently your fault.

4. Be consistent, will you? Are pot smokers "a-motivated" stinky irresponsible bums or highly organized terrorists? I'm confused.

5. Re: "reefer blindness", again with the "I know you are but what am I."

6. Honestly, this whole thing is way below the belt so I'm just gonna go ahead and say "Your mom was a terrorist last night if ya know what I mean ZING/HIYO!!1" Not so much to insult you or the saintly woman who brought you into this world as to demonstrate how your own medicine tastes. Anyway, I'm 19 and writing in a student policy blog, what's your excuse?

Cordially,
Rebecca.

Now go write your own letter, except make it to the editor, and try not to make any your mom jokes (it's very tempting).

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bong User

In high school, I was all about tolerance and acceptance. Still am, except in high school I was the president of our diversity group. One thing we never discussed was the stereotypes surrounding those students who used drugs (mostly marijuana). It would have been a touchy subject, since we couldn't support their illegal and risky activities, but thinking back, it would have been appropriate to break down the general attitude towards our drug-using peers. Particularly early in high school, before people really got into experimenting, many people still seemed to hold at least one of the following attitudes:

• "Despite popular notions, research has shown a link between frequent marijuana use and increased violent behavior. Research found that among youth, the incidence of physically attacking people, destroying property and stealing increased in proportion to the number of days marijuana was smoked in the past year." -ONDCP Media Campaign
• "Regular marijuana users often have shortened attention spans, decreased energy and ambition, poor judgment, high distractibility, and impaired ability to communicate and relate to others." -Above the Influence
• "Research shows that recurrent or frequent use of this drug suppresses the immune system, damages brain cells and decreases short-term memory, attention span and motivation. " -Drug Free America Foundation

And so on. Basically, ever since the DARE program, those of us who had not formerly known anyone who smoked marijuana maintained that stoners were violent, criminal, stupid, unhealthy people who made bad choices. As the story always goes, by the time high school rolled around, the vast majority of us met (or became) at least one person who defied the prohibition-fueled stereotype. This leads to a lifetime of confusion and questioning the government, which may later develop into certainty that the government is bonkers. Here is my story about that magic moment in 9th grade when I realized that reefer madness is in fact madness:

I was walking through the cafeteria. I was not feeling so hot for whatever reason, and when I passed by this table of senior boys, I felt terrified that they were going to somehow harass me. They mostly gravitated around this one kid who was notorious for smoking pot - I'll call him Bud. I could have walked by with my head down, but I felt so vulnerable that I felt the need to keep my eyes on them. Bud noticed, and asked me something along the lines of what was wrong.

I froze in my tracks, then found myself walking over so that I'd be at a conversational distance. As angsty as this sounds, no one had ever bothered asking me directly what was wrong. I wasn't really ready to answer the question, though, so I blew it. I told Bud, in a very anxious tone trying to be casual, that nothing was wrong. Well, Bud readily soothed me by comically saying what is now one of my favorite phrases: "Hey, don't worry about it. I ain't got no beef with you!" I was kind of stunned, so he continued with this random-assed compliment about how he noticed me and didn't really know me but thought it was cool how I stood out (I wore all black at the time). Outside of my friends, it was the first positive feedback I'd recieved for standing out.

Was Bud just trying to ensnare a new victim into his reefer den? No. Bud didn't say a damn word about bud to me, ever. I almost expected him to, so there was an awkward pause, and then I snapped out of it and said thanks.

In the spirit of transcending stereotypes, I have to make it clear that of course, not every high school stoner is the angel in a hemp necklace that Bud was. But it would be good to start a dialogue about the way regular student drug users are percieved, for two reasons:

1. A lot of kids in various stages of insecurity live up to the expectations set for them. If smoking weed makes them a delinquent, according to society, they may incorporate that role into their defenses. On the other hand, if delinquency always goes along with drug use, then troublemakers may take it for granted that they're "supposed" to use drugs.

2. The same reason you don't want anyone to be on the fringes of society for superficial reasons: they're valuable, and they're not so very different than non-drug users. They offer unique perspective as a group, if they choose to identify with that group, and their solutions could be applied to better society at large. Not to mention each individual offers unique perspective and talents.

By building strong bridges in high school and college, it will be easier for the next generation to rise above the propaganda haze and do something about the fact that undeserving people are being incarcerated for their choices. When our peers, friends, and possibly selves are being sent to jail it's not about high school cliques anymore. (And curse the evil time when it was in the least bit about high school cliques!)

Baltimore Sun et al, you slay me.

One war appears to be going well for the United States and its allies these days: the drug war.

-From "War on Drugs Said to Progress." Peruse this page for more media outlets that hosted the same article.

Sometimes I want to quit my job and school and everything I'm involved in so that I can devote my life to going around the nation's news headquarters with a disciplinary spray bottle. "NO! (squirt) Bad journalism! You do NOT just regurgitate statistics and heavily biased one-sided analyses! Bad, bad, bad!" Each "bad" would be punctuated, of course, with a squirt. I'd use water, mostly. I might employ some abrasive sort of acid for repeat offenders.

Alternatively, they do accept letters to the editor. There are so many points in the article to argue, such as how a decrease in the availability of cannabis isn't necessarily a good thing since it's the least harmful illegal drug and others will take its place, or how the supply and demand of illegal drugs hasn't gone down drastically or consistently enough to declare victory and never will, or how maybe it's not exactly appropriate to praise drug war policies in developing countries... Just choose a sentence and tear it to pieces. Or walk into your local news headquarters with a spray bottle, but don't say I sent you. ;)

Bong Hits 4 Jesus Game an internet sensation!

Two weeks ago, I posted Bong Hits 4 Jesus - The Game. Since then, DARE Generation Diary has been on fire -- people love the game.

It was even featured on Amanda Congdon's ABC show:
The game was also linked by several big blogs (including Boing Boing, Huffington Post, and Wonkette), generating oodles of visits to the site.

So, why should you care?

SSDP is always in need of volunteers with unique skills. In return, SSDP can potentially expose your work to lots of people. In fact, BH4J The Game was created by a volunteer with just a few hours of time. But by collaborating with SSDP, he was able to spread his work to tens of thousands of people within a matter of a few days (check out the stats on the right), while helping SSDP educate people about the aftermath of a landmark Supreme Court case.

Do you have unique talents (flash animation, filmmaking, photography, music, etc) that can be used to help end the failed War on Drugs? If so, please contact me at micah@ssdp.org

In Pot We Trust

Do you have a TV? Good.
Do you get Showtime? Good.

Tonight, at 8:30 p.m. EST, Showtime is premiering one of the best documentaries I've seen in a long time. In Pot We Trust presents a moving narrative about the ongoing fight to protect medical marijuana patients from arrest in the United States. Among many advocates and patients, it stars Aaron Houston (Marijuana Policy Project lobbyist and long time friend of SSDP), and Rhonda O'Donnell (the proud mother of SSDP's very own lobbyist, Tom Angell).

(Look for Tom's brief cameo - he's carrying an umbrella for his mom.)

Bloomberg has a great review:

Reefer madness can still be hazardous to your health.

That's the message of "In Pot We Trust," a Showtime documentary airing tonight at 8:30 p.m. New York time. The show makes a persuasive case that marijuana provides some patients a degree of relief they can't get from standard medications and should be legally available.

Yet many patients continue to face prosecution and even jail for smoking the palliative weed.

[snip]

The documentary -- written, produced and directed by Star Price -- doesn't overlook the negative effects of toking. One memorable segment, featuring pro-legalization marchers chanting "We smoke pot and we like it a lot," includes an enthusiast who loses his train of thought in mid-sentence.

Such lapses, to be sure, aren't confined to stoners. We see snippets of congressional debate over medical marijuana legislation that makes you wonder what they're smoking on Capitol Hill. One sputtering pol rails that clerks at his grocery store have turned into dimwits from smoking marijuana, though as Houston points out such arguments have nothing to do with medical marijuana.

The show is sympathetic to the view expressed by writer Christopher Hitchens, who calls current drug policies "insane." He brands the war on drugs as "the last dying smell from the Nixon administration."

The war certainly isn't over. Reed brags that his raid "hurt somebody today." Houston, however, has the last word: "We're going to win eventually."

If you catch the show tonight, please come back to the blog and share your comments with us.

UPDATE: In Pot We Trust will be playing during the following times as well:

Showtime Too - Wed July 11th - 8:30 PM
Showtime - Sunday July 15th - 3:45 PM
Showtime Showcase - Tuesday July 17th - 2:30 PM
Showtime Showcase - Tuesday July 17th - 12:00 AM
Showtime - Wednesday July 18 - 12:00 AM

More pics...

... from the SSDP Strategy Summit.

(More pics, stories, and perhaps video, to come...)