After decades of fighting, billions of dollars spent, millions of incarcerated Americans, via the Drug War Rant I see that we finally have the solution to our drug crisis.
If you guessed the solution would be to partially decriminalize possession and consumption of marijuana, you would be wrong.
If you guessed ending mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, you would be wrong.
If you guessed this new solution would be a dramatic increase in rehabilitation and treatment and less reliance on excessive incarceration, you would be wrong.
If you guessed it would be to introduce realistic and believable drug education programs, ones in which the police and authorities would stop suggesting that marijuana is as dangerous as crack cocaine, you would be wrong.
If you guessed authorities would investigate areas hardest hit by drug abuse, and look to change the overall sociological, economic, and political underpinnings which makes the citizens more vulnerable to drug addiction, and taking the necessary steps to help these people change their circumstances, you would be wrong.
What then, could be the ultimate solution we have been looking for?
Restricting the sale of cold medicine:
Restricting sales of cold meds key to war on drugs
FOR 10 years, the increased usage and manufacturing of methamphetamine has been a serious drain on law enforcement’s resources and time. The drug, a cheap cocaine if you will, is firmly rooted in our state, particularly in the Central Valley, which is considered the capital of methamphetamine manufacturing.
Now, after flourishing under the radar screen of many people and politicians, meth has been placed in the spotlight in recent weeks and now is being addressed by Congress. But acknowledgment is not in your typical drug war rhetoric or legislation.
The new offensive in the war against methamphetamine is happening down at your neighborhood drug store.
Believe it or not, the cold medicines that we buy to battle coughs and runny noses are at the heart of the war against meth. Unlike its intended use, medication such as Sudafed is being used as a key ingredient in the manufacturing of methamphetamine.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
As someone who has dealt with people ravaged by drug addiction, this idiotic mentality on the part of our government just depresses me. And this in no way is intended to minimize how dangerous the meth epidemic is in our country, because it is a serious problem. In West Virginia alone, meth labs are everywhere and growing at an alarming rate, and restricting the sale of OTC drugs will have a short-term effect.
But it isn’t the solution to drug addiction. Merely attacking the supply never is.
Oh, screw it. Go read all of Mark Kleiman’s research on this topic (scroll down through his vita and you will find the links), and in particular, this piece. And for the Drug Warriors in the audience, if you think Kleiman, simply because he is a squishy liberal, is just another NORML rope-smoker, you will be surprised.
And, if you want the global hysteria over drugs encapsulated in less than 50 words, I offer you this:
Bali Sentencing Logic:
Smuggle 4 kilos of drugs into Bali, get 20 years in prison.
Blow up a nightclub in Bali and kill over 200 poeople? Get less than 3 years.
*** Update ***
Mark says I am all washed up, but I still maintain that this is nothing more than a quick fix.
And, again, I am not against this- I am merely ridiculing the idea that this is ‘the key’ or ‘the solution’ to our drug problems.
Libertine
Methamphetamines are a huge problem in the heartland of the country from what I hear (I am living a sheltered life in the northeast corridor). From what I hear Meth is far more addicting and insidious then heroin.
There will always be certain people in society looking to get high…whether it is grass…smack…crack…crank…booze…or something they whipped up in a lab in their garage. And when there is demand there will be supply and profits to be made. I thought we learned a lesson from prohibition that even if we try to criminalize a substance, like alcohol was in the 20’s, people will not stop using it. You are absolutely right work on lessening the demand and we will get at the root of the problem…the profits.
anon
Crystal Meth is seriously, seriously bad shit. SOMETHING needs to be done about it. There needs to be some serious education done about it, because I have a lot of friends doing it, and they don’t know what goes into making it or what it does to your brain. I’ve seen it destroy people.
This is silly though. Do we really need people getting arrested for buying cold medicine?
John Cole
Oh- meth addiction is horrifyin, but suggesting this will stop the problem is silly. It may slow tings down in the short term, but in no time, vans full of ten people will be going from store to store, with each person in the van buying the maximum allowed, effectively killing the impact of the legislation.
Calling it a short-term fix, when you consider that, is not even fair.
BadTux
For the record, I have never used any drug more potent than the cold medicines that will now be barred from sale over the counter. I don’t even drink alcoholic beverages. And I’ve seen the effects of drug-using parents on the lives of innocent children up front and personal, having taught in an inner city school in Houston. But the War on Drugs just doesn’t make sense.
I’ve seen reports that say drugs are more readily available on America’s streets today than they were when Nixon “declared” this bogus war back in 1973. What we’re doing isn’t working. The drug war is to law enforcement what the Vietnam War was to the U.S. Army — a war that could not be won given the strictures of a democratic nation (democracies are rarely kind to long-running wars of convenience i.e. wars where the democracy was not first attacked by the nation in question, which is also why we are not putting the resources into Iraq needed to win there). Eventually in Vietnam we declared victory and went home, after spending almost 5% of the U.S. GDP on the war for each of five years in order to deliver Cambodia and Laos to the Communists. But whereas it took us less than eight years to figure out that what we were doing in Vietnam wasn’t working and couldn’t work given that we are a democracy rather than a dictatorship, it seems that over 30 years after the start of the drug wars, we are no closer to admitting that, in a democratic nation, we are talking about a war that is lost because only a dictatorship could fight it the way we’re fighting it and win. Indeed, it appears that the drug warriors, confronted with the fact that their desires are incompatible with democracy, want to do away with DEMOCRACY rather than with the drug war!
We must decriminalize currently-illegal drugs, license their sale in government-run drugstores (to remove the profit motive for pushing sales of nasty substances) in order to remove all that money from the hands of very nasty people (the difference between my childhood in the 60’s, where we often ran in gangs, and childhood today, where kids often run in gangs, is that our gangs were armed with rocks and the occasional kitchen knife, not with Uzis, because we didn’t have the ridiculous profits that the drug wars give to gangs). And instead of the billions spent on incarcerating people who have harmed nobody but themselves (almost half of all people in prison are there not because they harmed somebody, but because they bought or sold some substance that the government wants banned), put that money into treatment facilities and mental health clinics and education and foster homes and therapy for the children whose parents have been lost to drugs. The War on Drugs is lost, and was lost the day it was declared, because the only way to win it as currently defined is to turn America into a dictatorship — a democracy will never take the sort of draconian steps needed to win such a war. It’s time to admit defeat and cope with the results as best we can, rather than continuing a path which is a) not working, and b) unwinnable unless we totally destroy democracy.
— Badtux the Realist Penguin
Molly
Does anyone here know any other crimes for which conviction allows the confiscation of real and personal property as part of the punishment?
Do some law enforcement agencies really enhance their budgets significantly by continuing this “war” but never winning it.
Would eliminating such laws help?
I’ve heard this points made but don’t know if they are truly relevant or not.
Kimmitt
My preferred option is to hope that cannabis is a substitute — rather than a complement — for harder drugs and legalize marijuana.
Jon H
I just noticed that Sudafed is now made with “phenylphedrine”, not pseudoephedrine.
I’m guessing the change was due to meth labs.
Libertine
Does anyone here know any other crimes for which conviction allows the confiscation of real and personal property as part of the punishment?
Yep…obscenity convictions can trigger forfeitures.
Josh
Cannabis is very much a gateway drug, I’ve seen people go from pot to crystal meth, oxy, etc. but that’s because you have to go through the same channels to get it as the harder stuff. Offer people as many safe, legal ways to get high as possible and there’s a much lower chance that they’ll get into the bad shit.
Kimmitt
Cannabis is very much a gateway drug,
I’m told that the real gateway drug is alcohol, with cannabis being an endpoint for a lot of people.
Libertine
I agree Kimmit…Alcohol is a much more dangerous drug then cannibis will ever be. I have never heard of anyone dying from sirrosis (sp?) of the liver by smoking to much grass. Nicotine and alcohol are insidiously addictive drugs. But the “war on drugs” has turned prison system into a nice little growth industry…
markm
“Does anyone here know any other crimes for which conviction allows the confiscation of real and personal property as part of the punishment?”
More to the point, does anyone know of such laws in the USA predating drug laws? (Items that are inseparable from the alleged crime, such as pornographic materials or moonshine don’t count.) In several cities now, vice cops have shifted from arresting prostitutes to arresting their customers, and they confiscate their cars – but that is a recent innovation, introduced only after the drug war showed the revenue opportunities presented by property confiscation, especially when the customers are included.
markm
“Does anyone here know any other crimes for which conviction allows the confiscation of real and personal property as part of the punishment?”
More to the point, does anyone know of such laws in the USA predating drug laws? (Items that are inseparable from the alleged crime, such as pornographic materials or moonshine don’t count.) In several cities now, vice cops have shifted from arresting prostitutes to arresting their customers, and they confiscate their cars – but that is a recent innovation, introduced only after the drug war showed the revenue opportunities presented by property confiscation, especially when the customers are included.
Wren
Meth is a disease. The recovery rate for addicts is no more than 5%. If you know a methhead, he’s probably dead in five years. But say your goodbyes today because you really don’t want anything to do with him starting tomorrow. He’ll steal anything that’s not tied down including your car and credit cards.
Solutions? None. Liberals want more treatment — doesn’t work. Conservatives want stiffer jail terms — doesn’t work. Almost 95% of all meth addicts are lost causes.
Can you spell triage?
BTW controlling PSE is nice but 90% of all meth comes from the superlabs in Mexico and California. It’s just politicians trying to feel they are in control. Pissing in the wind get’s you wet.
Wren
Another thing. This blog sounds exactly like the astroturf carap that Pfizer paid right-wing-think-tanks-for-hire to manufacture last winter. Then Pfizer was fighting the 2nd wave of PSE sales restrictions bills in several state legislatures and got a huge letter writing campaign going saying exactly what Cole says here.
Perhaps you didn’t get the memo but ever since Pfizer introduced their Sudafed with phenylphedrine they are supporting PSE limits! Go figure.
RickG
Meth presents a fairly unique situation with drugs, in that the demand and supply sides of it are both significant public health and safety problems. Here in the Colorado Springs area, the sudafed boxes disappeared off the shelves some years back. I am not honestly sure it made much difference since their was a significant increase in meth lab busts in the ensuing years. The number of busts are now down, but no one is really sure why. It is possible that the cooks moved on somewhere the “heat” was less prominent.
The toxicity of the supply side is such that one wonders if there shouldn’t be some “legal” channel for it just to help mitigate the risks. But then the effects on the users are quite damaging.
I agree that if prevention and education had to focus on one drug to emphasize, meth would be it.
TomK
Meth is bad stuff. Don’t do meth.
That said, how much of this drug being bad do we know for sure. I remember a lot of the stuff people said about marijuana was similar to this stuff, when marijuana first got big.
I don’t doubt that meth use is harmful. But, I wonder just how much of this problem is police trying to create a drug war budget? Does anyone have some hard statistics on the effects of meth use?
Why wouldn’t maitanence prescriptions solve this problem?
Skelly
Last fall, the Portland Oregonian published a series on methamphetamine.
“In fall 2002, Oregonian staff writer Steve Suo set out to answer a fundamental question: What was fueling the rapid growth of methamphetamine abuse across the West? The search turned up something surprising. While meth abuse had exploded to epidemic proportions during the 1990s, it also had inexplicably subsided at times. The newspaper’s investigation asked why.”
Some conclusions:
* “The methamphetamine supply is uniquely susceptible to disruption by government.” (PDF graph) Whenever new legislation has limited access to the chemical precursors used to manufacture meth, production has slowed.
* As restrictions on meth precursors took effect, the purity of meth, and consequently its potency, decreased. (PDF graph)
* Major declines in meth purity and potency have been matched by falling rates of meth abuse, traumas and overdoses. (PDF graph)
Not the key, perhaps, but one of the keys.
Skelly
Last fall, the Portland Oregonian published a series on methamphetamine.
“In fall 2002, Oregonian staff writer Steve Suo set out to answer a fundamental question: What was fueling the rapid growth of methamphetamine abuse across the West? The search turned up something surprising. While meth abuse had exploded to epidemic proportions during the 1990s, it also had inexplicably subsided at times. The newspaper’s investigation asked why.”
Some conclusions:
* “The methamphetamine supply is uniquely susceptible to disruption by government.” (PDF graph) Whenever new legislation has limited access to the chemical precursors used to manufacture meth, production has slowed.
* As restrictions on meth precursors took effect, the purity of meth, and consequently its potency, decreased. (PDF graph)
* Major declines in meth purity and potency have been matched by falling rates of meth abuse, traumas and overdoses. (PDF graph)
Not the key, perhaps, but one of the keys.
Skelly
Last fall, the Portland Oregonian published a series on methamphetamine.
“In fall 2002, Oregonian staff writer Steve Suo set out to answer a fundamental question: What was fueling the rapid growth of methamphetamine abuse across the West? The search turned up something surprising. While meth abuse had exploded to epidemic proportions during the 1990s, it also had inexplicably subsided at times. The newspaper’s investigation asked why.”
Some conclusions:
* “The methamphetamine supply is uniquely susceptible to disruption by government.” (PDF graph) Whenever new legislation has limited access to the chemical precursors used to manufacture meth, production has slowed.
* As restrictions on meth precursors took effect, the purity of meth, and consequently its potency, decreased. (PDF graph)
* Major declines in meth purity and potency have been matched by falling rates of meth abuse, traumas and overdoses. (PDF graph)
Not the key, perhaps, but one of the keys.
busta_cap
Cannabis is very much a gateway drug, I’ve seen people go from pot to crystal meth, oxy, etc.
The “cannabis as a gateway drug” myth has been scientifically discredited for at least two decades, and yet the uninformed (and the government’s propaganda machine) keep parroting it as if it were carved in stone somewhere. It’s a lie.
busta_cap
Cannabis is very much a gateway drug, I’ve seen people go from pot to crystal meth, oxy, etc.
The “cannabis as a gateway drug” myth has been scientifically discredited for at least two decades, and yet the uninformed (and the government’s propaganda machine) keep parroting it as if it were carved in stone somewhere. It’s a lie.
someone
* Ingredients
Active ingredients (in each tablet)
Purpose:
Pseudoephedrine HCl 30 mg – Nasal decongestant
—
SUDAFED HAS NOT CHANGED
stop being tools.
Jim
“The recovery rate for addicts is no more than 5%. If you know a methhead, he’s probably dead in five years.”
I just couldn’t let this stand. Yes meth is bad for you, but this is just a total lie. The “no more than 5%” stat is pullled from thin air.
I don’t know what the real figure is and frankly, I doubt that such things can be accurately tracked. Court-ordered recovery programs might track recividism but that figure won’t be accurate either as higher recovery rates will be found among those who seek treatment voluntarily. Those who go into narcotics anonymous voluntarily are truly anonymous: they don’t track numbers.
If you want to dicourage people from trying meth, give them real facts and don’t just make shit up because you think it makes you sound smart or interesting.
Chase
John –
A lot of times I agree with you, but on this count, I think you’re wrong.
The fact of the matter is that the restrictions on pseudoephedrine ALREADY have made remarkable strides in curtailing methamphetamine abuse. Oklahoma, the first state to enact such limits, has seen its rate of clandestine meth labs drop by as much as 80 percent. These are pretty astonishing results, and they are being mirrored throughout the U.S.
Seamus
I think you failed to mention the death sentences passed down to those who actually did the Bali bombing – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bali_nightclub_bombing