REEFER MADNESS!!!!!!

[BabylonHoruv]

The latter.  But if the state has a decent juvenile drug court system, or some other kind of diversion program, the kid isn't going to the Big House unless there was some other offense such as violence. 

or distribution, which as I pointed out doesn't necesarially mean he's actually selling weed.

How often does this occur?  What percentage of those charged with distribution are not distributing? 

Those statistics are not tracked, so I do not know.  They're not really trackable in any reliable way as the police mark anyone caught with more than a certain amount (varies by state) as a dealer and any dealer who has an amount that is not absurd is going to claim that he did not intend to distribute it. 

How many people are caught in the act of selling as compared to how many are caught with an amount that qualifies them to be charged with distribution is trackable, but I am not aware of anywhere to access that information.

[AFK]

We need more funding for that to happen.  We are under-funded as it is, with a Democratic President.  I would say, nationally, we really don't have the capacity to do justice to the problem that exists today.  I mean, we have managed to make progress with the peanuts we have but we could do more.  I just fear that legalizing marijuana will tip the balance and we'll lose the progress we've made, and then some.  Ethically, I can't condone taking that leap of faith.  

1.  I'm reasonably certain that everyone who WILL smoke shit IS smoking shit, based on 4 decades of observation.

2.  Eliminate the DEA, give funding to you guys.  You get funding, the kids get counseling, etc, instead of going to prison for 7 years or so, and coming out ruined.

Even if you legalize marijuana you still need the DEA.  Even if you legalized all drugs you'd still need the DEA.  Just the operation to combat prescription drug diversion and counterfeit prescription drugs is a mountain of work that someone needs to do.  It's not a good thing for people to be getting fake VIOXX and Lipitor. 

That looks like work for the FDA.

Why would you want to spend all of that time and money training FDA employees to do what DEA employees already know how to do?  Seems like a big waste to me. 

well, if the DEA has been dismantled you just take those same employees and put them under the FDA.  Counterfeit medication or adulterated medication is pretty clearly an FDA issue.

Prescription diversion may be a whole different matter, but seeing how the DEA tends to deal with problems I'm not sure I want them dealing with adulterated medication in any case.

And how do they tend to deal with problems? 

[trix]

As far as arrests and jail time most of us disagree with you over whether or not a dealer should be doing jail time.  If there isn't something wrong with adults possessing and using the drug there's also nothing wrong with distributing the drug to adults, or "manufacturing" (growing) the drug for personal use or for distribution to adults.  Also, if more than a certain amount is found on a person they are not charged with possession, they are charged with distribution.  Same with if they are the one who serves as the connection to a larger dealer for a buy among friends.  (to make that clear, if Joe, John, Diana, and Annie all want some weed, and they get together to buy a quarter pound, because it is cheaper buying in bulk, and Joe is the one who goes and buys it and then splits it up among his friends and gets caught somewhere in the process he's dealing, not possessing, even though he makes no profit on the deal) Even if Joe buys a quarter pound purely for personal use, and gets busted for it, he'll still be charged with dealing, simply because of the quantity he's been found with.

Looking at the statistics for people serving jail time for possession versus distribution is deceptive since many of those people in jail for distribution are not weed dealers.  Also, manufacturing carries heavier penalties than distribution and someone who is growing a few plants for personal use, thus staying out of the whole black market economy entirely, is going to be hit with manufacturing.

THIS.

Involvement in the weed trade would, of course, easily land anyone involved in prison.  Wisconsin is probably an unusual case in that the local cops aren't much worried about the weed trade, and it's common when pulled over with under a pound or two to have the cops take the weed and let us go.  But the fact remains that local warehouses sell cheap to the 10lbs-a-week guys, who sell to the 1/2lb-a-week guys, who sell the 'personal' size bags to the college students and friends.  AFAIK that's the common scenario for most of the sources of hydro around here.  The chain isn't very long, and most people know each other pretty well, and it's been going for years.  If a major bust were to come out of the woodwork and lock us all up, a bunch of college students would go to prison, and other college students that love to smoke would fill the void with their own grow op.  Those at the lower end of distribution are heroes to their customers.  It's very profitable, friendly, and rather easy.  Except for harvest, trimming that many plants with a small crew takes for fucking EVER.

Locking everyone up accomplishes nothing except throwing away contributing members of society, that almost always work other jobs as well or go to college.  The business is transitive; those involve change up every few years.  Some move on, replacements come in, some stick around, some branch out, etc.  It is simply not possible to put anything but an extremely temporary dent in the trade, which makes the "war" not only futile, but ridiculous.

Bottom line is, plenty of people love to smoke weed.  This cannot, and will not, be stopped, no matter how draconian the government or police get about it.

EDIT:  KYFMS?  I suppose.  Though nothing I had said got anywhere approaching specific.  It's not like the way it happens around here is unique.  But, I suppose it's better to err on the side of paranoid.

[Doktor Howl]

KYFMS rule, ITT.

Dumbfucks.

[BabylonHoruv]

We need more funding for that to happen.  We are under-funded as it is, with a Democratic President.  I would say, nationally, we really don't have the capacity to do justice to the problem that exists today.  I mean, we have managed to make progress with the peanuts we have but we could do more.  I just fear that legalizing marijuana will tip the balance and we'll lose the progress we've made, and then some.  Ethically, I can't condone taking that leap of faith.  

1.  I'm reasonably certain that everyone who WILL smoke shit IS smoking shit, based on 4 decades of observation.

2.  Eliminate the DEA, give funding to you guys.  You get funding, the kids get counseling, etc, instead of going to prison for 7 years or so, and coming out ruined.

Even if you legalize marijuana you still need the DEA.  Even if you legalized all drugs you'd still need the DEA.  Just the operation to combat prescription drug diversion and counterfeit prescription drugs is a mountain of work that someone needs to do.  It's not a good thing for people to be getting fake VIOXX and Lipitor. 

That looks like work for the FDA.

Why would you want to spend all of that time and money training FDA employees to do what DEA employees already know how to do?  Seems like a big waste to me. 

well, if the DEA has been dismantled you just take those same employees and put them under the FDA.  Counterfeit medication or adulterated medication is pretty clearly an FDA issue.

Prescription diversion may be a whole different matter, but seeing how the DEA tends to deal with problems I'm not sure I want them dealing with adulterated medication in any case.

And how do they tend to deal with problems? 

swat teams.

[AFK]

But, see, the counterfeit medications many times are going back to the same kinds of organizations involved in diverting drugs.  Sure, the FDA can tackle the problem on the pharmacy end or the user end, but they aren't equipped to go back and deal with the criminal element that got them there in the first place. 

[Telarus]

I"m glad we're keeping things relatively civil.


Prohibition forces the black market to make an end run around regulations and control to reach the end user. I consider the harm from this to outweigh harm from a natural substance that humans have been using therapeutically and religiously for thousands of years.

Case in point: the recent explosion in "synthetic cannabinoids". When I first heard about 'Spice', I totally didn't believe it. Why the fuck would some-one bother to go through the chemical process to fake a cannabinoid?

The last few articles I've read have explained that because laws like the CSA are written towards specific chemical structures, many 'synthetic cannabinoids' which activate CB1 and CB2 receptors aren't actually illegal. In this article, we actually have the invetor of one of these substances (a medical researcher here in the states), warn that these substances have a much higher chance of abuse because of their singular chemical composition, and may have unseen-as-yet side effects including the possibility of death from overdose (not possible with vegetable cannabinoids).

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/legalize-marijuana-inventor-spice-chemicals/story?id=13782613#.TgjOKYLKEVQ

When John W. Huffman invented a whole class of chemicals that mimic the effect of marijuana on the human brain, he never intended for them to launch a whole "legal marijuana" industry.

But now that "Spice" and other forms of imitation pot are sending users to emergency rooms across America, the retired professor has an idea of how to stem the epidemic. If the federal government would legalize the real thing, says Huffman, maybe consumers wouldn't turn to the far more dangerous fake stuff.

Huffman, who developed more than 400 "cannabinoids" as an organic chemist at Clemson University, says that marijuana has the benefit of being a known quantity, and not a very harmful one. We know the biological effects of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, Huffman told ABC News, because they have been thoroughly studied. "The scientific evidence is that it's not a particularly dangerous drug," said Huffman.

The "JWH" class of compounds that Huffman invented to mimic marijuana's effects, meanwhile, have not been tested the same way. "The physiological compounds effects of [JWH] compounds have never been examined in humans," said Huffman. What we do know, he says, is that "it doesn't hit the brain in the same way as marijuana, and that's why it's dangerous."

While they are known to elevate blood pressure -- unlike marijuana -- and to cause increased heart rate and anxiety, to date most of the evidence of their effects is anecdotal, and comes from things like visits to emergency rooms. "There have been a number of people who've committed suicide after using them," said Huffman.

Huffman began working on the cannabinoids in the early 1990s using a grant from the National Institute for Drug Abuse. He published academic papers that gave information on the chemical steps to make the compounds, including JWH-018, one of the easiest of the class to make and the one most often found in Spice products.

"JWH-018 can be made by a halfway decent undergraduate chemistry major," said Huffman, "in three steps using commercially available materials."

In 2008, says Huffman, someone sent him an article from the German magazine Der Spiegel about a young man using the JWH chemicals to get high. He subsequently learned that the "imitation marijuana" drugs based on his chemicals had popped up in Europe in 2006, not long after he'd published a paper describing how to make the compounds. The compounds were also being used commercially in South Korea as a plant growth product, and Huffman speculates that they migrated from there to China, where they are now being manufactured for use in Spice.

"I figured that somewhere along the line, some enterprising individual would try to smoke it," said Huffman. He didn't figure that it would become a global industry.

Anyone who ingests it recreationally, Huffman stressed, is "foolish" and playing "Russian Roulette," and the head shop owners who are selling it know what they are doing. "They can read the newspapers, they can watch TV," said Huffman. "They know what's in it. And I think they're exploiting the young people who buy them." A representative of a head shop trade group told ABC News that the products should be regulated but not outlawed.

Huffman, who opposes prohibition in general, doubts that a ban on the substances will keep kids away from it. "We declared marijuana illegal in 1937. The federal government passed the law. Now, that really did a lot of good to keep people from smoking marijuana, didn't it?"

Huffman said that making all the JWH compounds illegal would probably have similar results, but emphasizes that any decision to legalize JWH compounds should hinge on a thorough study of how they affect humans. The DEA currently bans five cannabinoids, including JWH-018 and one other JWH chemical, but Congress is weighing a more sweeping ban.

Huffman does believes marijuana should be legalized, since its effects are known. "It should be sold only to people 21 and older. It should be heavily, heavily taxed."

One of the benefits of decriminalizing marijuana, he said, would be diminishing the allure of its more dangerous substitutes.

"I talked to a marijuana provider from California, a doctor, a physician," explained Huffman, "and he said that in California, that these things are not near the problem they are in the rest of the country simply because they can get marijuana. And marijuana, even for recreational use is quite easy to get in California, and it's essentially decriminalized. And marijuana is not nearly as dangerous as these compounds."

Compare this reporting (tone, narrative presented) to a similar peice on this subject from New Zeland...when asked if they should be outlawed, and he says "Probably not, look what prohibition of cannabis has done"... the reporter goes and finds a scientist who is willing to say it.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm?c_id=204&objectid=10734721


If the effects of Prohibition are the spread of toxic versions of cannabinoids (which may lead to underage deaths, due to a different dose-to-bodyweight ratio for the LD50 level and unknown effects in humans), then Prohibition is the wrong approach.

[Doktor Howl]

I"m glad we're keeping things relatively civil.

HATE HATE BLAH SHIT HATE HATE SHIT BLAH BLAH HATE PUKE TROLL GRRR

[AFK]

I think you would first have to do some kind of study to separate the "I'm doing this because it's legal and marijuana is not" from the "hey look at this new drug, I'm going to try it and see what happens"  

The latter of which you see exemplified in the "bath salt" fad that has popped up in recent months:

http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/drugs/bath-salts-abuse-hits-michigan-cdc-reports

[Telarus]

Wat. It's Marketed as a legal cannabis replacement.


Because of that, it's a "3 to 5 billion dollar industry", smoke shops carry it and continue to sell it even they know the anecdotal evidence of people calling poison centers and going to the emergency room because of these substances (from the first article).


BTW, here's the National Institute of Drug Abuse's response to the ABC articles (which correctly points out that they funded the creation of these chemicals).

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/taxpayer-money-created-legal-marijuana-teens/story?id=13772490&page=3#.TgjVkoLKEVQ

A NIDA spokesperson defended the agency's funding for Huffman's research, saying that studying "artificial variations of brain chemicals ... has yielded major research and clinical advances."

Research into cannabinoids, said the spokesperson, "has the potential to usher in the next generation of pain medications," as well as possible treatments for obesity and multiple sclerosis."

"The scientific record demonstrates that the cost of discontinuing the pursuit of potentially life-saving medications, because such compounds could be illegally diverted and abused, would be unacceptably high."

[AFK]

So doesn't this run counter to the argument that has been given by some in this thread and others that the allure of marijuana is because it is illegal?  If that is the case then why does this "legal" version of marijuana, the Spice and K2 products, why is it alluring youth? 

[BabylonHoruv]

I"m glad we're keeping things relatively civil.


Prohibition forces the black market to make an end run around regulations and control to reach the end user. I consider the harm from this to outweigh harm from a natural substance that humans have been using therapeutically and religiously for thousands of years.

Case in point: the recent explosion in "synthetic cannabinoids". When I first heard about 'Spice', I totally didn't believe it. Why the fuck would some-one bother to go through the chemical process to fake a cannabinoid?

The last few articles I've read have explained that because laws like the CSA are written towards specific chemical structures, many 'synthetic cannabinoids' which activate CB1 and CB2 receptors aren't actually illegal. In this article, we actually have the invetor of one of these substances (a medical researcher here in the states), warn that these substances have a much higher chance of abuse because of their singular chemical composition, and may have unseen-as-yet side effects including the possibility of death from overdose (not possible with vegetable cannabinoids).

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/legalize-marijuana-inventor-spice-chemicals/story?id=13782613#.TgjOKYLKEVQ

When John W. Huffman invented a whole class of chemicals that mimic the effect of marijuana on the human brain, he never intended for them to launch a whole "legal marijuana" industry.

But now that "Spice" and other forms of imitation pot are sending users to emergency rooms across America, the retired professor has an idea of how to stem the epidemic. If the federal government would legalize the real thing, says Huffman, maybe consumers wouldn't turn to the far more dangerous fake stuff.

Huffman, who developed more than 400 "cannabinoids" as an organic chemist at Clemson University, says that marijuana has the benefit of being a known quantity, and not a very harmful one. We know the biological effects of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, Huffman told ABC News, because they have been thoroughly studied. "The scientific evidence is that it's not a particularly dangerous drug," said Huffman.

The "JWH" class of compounds that Huffman invented to mimic marijuana's effects, meanwhile, have not been tested the same way. "The physiological compounds effects of [JWH] compounds have never been examined in humans," said Huffman. What we do know, he says, is that "it doesn't hit the brain in the same way as marijuana, and that's why it's dangerous."

While they are known to elevate blood pressure -- unlike marijuana -- and to cause increased heart rate and anxiety, to date most of the evidence of their effects is anecdotal, and comes from things like visits to emergency rooms. "There have been a number of people who've committed suicide after using them," said Huffman.

Huffman began working on the cannabinoids in the early 1990s using a grant from the National Institute for Drug Abuse. He published academic papers that gave information on the chemical steps to make the compounds, including JWH-018, one of the easiest of the class to make and the one most often found in Spice products.

"JWH-018 can be made by a halfway decent undergraduate chemistry major," said Huffman, "in three steps using commercially available materials."

In 2008, says Huffman, someone sent him an article from the German magazine Der Spiegel about a young man using the JWH chemicals to get high. He subsequently learned that the "imitation marijuana" drugs based on his chemicals had popped up in Europe in 2006, not long after he'd published a paper describing how to make the compounds. The compounds were also being used commercially in South Korea as a plant growth product, and Huffman speculates that they migrated from there to China, where they are now being manufactured for use in Spice.

"I figured that somewhere along the line, some enterprising individual would try to smoke it," said Huffman. He didn't figure that it would become a global industry.

Anyone who ingests it recreationally, Huffman stressed, is "foolish" and playing "Russian Roulette," and the head shop owners who are selling it know what they are doing. "They can read the newspapers, they can watch TV," said Huffman. "They know what's in it. And I think they're exploiting the young people who buy them." A representative of a head shop trade group told ABC News that the products should be regulated but not outlawed.

Huffman, who opposes prohibition in general, doubts that a ban on the substances will keep kids away from it. "We declared marijuana illegal in 1937. The federal government passed the law. Now, that really did a lot of good to keep people from smoking marijuana, didn't it?"

Huffman said that making all the JWH compounds illegal would probably have similar results, but emphasizes that any decision to legalize JWH compounds should hinge on a thorough study of how they affect humans. The DEA currently bans five cannabinoids, including JWH-018 and one other JWH chemical, but Congress is weighing a more sweeping ban.

Huffman does believes marijuana should be legalized, since its effects are known. "It should be sold only to people 21 and older. It should be heavily, heavily taxed."

One of the benefits of decriminalizing marijuana, he said, would be diminishing the allure of its more dangerous substitutes.

"I talked to a marijuana provider from California, a doctor, a physician," explained Huffman, "and he said that in California, that these things are not near the problem they are in the rest of the country simply because they can get marijuana. And marijuana, even for recreational use is quite easy to get in California, and it's essentially decriminalized. And marijuana is not nearly as dangerous as these compounds."

Compare this reporting (tone, narrative presented) to a similar peice on this subject from New Zeland...when asked if they should be outlawed, and he says "Probably not, look what prohibition of cannabis has done"... the reporter goes and finds a scientist who is willing to say it.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm?c_id=204&objectid=10734721


If the effects of Prohibition are the spread of toxic versions of cannabinoids (which may lead to underage deaths, due to a different dose-to-bodyweight ratio for the LD50 level and unknown effects in humans), then Prohibition is the wrong approach.

Here's that direct replacement arguement I was talking about earlier with RWHN's pesticide metaphor.  Spice, K2 etc. are all things which would be directly replaced by marijuana if it were legal.

[AFK]

That assumes a rational drug user making rational decisions.  And I'll pose the above question again, if one of the arguments about marijuana prohibition is that it creates an allure and attraction to youth because it is illegal, then why are youth turning to a legal version? 

[Doktor Howl]

That assumes a rational drug user making rational decisions.

Point to RWHN.

[BabylonHoruv]

That assumes a rational drug user making rational decisions.  And I'll pose the above question again, if one of the arguments about marijuana prohibition is that it creates an allure and attraction to youth because it is illegal, then why are youth turning to a legal version? 

because it gives them the idea that they are getting away with something.