cannabisnews.com: Czar Wars: The White House Lectures Seattle on Pot





Czar Wars: The White House Lectures Seattle on Pot
Posted by CN Staff on September 17, 2003 at 20:58:47 PT
By Dominic Holden 
Source: The Stranger
President Bush's drug czar, John Walters, is leading a new systematic nationwide effort to quash citizens' initiatives on pot reform. The trend was established last year when Walters successfully campaigned to defeat initiatives in Nevada, Ohio, and Missouri. Last week, his campaign arrived in Seattle for an afternoon press conference, just six days before the primary election, to challenge Initiative 75--a measure to deprioritize Seattle's pot laws. After this story went to print, I-75 held a comfortable lead at 58.62%. --Eds.
Miraculously, even though I'm the steering committee chair of I-75, I made it through the door, grabbed a free cookie, and eagerly took a seat, without so much as a peep from the swarms of men in black. The event was set against the backdrop of the Recovery Centers of King County detox facility--a politically savvy choice on Walters' part. The health-oriented facility could make one forget that Walters is more supportive of throwing people in prison than sending them to rehab for addiction. The setting was also misleading, since this place had likely never detoxed a single person for just pot. When I asked how many people came to detox for pot alone, the facility was unable to cite any examples.Before Walters could step up to the flag-draped lectern, we watched presentations from a couple of local officials, who gave the impression that Walters' 25-city tour was, in fact, part of a local effort. First up, to my surprise, was City Attorney Tom Carr. Carr had been my halfhearted opposition at editorial board meetings all over town. Here, he was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with White House minions who vehemently opposed the initiative. Just the week before, as I was sitting across the table from Carr during one ed board meeting, he was asked, "On a scale of one to 10, how opposed are you to I-75?" Carr responded with a tepid "Five." But suddenly, with Walters by his side, Carr practically revoked his status as a progressive Seattleite--delivering a speech praising the work of the White House, offering to collaborate with D.C., and thanking Walters for "sending the right message." Finally, we got to hear from John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. His central mantra is this: Treatment facilities for illicit drug users are clogged with more pot smokers than users of any other drug, many of those arrested for other crimes test positive for marijuana, and initiatives to decriminalize pot are sending the wrong message to kids. All the pieces of Walters' well-crafted propaganda had one thing in common: Each tied indisputable facts to an unrelated editorial conclusion while leaving out relevant details. In his first point--namely, that around 50 percent of young people are in U.S. drug treatment centers for marijuana use--Walters concluded that marijuana is very dangerous and addictive. What's left out is that these folks reluctantly choose treatment centers over cellblocks in order to skip jail time. Really, which would you choose: a treatment center with comfy beds and nice healthcare professionals, or a 12-foot-by-12-foot concrete box? Although Walters opposes measures to implement rehabilitation over incarceration, he paints an illusion of a growing problem that doesn't exist. Next, Walters cited a 2002 statistic from the National Institute of Justice, stating that 39 percent of male arrestees in Seattle test positive for pot, whereas far fewer test positive for cocaine or methamphetamine. Walters would have you conclude that smoking pot makes people spontaneously break other laws. There are two missing links in this equation: the number of people who use these drugs in the first place, and the physiology of how long these drugs stay in the body. Marijuana is the most popular illicit drug; meth and cocaine are used by a relatively small percentage of the population, so of course more people have pot in their systems. Cocaine stays in the body for only a few days, but THC (pot's active ingredient) is stored in fat cells and then released into the bloodstream over a period of weeks. One could test positive for pot more than a month after one's last toke. Finally, Walters' strongest piece was designed to trigger fear in parents everywhere: "Initiatives like I-75 send the wrong message to kids," and "What about the children?" Walters' ceaseless braying about the children has the best intentions; realistically, nobody wants children to get high. Nobody. But Walters' approach--saying that pot is very dangerous--only exacerbates the problem. How do kids respond to D.A.R.E.'s message that kids should "Just say no"? Any parent knows the fastest way to entice an adolescent is to label something "dangerous" and make it off-limits. Walters' talk of implementing treatment for abusers and keeping our kids off pot is admirable, but it doesn't reflect what is actually happening under his policies. None of the $19 billion drug-war budget has been shifted away from enforcement and toward treatment (or toward offering kids information that will help them understand drug abuse). And how, exactly, would a young person be helped if he or she actually got busted? Going to jail, losing opportunities for student aid, and being branded with a criminal record is a greater setback than smoking a joint. Walters recently proposed $600 million for treatment programs, but if that ever happens, it's still a token drop in the bucket considering the drug war's overemphasis on enforcement. The sermon is a charade, since Walters really supports locking people up (over 700,000 for pot offenses last year in the U.S.). Walters didn't acknowledge that maintaining current levels of drug-law enforcement would send millions more people up the river, waste countless billions of tax dollars, clog our courts, and ultimately fail to reduce our drug problems. A real drug war would be a war on addiction, misinformation, and joblessness, rather than a war on otherwise law-abiding citizens. Unfortunately, Walters' propaganda campaigns have been very effective. Nevada's Question 9 (a measure similar to I-75) was the focus of his visit to that state during the 2002 election. Walters managed to scare the crap out of parents by holding multiple news conferences, meeting with newspapers, and concluding his visit with a crescendo of pricey TV ads. Bruce Mirkin of the Marijuana Policy Project, the primary organization that sponsored Question 9, said that while Walters campaigned, "we saw poll results shift. Early results showed us even, but we ended up losing, 39 percent to 61 percent." By the time this article is inked, Walters will be off to his next city, and we'll know if he was as successful in Seattle as he was in places like Nevada. Both the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have come out against I-75. If the measure has passed, Seattle can give itself a pat on the back for sticking to its guns and not succumbing to pressures from the Bush administration. If I-75 has failed, Walters will have racked up another victory in Bush's strong-arm efforts against local communities' attempts to rein in the ill-conceived drug war. Dominic Holden is the steering committee chair of Initiative 75 and the director of Seattle Hempfest, the nation's largest marijuana policy reform rally. URL: http://www.thestranger.com/2003-09-18/city4.htmlComplete Title: Czar Wars: The White House Lectures Seattle on Pot InitiativeSource: Stranger, The (Seattle, WA)Author: Dominic HoldenPublished: Vol 13 No. 1, Sep 18 - Sep 24 2003Copyright: 2003 The StrangerWebsite: http://www.thestranger.com/Contact: postmaster thestranger.comRelated Articles & Web Sites:Seattle Hempfesthttp://www.seattlehempfest.com/Sensible Seattle Coalition http://www.sensibleseattle.org/Seattle Votes To Make Marijuana Low Priorityhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread17340.shtmlVoters Scald Latte Tax; But Pot Measure Passinghttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread17334.shtmlSeattle Voters Favor Measure on Marijuana http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread17332.shtml
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Comment #5 posted by Arthropod on September 18, 2003 at 11:11:31 PT:
Hold on a second now
Aren't you forgetting something Sam? Walters is paid to "protect" the children. The last thing he would want is some snot-nosed kid's opinion. This has nothing to do with actually looking after their welfare, he just wants to protect them from a normal life without fear of incarceration for using a plant. If children were to ever shake off the fear of jail time, they might actually start looking at the people shaking that stick in their face. 
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Comment #4 posted by OverwhelmSam on September 18, 2003 at 06:38:02 PT:
Message To The Kids?
"Finally, Walters' strongest piece was designed to trigger fear in parents everywhere: "Initiatives like I-75 send the wrong message to kids," and "What about the children?""What about the kids? Do you mean teenagers or pre-pubescent kids? If you mean teenagers, let's ask them what they think if you're so concerned about them. I'll bet they tell you that incarceration for marijuana is bullshit. 
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Comment #3 posted by WolfgangWylde on September 18, 2003 at 06:17:34 PT
Yes, of course you are right...
...It is the metabolites of THC that remain in the system for weeks on end. That active THC hangs around is just another bald-faced Prohibitionist lie.
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Comment #2 posted by DevoHawk on September 17, 2003 at 23:33:42 PT:
THC Not A Unique Acronym
"THC (pot's active ingredient) is stored in fat cells and then released into the bloodstream over a period of weeks." is not correct to my understanding. This is a very good article. I just want to make sure people know that the active ingredient does not stay in the system so we remain far more knowledgeable than the Prohibitionist as they espouse misinformation.Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol known as THC is the active ingredient which circulates in the blood stream for a few hours after vaporizing/smoking cannabis.11-nor-9-tetrahydrocannabinol-9-carboxylic acid also known as THC is the main inert ingredient left over after the active cannabinoids have been metabolized by the body. I believe this is what is absorbed by fat cells?The main metabolite excreted in the urine is 11-nor- 9-tetrahydrocannabinol-9-carboxylic acid. Some cannabis drug tests are based on the principle of the highly specific immunochemical reactions between antigens and antibodies, which are used for the analysis of specific substances in biological fluids. Generally with sensitivity to not less than 50 ng/ml of THC: the metabolite. 
From “The Emperor Wears No Cloths” Jack Herer Below:In effect these doctors said that the active ingredients in THC are used-up in the first or second pass through the liver. The leftover THC metabolites then attach themselves, in a very normal way, to fatty deposits, for the body to dispose of later, which is a safe and perfectly natural process. Many chemicals from foods, herbs, and medicines do this same thing all the time in your body. Most are not dangerous and THC metabolites show less toxic* potential than virtually any known metabolic leftovers in your body! 
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Comment #1 posted by Patrick on September 17, 2003 at 22:17:21 PT
Very cool
This was a well written article. Kudos to the author for telling it like it is.
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