Drugs

Image from public domain.

Marijuana is great medicine. It is natural and green, and lacks the very undesirable side effects of so many other medicines, including anti-depressants. It can be ingested in brownies and cookies, to avoid being smoked. Pharmaceutical companies have no financial interest in having marijuana legalized, because if it becomes legal, people can grow their own quality marijuana weed.

Here are some good links I recently found by medical professionals that detail the medicinal benefits of marijuana:

- Taped interview with Donald Abrams, M.D., on medical marijuana.

"Short Term Effects of Cannabinoids in HIV Infection." This title relates to a study that is outlined here at the website for the Multidiscipliary Association for Psychedelic Studies. More details on the study are here.

"Cannabis in painful HIV-associated sensory neuropathy." This is an abstract. The full text is available by subscription here.

Marijuana, the AIDS Wasting Syndrome, and the U.S. Government: Letter to the editor for New England Journal of Medicine.

"Medical marijuana and the Supreme Court."

Here is a link to an article suggesting possible dangers from marijuana, but advocating further study.

- "Adverse effects of medical cannabinoids: a systematic review." The report says, in part:

"Short-term use of existing medical cannabinoids appeared to increase the risk of nonserious adverse events. The risks associated with long-term use were poorly characterized in published clinical trials and observational studies. High-quality trials of long-term exposure are required to further characterize safety issues related to the use of medical cannabinoids."

 Jon Katz. 

 Image from public domain.

A wonderful fringe benefit of my marijuana defense work has involved meeting key players who bring sense to overcome so much of the nonsense of anti-marijuana crusaders. In addition to meeting such players through NORML annual meetings, I have worked with marijuana smell expert Richard Doty, and marijuana grow experts Chris Conrad and Jon Gettman. I have met medical marijuana M.D. Lester Grinspoon by phone, which was a real trip, as his was one of the first names I learned of in the ongoing movement to legalize marijuana. It has also been an honor to know NORML founder Keith Stroup and the late Don Fiedler, who was both a great criminal defense lawyer and past NORML national director.

Teaming with marijuana cultivation experts Chris Conrad and Jon Gettman, I won a Maryland medical marijuana sentence of just a fine followed by a probation before judgment (which means my client has no conviction in the case) on a prosecution for over thirty marijuana plants.

In addition to being a marijuana grow expert, Jon Gettman is a former NORML national director. Jon and I spoke recently, and he graciously permitted me to upload his 2002 article with Virginia caselaw to beat intent to distribute prosecutions in favor of simple possession convictions, which carry drastically lower sentencing exposure. Jon. who lives in Lovettsville, Virginia, also provided me his updated resume. Check out his webpage entitled DrugScience.org.

Thanks, Jon, Chris, Keith, Don, Lester, Richard, and the rest of you who have poured your heart and souls into replacing myth with facts about marijuana. Jon Katz. 

On the indigent defense side alone, public defender offices are so overburdened with criminal defense cases that seven such offices have been turning away many people who otherwise would be qualified for their services.

Consequently, the criminal justice system must be substantially shrunk. Jon Katz

 Image from Library of Congress's website.

Here are some useful links that are destined for addition to my links page.  

- British Columbia's Supreme Court gives protections against drug laws to drug-addicted people. PHS Community Services Society v.
Attorney General of Canada, 2008 BCSC 661 (decided May 2008).

- An excellent sample Freedom of Information Act request letter, from the American Civil Liberties Union.

- The District of Columbia's Criminal Record Sealing Act of 2006. The D.C. Public Defender Service has a free information packet with sample motions for those wishing to file pro se, by calling or visiting PDS. For sealing in jurisdictions bordering D.C., Maryland's expungement application process is the simplest, generally requiring the completion of two triplicate one page forms. Virginia's sealing procedure requires filing an entirely new lawsuit for such relief. An attorney should be consulted before applying to seal or expunge criminal records, particularly by people who are not United States citizens and who need to have their criminal records reviewed periodically for such matters as security clearances. Jon Katz.

Recently during a suppression hearing in a drug case, the police officer testified that controlled dangerous substances fell to the ground from my client's pants as the cop conducted a patdown for weapons, on the cop's claimed belief that this was a valid Terry stop.

During cross examination at the suppression hearing, I asked the cop to show how my client was frisked, by putting me into the role of the client, which gave the judge a good bellylaugh as he proclaimed that I would be responsible for any contraband found during the cop's patdown of me in court. This so-called patdown demonstration revealed the very manipulation that is prohibited with Terry patdowns. The judge later indicated he tended to agree with me that the cop had demonstrated an unlawful Terry patdown, but the judge had concluded that the officer had probable cause to search based on the alleged odor of unburnt marijuana (I join the argument here that unburnt marijuana ordinarily is too hard to distinguish from lawful substances). Probable cause does in fact permit squeezing and sliding of suspected contraband, but a Terry stop does not allow that.

About the limits of a Terry  frisk, in Minnesota v. Dickerson, 508 U.S. 366, 378 (1993), the Supreme Court upheld the suppression of the drugs seized from Mr. Dickerson's pocket, the Supreme Court explained: "Where, as here, 'an officer who is executing a valid search for one item seizes a different item,' this Court rightly 'has been sensitive to the danger . . . that officers will enlarge a specific authorization, furnished by a warrant or an exigency, into the equivalent of a general warrant to rummage and seize at will.' Texas v. Brown, 460 U.S. at 748 (STEVENS, J., concurring in judgment). Here, the officer's continued exploration of respondent's pocket after having concluded that it contained no weapon was unrelated to 'the sole justification of the search [under Terry:] . . . the protection of the police officer and others nearby.' 392 U.S. at 29. It therefore amounted to the sort of evidentiary search that Terry expressly refused to authorize,  see id at 26, and that we have condemned in subsequent cases. See Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. at 1049, n.14; Sibron, 392 U.S. at 65-66."  Dickerson, 508 U.S. at 378.

How, then, can a proper Terry frisk -- which is not permitted to involve manipulation, sliding or squeezing -- determine the presence of crack cocaine in one's pocket? If the crack rock is the typical small one-dose size, it sounds particularly farfetched. Nevertheless, in one Virginia criminal case, a police officer claimed to have felt apparent crack cocaine in Mr. Dickerson's pocket during a Terry patdown. The trial judge refused to suppress, and so did Virginia's intermediate appellate court, the Court of Appeals. See Bandy v, Virginia, _ Va. App. _ (August 12, 2008). Something sounds seriously wrong here, and I hope the defense seeks appellate relief. Jon Katz.

As I became more knowledgeable over the years about the marijuana legalization movement, from time to time I would hear about Tod Mikuriya, M.D. As the May 29, 2007, New York Times tells it, Mikuriya "was an architect of Proposition 215, the state ballot measure that in 1996 made it legal for California doctors to recommend marijuana for seriously ill patients. He was also a founder of the California Cannabis Research Medical Group and its offshoot, the Society of Cannabis Clinicians."

The above-referenced New York Times article is Dr. Mikuriya's obituary, one of the many I miss in the course of each year. Only two months earlier, I linked to his webpage supporting the rescheduling of marijuana to make it available for medicinal use. It seems better late than never to sing Dr. Mikuriya's praises after his departure from this planet. His good karma will continue for a long time, and certainly infects me in the most positive of ways. A belated thanks to Tod Mikuriya. Jon Katz.

No stems, no seeds that you don't need,

Acapulco Gold is -- pfffffffffffffffff -- bad-ass weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed. - Cheech & Chong (listen here).

My introduction to the pro-marijuana culture was heavily influenced by Cheech & Chong, who at once indulged (at least Chong, and I assume Cheech) in marijuana and lampooned those who did the same. This was 1971, and I was eight years old.

Somehow, I did not take to pot. I first smelled it on someone a few years older, recoiled at its reek, and recoiled even more at the age of thirteen when some people nearby me at an outdoor concert were smoking it openly and notoriously (those were the days). Not long after that, the Jimmy Carter administration, as I understand it, promoted the spraying of paraquat on marijuana in Mexico, which then spelled health hazards to smoking it with paraquat, and I did not want the health hazard.

Part of me wanted to know more about this weed that permeated all levels of American society and culture. Ultimately, when offered some by a friend, I tried it, and did so on a few more occasions. Each time, I had been drinking some beer, too. I had trouble figuring out if I was feeling anything different than if I had just been drinking beer. Maybe I was not inhaling enough. Maybe it was low quality stuff. Maybe it was not for me.

Nevertheless, marijuana is my favorite illegal drug, which I now vicariously enjoy through my marijuana smoking clients. As I have said many times, I insist that it be legalized, and I believe that we will have a much better society if those who drink a lot of liquor switched to marijuana.

It has been over two decades since I last smoked marijuana. Since then, fascinating botanical developments have taken hold whereby excellent quality marijuana can be grown throughout the United States without needing to be imported any longer.

I hear repeated talk about marijuana's potency being much higher now than in the past, with this emphasis often coming from the anti-marijuana crowd. How true is that? If today's marijuana is stronger than 1980's marijuana, is it no different than getting the same high from one bowl today that needed more bowls twenty years ago?

Yesterday, I was asked about this marijuana potency matter by a Washington Post reporter, whom I am certain found numerous interesting soundbites to choose among. The writer told is preparing an article for this Saturday or Sunday about recent marijuana busts at two Montgomery County, Maryland, high schools, where one of the busts yielded at least two pounds of alleged marijuana. He asked me for my reaction to those who claim that some or many parents are too lax about their children's marijuana use, that this may have something to do with the parents' previous marijuana use, and that today's marijuana is more potent than yesteryear's. I replied:

- To say that a former marijuana smoker will be too lenient on his or her children's marijuana smoking is as farfetched as saying the same about a beer drinker dealing with his or her child's beer drinking.

- If today's marijuana is stronger than yesterday's, all that means is that it takes less marijuana to get the same high.

- Marijuana must be legalized now, as well as prostitution and gambling, and decriminalization of all other drugs. Without doing so, we will always have an overgrown criminal justice system that involves too much injustice, and too many unjust and incompetent judges, prosecutors, police, jailers, and probation agents.

- The overgrown criminal justice system is too expensive, and is costing me and other taxpayers money we should not need to spend. Many in the criminal justice system will be reluctant to shrink the criminal justice system, lest thy be out of jobs.

- Marijuana must be legalized to protect the Fourth Amendment. Today, cops will testify and testilie all the time that they searched a person or car based on the smell of marijuana (even going to the canard of claiming they smelled unburnt marijuana; burnt marijuana reeks, but unburnt marijuana is much more subtle, and cannot be smelled in small quantities from even a few feet away, and it is often a similar situation with larger quantities of marijuana).

- Marijuana needs to be legalized as medicine. It is a natural, effective proven alternative to many pharmaceuticals peddled by the drug companies.

- The Food and Drug administration's current drug approval process presents too expensive a hurdle for getting marijuana approved. Harvard emeritus medical professor Lester Grinspoon -- who started studying marijuana in the 1960's expecting to prove marijuana's harm but then finding the opposite to dominate -- estimates that at least $200 million is needed for studies to get a drug approved by the FDA. Absent Bill Gates or George Soros coming to the plate to fund such a study, nobody is going to pay for such a study. Marijuana is unpatented, so pharmaceutical companies will have no interest in paying for getting FDA approval of marijuana. 

- With the FDA approval process too expensive for marijuana, Dr. Grinspoon points to persuasive anecdotal evidence of marijuana's strong benefits and low risks as medicine.  

Returning to the marijuana potency issue, I ask marijuana smokers to weigh in on the extent to which I am correct that stronger marijuana mainly means that one can smoke less of it to get the same high as one could get from the less potent strains of marijuana. Jon Katz.

LSD image from DEA's website.

Although I have never used LSD, it has had a profound indirect impact on me. Ram Dass --born Richard Alpert -- likely became Ram Dass only because he was booted out of Harvard with Timothy Leary for having conducted LSD experiments in the Sixties, so he had some time on his hands to make his trip to India that is recounted in his essential and tremendously influential Be Here Now. When Ram Dass was giving out LSD in India, trying to make further sense of the drug's interaction with people, he met Bhagavan Das,who wanted in on the acid, and who introduced Ram Dass to being here now, which is a life approach that is so critical to me, and to everyone.

Although Owsley "Bear" Stanley may be legendary for his Sixties LSD manufacturing, LSD would not exist without its creator and accidental self-experimenter Albert Hofman, who left the planet on April 29 at 102 in Switzerland. After accidentally absorbing LSD through his skin as a scientist at Sandoz pharmaceuticals, Hofman experienced the following in 1943 from his first intentional LSD intake: "Now, little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vividly changing image, with its own consistent form and color."

Hofman writes more about LSD, including meeting with Aldous Huxley, in LSD - My Problem Child (1980). Without LSD, the whole course of the Sixties, its counterculture, and the Deadhead culture would have taken a dramatically different path. Thanks to Jonathan Turley for blogging on Albert Hofman and his passing. Jon Katz.