From the Archives: Ken Cuccinelli clarifies remarks on marijuana legalization as federalism issue

Ken Cuccinelli clarifies remarks on marijuana legalization as federalism issue
February 9, 2013 1:16 PM MST

Replying to a question from a self-described former addict about marijuana legalization, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli used the opportunity to explain his views on federalism to an audience of Republican activists in Albemarle County on February 9.

Cuccinelli, a candidate for governor in 2013 and author of a new book scheduled to be published on February 12, The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty (Crown Forum, 272 pages, $25), said that “one of the problems with the ever-layering on of federal regulations and commands about how we all run our governments, our local governments, our businesses, is this sort of maniacal drive that we all be the same.”

Diversity, Cuccinelli explained, “is a strength of this country. We shouldn't try to wring it out, including intellectual diversity and policy diversity, because we get these sorts of experiments and some of them don't work and some of them may work.”

Colorado and Washington
Earlier in the week, the Attorney General had told students at the University of Virginia that, with regard to the legalization of recreational use of marijuana by voters in Colorado and Washington state, “I and a lot of people are watching Colorado and Washington to see how it plays out.”

Cuccinelli used his appearance at the Albemarle GOP breakfast to clarify and expand on his remarks at UVA.

“What I expressed to [the students] was an openness to observe how things work there, both in terms of the drug side and the economics. One issue that is often discussed is how the war on drugs itself has played out. Have we done this the right way? It's been phenomenally expensive.”

If the government, he said, is “going to put people in jail and spend $25,000 [to] $30,000 a year for a prison bed, do we want it to be for someone who's pushing marijuana or pushing meth? I'll tell you what, that $30,000 for the meth pusher is well worth the deal.”

Different kinds of illicit drugs, he said, are “not the same” and policymakers have to set priorities in terms of law and of how the laws are enforced.

“We have limits on our budget and our ability to police this, so we've got to make these kinds of distinctions over time.”

'Simple federalism experiment'

The benefit of the legalization of cannabis in Colorado and Washington, he explained, is that “having data from a couple of states, whole states, that go down this path may not be good news but it will be interesting and it will be something we can learn from.”

The situation in those two Western states “is going to be interesting on several levels,” he said, including “as a simple federalism experiment.”

What, he asked, is “the federal government going to do? What are they going to do? How is this interaction between the states and federal government going to take place?”

Cuccinelli said he has no “problem watching that. It's a peculiar subject but I do think it's important that states try some things they think are appropriate and whether the federal government approves or not, the rest of us watch and learn.”

Undermining federalism
He explained he had told the UVA students, “I'm ready to watch and learn. I'm not ready to do it [legalize marijuana] but I don't want to just never ever say never to the possibility in the future.”

When the federal government forces all states to be uniform, he said, diversity and experimentation are undermined.

“We're not going to have any [experiments] if the federal government is just squashing all of us,” Cuccinelli said, adding: “That's something I have fought against as AG.”

At the same time, he continued, “I don't want you to think that I'm going to land in the governor's office and sign a legalization bill. I don't think you have to worry about it getting to the governor's desk but it's worth knowing what your candidate's saying.”


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on February 9, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Guest Post: How an Axe Murderer Helped Make Weed Illegal

by Laura Smith

Tampa police arrived at the Licata residence one afternoon in October 1933. Neighbors in the tightly-knit immigrant community were concerned. No one had come in or out of the Italian-American family’s home all day, which was strange, considering the school-aged children, and that the father, Mike, ran two bustling barber shops.

When the police opened the door, they found carnage. Twenty-one year-old Victor Licata had murdered his family with an axe the night before – his parents, one of his brothers, and his younger sister were all dead and another younger brother would be soon. Victor was discovered in the bathroom, curled in a chair, murmuring incomprehensibly. His family was trying to dismember him, he said, and replace his arms with wooden ones.

According to Larry Slomans’s book, Reefer Madness, shortly after the murders, Licata was evaluated by psychiatrists and determined to be suffering from “dementia praecox,” (now known as schizophrenia). The doctors speculated that his condition was congenital. Two cousins and a great uncle had been committed to asylums, his brother also suffered from “dementia praecox,” and his parents were first cousins. The police had been trying to have him committed for over a year, but stopped when his parents said they would care for him at home.

The case would have slipped largely unnoticed into grisly small-town lore if it were not for one detail. According to the local newspaper, at the time that he committed the murders, Victor Licata had been “addicted to smoking marihuana cigarettes for more than six months.”

Driven By Racism
Four years later when Harry Anslinger heard about the Licata case, he knew it was the break he had been waiting for. Anslinger had recently been appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (the precursor to the DEA) after making his name as a temperance hardliner during prohibition. But as Johann Hari explains in his book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, after prohibition ended, bureaus like Anslinger’s were threatened by obsolescence.

Anslinger’s office was focused on narcotics like cocaine and heroin, but these drugs were only used by a small minority. In order to ensure a robust future for his bureau, “he needed more,” Hari writes. Marijuana was used more widely.

Anslinger consulted 30 doctors about the drug’s connection to violence. All except one told him there was none, so he bucked the other 29 and trumpeted the findings of that one doctor. Anslinger warned in a congressional hearing, “Some people will fly into a delirious rage, and they are temporarily irresponsible and may commit violent crimes.”

His anti-marijuana push was driven by racism. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he was quoted as saying, and “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

Beginning in 1939, immediately following her performance of “Strange Fruit,” Anslinger began ruthlessly targeting Billie Holiday who was rumored to have a heroin addiction. Those closest to her believed Anslinger’s campaign created an enormous strain, contributing to her early death. During this time, anti-drug crusaders switched from calling it “cannabis” to “marihuana” or “marijuana,” hoping the Spanish word would capitalize on anti-Mexican sentiment.

Linking Violence to Cannabis
At hearings in 1937 on a bill to prohibit marijuana, Anslinger was asked for “horror stories” proving the marijuana-violence connection. Two weeks later, a letter from the chief inspector at the Florida Board of Health arrived telling the story of Victor Licata. The inspector also sent along a picture, presumably the young man’s mugshot, which had been circulated widely in the Florida dailies. In the photograph, Licata is crazed violence incarnate, his wild-eyed stare entirely unnerving. This would be the face of Anslinger’s marijuana crackdown.

Victor Licata, driven “mad” by reefer.

Anslinger began giving speeches and writing articles on the dangers of marijuana, harping on the Licata case. “You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother,” he said. In his most famous article, “Marijuana – Assassin of Youth” published in the American magazine, Licata is transformed from a congenitally mentally ill person into “a sane and rather quiet young man” whose reefer-toking had turned him into an axe-wielding murderer – not his schizophrenia.

Anslinger succeeded in turning marijuana into a national issue. By 1938, the film Reefer Madness had been purchased by a new director and was being circulated more widely, warning of the “frightful toll of a new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America … The Real Public Enemy Number One!”

In the 1930s, The New York Times ran dozens of articles about police crackdowns on “marijuana rings,” whereas in 1926, the paper ran an article titled, “Marijuana Smoking Is Reported Safe.”

The Marijuana Tax Act, legislation that Anslinger drafted himself, was passed in 1937, effectively making the sale and possession of marijuana illegal across the country. In 1950, Victor Licata hanged himself with a bed sheet. Meanwhile, Anslinger’s bureau flourished.

According to Hari, “within thirty years, he succeeded in turning this crumbling department with these disheartened men into the headquarters for a global war that would continue for decades.” In the coming years, hundreds of thousands of men and women – disproportionately people of color – would spend huge portions of their lives behind bars.

Reprinted from Timeline.

Laura Smith is a staff writer @timeline and a freelance journalist based in Oakland, California. Her nonfiction book, The Art of Vanishing, about the disappearance of Barbara Newhall Follett will be out from Viking in 2018.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Caffeine, the Law, and Me

by Eileen L. Wittig

I was talking with a non-coffee-drinking friend recently, and mentioned that I was probably going to have to bring caffeinated tea with me on an upcoming trip because there wasn’t going to be a coffeemaker there.

“Addict,” he said. “Nuh uh,” I responded brilliantly. “When’s the last time you went two days without coffee?” he countered. “Two weeks ago,” I shot back. “Three days?” he asked. “… It happened, I just don’t take note of when I do and don’t drink coffee.” Which was a perfectly reasonable response. “Uh huh,” he rolled his eyes.

“I am not addicted to coffee. I will prove it to you … later.” And I finished my cup of coffee. “But,” I said, “I do function better with it, and that is because of science. Black coffee is objectively healthy. In fact, here is an article citing 53 scientific studies saying that coffee is healthy. So even if I am addicted, at least the addiction is to something healthy.”

The article is actually extremely interesting, and by the end you realize that caffeine is surprisingly healthy, definitely a drug, and truly potentially addictive. (But only black coffee is healthy. Sorry, latté lovers.)

The Science of Caffeine
Chemically, caffeine blocks another naturally-occurring chemical, Adenosine, from being received in the brain. When Adenosine isn’t as active, chemicals dopamine and norepinephrine get the chance to be more active.

Dopamine is a feel-good chemical, released by the brain in response to good behavior as a kind of Pavlovian training exercise. Norepinephrine is an energy chemical, working to wake the body, trigger the fight-or-flight response, and increase awareness, memory, and attention – but also restlessness and anxiety. Everything in moderation, right?

But wait, there’s more: caffeine can boost your metabolism and burn fat. True story.

Does this not sound like the definition of a drug?

(Answer: it is. According to the Oxford English dictionary, a drug is “a medicine or substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced to the body.”)

So there’s the science for why drinkers of black coffee have a reason to tell the haters to take a long walk off a short pier, as my mother would say. But there’s a fun screw-you-government aspect to it as well, which is where things really get interesting.

The Legal Drug
“Caffeine is legal,” I told my friend. “It’s even more legal than alcohol. I can’t be arrested for driving while on a caffeine kick, so even if I am addicted, leave me alone.”

Which makes you wonder: if caffeine is an enhancing drug, and it’s legal, why aren’t the others?

“Illegal drugs are addictive, so they’re bad. Caffeine is addictive too, but not, like, addictive,” the government says. “If you’re addicted to a bad drug, you spend all your money on it and it ruins your life.” Do y’all think caffeine is free? Or that caffeine withdrawal headaches are fun?

“Caffeine isn’t a gateway drug,” they argue. Neither is marijuana, yet that’s illegal.

“Coffee is healthy, it does good things for your brain and body.” So do drugs. Which is why doctors, you know, prescribe them. When I told my friend that I function better after I’ve had caffeine, I could have been talking about any number of things, legal and illegal.

“Well, if you take too much of an illegal drug you could hurt someone!” the government says. Fine, but you can say that about pretty much anything. If I don’t sleep enough, my ability to drive is severely impaired. Thus why I sleep more than three hours a night. If I drink too much coffee, my hands get shaky, my attention span shrinks, and I don’t shut up. Talking someone’s ear off would hurt them as much as being asked a literally dopey question, and not being able to focus in traffic could also hurt someone. Thus why I don’t drink that much coffee. There is a line, and I don’t cross it. None of my self-proclaimed coffee addict friends do, either.

“Yeah but it’s so easy to take too much of an illegal drug!” the government argues back. True, but it’s not as if every person takes the exact same amount of everything they consume. If I consumed the same amount of liquor that I do protein or carbs or chocolate, I would be dead. People are capable of adjusting intake. If it’s possible for something to be fine, shouldn’t we just focus on teaching people not to take too much of it and work on rehabilitation instead of locking people away in prison for years and years?

“Well, if it’s illegal, we can avoid the whole problem of people taking too much, because fewer people will do it.” Oh sure, because that worked well during Prohibition. But suppose there would be a short-term spike in drug use if something was suddenly legalized. I bet usage would trail off like it did in Colorado and Portugal, as the excitement of having a new drug readily available wore off. People get bored easily, and I doubt the drugs would be as cheap as coffee.

“It’s just different,” the government finally says. But why is it different? Because caffeine is more socially acceptable? Because there would literally be riots with torches and pitchforks in the streets if it was banned? Because Washington couldn’t function without it?

Kind of, but no: it’s because every race consumes caffeine daily, and always has. The war on drugs began as a racist tactic, and it just never went away.

Racist War
If you have 15 minutes, you can watch John Oliver explain it here. If not, here’s the short version:
The Federal Bureau of Narcotics was created in 1930, and racist Henry J. Anslinger was appointed its first commissioner. Anslinger used his new position to attack all the people he didn’t like: mostly African-Americans, Mexicans, and anyone associated with jazz music (proof he was not only racist, but also an uncultured swine).

Anslinger decided to associate drugs – especially marijuana, because it was easiest – with minority criminals in order to gain popular support. He popularized the re-naming of “cannabis” to the Mexican’s name for it – “marihuana” – to make it sound less American and, following, acceptable. 

He spread stories of black men seducing white girls after smoking it. He said Asians were coming out of opium dens with “a liking for the charms of Caucasian girls … from good families” and bringing these girls into terrible lives. And he was convinced that “marihuana” was the reason jazz music was so awful, making the musicians “hopelessly confused and playing horribly” and inspiring them to make music sounding “like the jungles in the dead of night.” (Apparently that was a bad thing, assuming he was correct.)

His tactic worked. Nearly 90 years later, it’s still working, and drug arrests are still predominantly minorities even though studies have shown that whites abuse drugs more. Marijuana is still legally as bad as heroin, ecstasy, and LSD (all stereotypically “minority” drugs) – making weed worse than crystal meth, cocaine, and opium (all stereotypically “white” drugs). If marijuana is worse than crystal meth, where should caffeine be in this classification?

If I decided to be racist against hipsters, I could claim that caffeine makes people enjoy all that lame coffee shop music. I could say that baristas and coffee shop owners sell you caffeine so they can control your mind and own you. I could tell you that people come out of coffee shops with wild eyes and running mouths, throwing themselves in front of passing cars as they focus solely on the cups they’re carrying. I could announce that caffeine leads people to lives of dependency and poverty, and that it makes its users inbreed with each other, only to continue the cycle with their own children.

You’d laugh at me, but only until I got Buzzfeed, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times on my side. Then I’d suddenly seem way more believable, wouldn’t I? That worked for Anslinger.

The Convenience of Hypocrisy
You cannot reasonably deny that caffeine is a drug. Same with alcohol. But here we are, living our lives with both of them all over the streets, legal.

Assume the war on drugs is not and never was racist, and that it isn’t even remotely a business venture to raise money for the government, or anything other than pure people truly looking out for the common good. Even if that was the case, shouldn’t they be consistent about it and ban *all* drugs, from crystal meth to caffeine to alcohol to ibuprofen?

The war on drugs is led by flawed human beings for flawed purposes, and their hypocrisy is hurting thousands of people every day by putting non-dangerous offenders behind bars, breaking up their families, and leaving violent crimes unsolved. If the war on drugs is truly a moral issue as they claim, then perhaps they should consider the morality of what they choose to ban, how it’s classified, and what the consequences of their actions are. And they should discuss it over a cup of coffee.

Eileen L. Wittig is an Associate Editor and author of the Lazy Millennial column at FEE. You can follow the Lazy Millennial on Twitter.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Ella Fitzgerald's flirtation with reefer songs

Adam Gustafson, Pennsylvania State University

“The First Lady of Song” Ella Fitzgerald would have turned 100 on April 25: institutions from the Library of Congress to the Grammy Museum will be honoring her amazing contributions to the jazz canon.

It will be interesting to see if any tributes mention Fitzgerald’s “Wacky Dust,” her song about cocaine.

Nick Lehr/The Conversation via Wikimedia Commons

In the 1930s – just as Fitzgerald was getting her start – jazz was under fire for its purported ties to drug culture. The 1936 anti-drug film “Reefer Madness” featured party scenes of young people listening to jazz and ragtime while smoking marijuana. A year later, Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, published “Marijuana, Assassin of Youth,” which pinned the use of drugs on a culture of unscrupulous partying – with big band jazz as its soundtrack.

In this climate, an ascendant singer named Ella Fitzgerald sought to take the opposite tack and cultivated a reputation as the “girl next door.” Fitzgerald walked the fine line between being understood as a jazz artist and an entertainer. Two recordings from the beginning of her career signal this tension. “A-Tisket, a-Tasket” and “Wacky Dust” were both released in 1938. One tune would go on to become a signature hit. The other would be largely forgotten, a side note to an otherwise squeaky-clean career.

A dressed-up nursery rhyme?

By 1938, Fitzgerald had established herself as the primary vocalist for Chick Webb’s orchestra at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Under Webb, Fitzgerald began recording for Decca Records and in May 1938, Decca released Fitzgerald’s first major hit, “A-Tisket, a-Tasket.”

It was a song that perfectly encapsulates Fitzgerald’s girl-next-door image. It opens with Webb leading the orchestra through a stock series of simple chord changes. When Fitzgerald enters, listeners are treated to a reworked nursery rhyme that asks little of them other than to sit back and enjoy. There is no moral value, no hint of the singer’s inner life and no mention of drug use.

Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘A-Tisket, a-Tasket.’

In fact, “A-Tisket, a-Tasket” is barely jazz. As with Goodman and so many other bandleaders in the late 1930s, Webb and Fitzgerald seem more interested in creating a pop tune that fit the 78 RPM format than in staying true to their genre. Yet it became so popular that she and Webb recorded a follow-up track, “I Found My Yellow Basket,” that same year.

But then – just a few months after “A-Tisket, a-Tasket” – Webb and Fitzgerald recorded “Wacky Dust,” a song about the allure and dangers of cocaine use.

Ella’s reefer song

How Fitzgerald moved from a nursery rhyme to a song about cocaine says more about jazz culture than it does Fitzgerald’s own tastes. And while songs about drugs were common in jazz, “Wacky Dust” put Fitzgerald in the awkward position of recording a song that ran contrary to the image that she was trying to cultivate.

Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Wacky Dust.’

The release of “Wacky Dust” coincided with a massive shift in cultural opinion taking place in the U.S. about the use of drugs like cocaine and marijuana. Once a relatively uncontroversial social issue, drug use in the 1930s increasingly came to be seen as a societal ill that was especially (and incorrectly) tied to African-Americans and jazz musicians. Even sympathetic artists couldn’t help but buy into the stereotype. George Gershwin’s operatic adaptation of DuBose Heyward’s novel “Porgy,” for example, was revolutionary for its diverse cast, but the story, written and adapted by two men of European descent, reinforced the popular perception of prevalent drug use among African-Americans.

Jazz artists in the early 1930s didn’t do much to help this view. Just as big band jazz was coming to dominate the music scene, two of the era’s biggest names released songs with direct references to drug use.

In 1933, Cab Calloway’s “Reefer Man” was used in the film “International House.” A year later, Benny Goodman released “Texas Tea Party,” a reference to both marijuana and to the trombonist on the recording, Jack Teagarden. These were not subtle works, and most jazz artists of the era produced what have since become known as “reefer songs.” Even Louis Armstrong – who, like Fitzgerald, cultivated a rather benign image – was arrested for smoking marijuana and recorded several tunes that allude to drug use.

So when “Wacky Dust” was released, the idea of one of the great New York City house bands recording a jazz tune about drugs wasn’t all that surprising. (Fitzgerald and Webb had experimented with a similar subject a couple of years earlier with the release of “When I Get Low I Get High.”)

Like “A-Tisket, a-Tasket,” Wacky Dust opens with Webb’s orchestra. Fitzgerald doesn’t enter until nearly one-third of the way through the song. The first verse aligns cocaine with jazz and describes how easy it is for musicians to access the drug. The second verse and bridge section describe its wonders, but the final verse takes a turn, with Fitzgerald warning that the drug can’t be trusted and might kill you.

While “A-Tisket, a-Tasket” went on to become one of Fitzgerald’s signature pieces, “Wacky Dust” has faded into relative obscurity outside of specialty albums that feature songs about drug culture. And this makes sense. Fitzgerald was extremely careful about her image, and “Wacky Dust” didn’t fit. In fact, after “Wacky Dust,” Fitzgerald moved entirely away from songs that alluded to drugs.

By the 1950s, she had embarked on a recording career that displayed an unrivaled musicianship and joy for singing. Nonetheless, one has to wonder what her career would have looked like had “Wacky Dust” been the hit of 1938, rather than “A-Tisket, a-Tasket.”

Adam Gustafson, Instructor in Music, Pennsylvania State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Stephen Jimenez discusses Matthew Shepard's murder at Virginia book festival

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 1, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Stephen Jimenez discusses Matthew Shepard's murder at Virginia book festival

Investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez discussed his 2013 book, The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard, in Charlottesville on March 20 at the Virginia Festival of the Book. Jimenez participated in a panel called “Shifting Identities” at the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library.

In The Book of Matt, Jimenez explores alternative explanations for the 1998 beating and murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, which at the time was thought to be an unprovoked gay bashing and hate crime.

Shepard's murderers were convicted of second degree murder but not a hate crime. Jimenez looks into a seedy underworld connection between Shepard and one of his convicted killers, Aaron McKinney. Based on his research, Jimenez posits that both Shepard and McKinney were involved in the crystal meth trade in Colorado and Wyoming and disputes the notion that anti-gay animus motivated McKinney and Russell Henderson, who also was convicted of Shepard's killing.

Disrupting the narrative
After the panel, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner interviewed Stephen Jimenez about his research and conclusions.

When the author began working on this story, he had no plans to disrupt the narrative of Matthew Shepard's murder as an anti-gay hate crime.

Almost 15 years ago, Jimenez traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, to write a TV movie about the Shepard murder, spending eight months working on a screenplay that ultimately went unproduced.

At the time, he “believed that the story of this anti-gay murder was really very important and deserved the long form of the television movie but” just as he thought his research for the screenplay was finished, he “started to realize there were other things going on around this crime.”

After extensive interviews with Cal Rerucha, the principal prosecutor of the Shepard case, “I felt I really wanted to look deeper. I also felt – as a gay man as I got into some of the methamphetamine side of the story, as someone who's a survivor of the AIDS era – that methamphetamine was becoming a very, very big problem in urban gay enclaves but also it was moving through a substantial part of the country: through the Midwest, through states like Missouri and Kansas and Iowa and then, in the West, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming. When I realized what methamphetamine was doing, I felt it was critical to tell that part of the story that had been largely excluded.”

'Drug laws have failed'
Asked whether his findings had implications for the wider debate about drug prohibition, Jimenez replied that “I'm quite libertarian when it comes to drugs.”

He explained that he believes that “drug laws have failed miserably” and that there is “a lot of organized crime” involved in the war on drugs.

“It's not by accident,” he added, “that some very vulnerable communities have been set up” as markets for methamphetamine.

“Meth has been a problem on native American reservations,” Jimenez said. “Meth has been a problem in the gay community. Meth has been a problem in economically depressed towns, communities across the country.”

His purpose in writing The Book of Matt, he explained, was to show how “the issues in this case are full of human complexities. Matthew was a human being. The perpetrators were human beings.”

He said “it behooves all of us to understand those complexities if we're serious about dealing with the many different manifestations of violence and hatred in our culture and in the world at large.”

Resistance and acceptance
Although there has been some resistance to his alternative theory of the Shepard murder – which upends the accepted narrative similar to the way Dale Carpenter's book, Flagrant Conduct, changed the accepted story of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that resulted in overturning sodomy laws in the United States – Jimenez said that reception of his book has generally been positive.

“I just completed a 34 city tour” in which “city number 33 was Laramie, Wyoming. I spoke to a packed theater there on a night when it was 10 below zero. A few hundred people came out.”

There were many comments and questions at that Laramie appearance, he said, but “not one person stood up and disputed my findings.”

While he was touring the country, Jimenez said he encountered “minuscule resistance to what's in the book. In fact,” he added, “it only happened at one book store in Washington, D.C., but everywhere else I spoke in the country, people were very open to the findings of the book.”

Since The Book of Matt began as a movie project, it should come as no surprise that “there have been some initial inquiries” adapting it into a film. While Jimenez has not done anything to pursue that possibility yet, because he's working on other projects, “maybe, with the passage of time, a movie can be made,” he said.

SUGGESTED LINKS

‘Flagrant Conduct’ author Dale Carpenter discusses how sodomy laws ended
First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams talks about free speech in Charlottesville
UVA political scientist analyzes 2012 election, looks toward 2016 GOP nominee
Former U.S. ambassador to Vatican talks diplomacy at Virginia book festival
GOP can regain control of Senate in 2014, says strategist Grover Norquist

Original URL:  http://www.examiner.com/article/stephen-jimenez-discusses-matthew-shepard-s-murder-at-virginia-book-festival

Guest Post: Report slams ‘unscientific’ war on drugs

By Tania Rabesandratana

Global policies to control illegal drug use tend to ignore scientific evidence and can undermine development efforts, global experts warn.

Repressive policies meant to protect people from the damage caused by drugs have caused disease, deadly violence and discrimination, says the Johns Hopkins-Lancet Commission on Drug Policy and Health, drawing on decades of research.

They say that efforts to clamp down on drug use have helped spread HIV and other infectious diseases, as users are forced to take drugs in secret and struggle to access sterile equipment such as syringe needles.

The report also highlights a spike of homicides in countries where governments use military forces against drug traffickers, which, in turn, causes drug gangs to arm themselves.

“Alternative development programmes really haven’t addressed the underlying factors that lead people to cultivate drugs.”

Rebecca Schleifer, Yale University

Ahead of a special UN meeting on the subject in New York, United States, on 19-21 April, the commission urges governments to focus on reducing harm from drug use rather than on punishment.

“The war on drugs and zero-tolerance policies that grew out of the prohibitionist consensus are now being challenged on multiple fronts, including their health, human rights and development impact,” the researchers explain in a paper published in medical journal The Lancet on 2 April.

The report highlights “aggressive and harmful practices” against farmers who grow drug crops such as coca, cannabis and opium poppies. This includes the forcible destruction of coca fields in the Andes through large-scale herbicide spraying, which causes health problems and environmental damage among affected communities and can force farmers to abandon their land.

Meanwhile, “alternative development” programmes to encourage farmers to switch to other crops have largely failed through poor design, says an appendix to the report.

“Alternative development programmes really haven’t addressed the underlying factors that lead people to cultivate drugs,” says Rebecca Schleifer, who studies drugs and human rights issues and is a fellow at Yale University in the United States. For example, she says, some programmes require farmers to destroy their crops before they can get aid.

“But if you do that before alternatives [are in place] you just undermine these farmers’ livelihoods,” Schleifer says.

The Lancet paper argues that minor, non-violent drug offences should be decriminalised. It recommends focusing on harm reduction services, such as providing supervised injection sites and prescribing replacement drugs for those addicted to opioids such as heroin, instead of aggressive drug policing.

The authors also endorse a gradual move towards regulated legal drug markets — as Uruguay has done with cannabis, for example — and for this change to be assessed scientifically.

In addition, they “call to broaden the research agenda around drug use [beyond] brain pathology” to include economic and social science, says commission co-chair Adeeba Kamarulzaman, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Malaya in Malaysia.

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On a practical level, the indicators used to evaluate drug policies should change, the paper suggests. “Success has been measured in hectares [of drug crops] eradicated, in kilos [seized], numbers of people arrested, convicted, incarcerated,” Schleifer explains. “These don’t really measure anything apart from scale of effort.”

The paper references the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and related promises for governments “to rely on the best scientific evidence” as they seek to ensure the “wellbeing of all people”.

But drug policy discussions are still far from adopting the language of SDGs, says Kamarulzaman. “Most countries are still stuck on criminalisation and zero tolerance,” she says.

Schleifer is more optimistic. While drug control policies and development efforts used to be completely separate, links between the two have been increasing in recent years, she says.

The same people who adopted the SDGs last September are returning later this month for the high-level UN meeting on drugs, she says. “It’s a tough road ahead, but even controversial subjects such as decriminalisation are on the table.”

References

Joanne Csete and others Public health and international drug policy (The Lancet, 2 April 2016)


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