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Post by Admin on Aug 20, 2020 7:48:03 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 4, 2020 0:59:55 GMT
Breaking Down a Model Bill to Decriminalize All Drugs filtermag.org/decriminalize-all-drugs-bill/On August 6, the Drug Policy Alliance* released a detailed proposal to decriminalize all drugs at the federal level. The timing was intended to coincide with the 50th anniversary of President Nixon signing the Controlled Substances Act, which launched the modern War on Drugs. “The world we are proposing will significantly reduce the harm experienced by the most marginalized in our society and actually improve public and community health,” said Queen Adesuyi, a policy manager at DPA’s Office of National Affairs. “It will also reveal the truth—that the problem has never been drugs. After one of the largest political uprisings in history this year, maintaining the status quo is not as politically feasible as it might have been in the past.” “Across the country and within the halls of Congress, it is becoming more and more common to hear elected officials [say] that drug use should not be treated as a criminal issue.” Titled the Drug Policy Reform Act, the model bill’s many provisions including abolishing criminal penalties for drug possession, decarceration, expungement of drug criminal records, anti-discrimination measures, and reinvesting money into communities and drug-user health. It would give the power to categorize and regulate controlled substances, currently held by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) instead. “Across the country and within the halls of Congress, it is becoming more and more common to hear elected officials speaking directly to the fact that drug use should not be treated as a criminal issue, but instead a matter of public health—especially in the context of marijuana,” Adesuyi told Filter. “While the progress that has been made on marijuana reform has moved the needle, it goes nowhere near addressing the full scope of drug prohibition and the harms it has had on Black, Latinx, Indigenous and low-income people.” Under the proposal, all criminal penalties would be repealed for simple possession of drugs—and also for possession with intent to distribute a personal-use quantity. One key, therefore, is to define what constitutes a “personal-use” quantity. Is it one gram of heroin, or a kilogram? To address this, DPA’s bill would require the NIH to create a task force to determine the relevant quantities for all drugs. This would include experts in harm reduction and addiction treatment, as well as people who use drugs and communities with a history of high drug enforcement. Next, the bill would destroy the federal drug-war regime as we know it. It would abolish the DEA, the police agency responsible for enforcing the Controlled Substances Act. It would also abolish the Office of National Drug Control Strategy (ONDCP) and the Bureau of International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement Affairs (INCLE). These agencies, which respectively report to the White House and the State Department, currently help develop and coordinate national and international drug law enforcement. But the bill goes further. It would also ban spending by other federal agencies on drug enforcement, including the Customs and Border Protection and US Coast Guard, which play key roles. And it would ban state governments from using federal funds to enforce and prosecute drug possession—including the purchase and use of military equipment for drug enforcement. Besides enforcement and policing, the bill addresses many of the harms that come from a criminal record for drugs. It mandates automatic and retroactive expungement of records for drug possession, and “immediate release, pending resentencing” for people currently in prison for these charges. No one with a drug conviction would, under the bill, be denied federal benefits like food stamps, education or housing assistance. Mandatory drug testing for people on welfare benefits, or on probation or parole, would be banned. Employers would be prohibited from asking job applicants about their criminal records, and no one would lose the right to vote in a federal election because of a drug conviction. How realistic is it? Encouragingly, the bill includes many policies that have already been implemented in parts of the United States. The bill doesn’t just abolish or ban bad things, however; it also creates new good things. Drug war money would be reinvested in a grant program under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This would would fund social and health services, science-based addiction treatment, harm reduction programs like sterile syringes and safe consumption sites, non-police crisis interventions, and pre-arrest diversion programs. To decide where money would go, HHS would convene a special board, including drug users and communities harmed by drug enforcement. The bill additionally addresses the important area of education and information. It would ban the Department of Justice from funding any addiction prevention or drug education programs, handing that responsibility to HHS. The federal government would expand research on drug harm reduction and the effectiveness of non-prohibition policies. And all state and local governments would be required to provide uniform, real-time data on all drug enforcement, including demographics of people arrested and substances recovered by police. There’s much more to the Drug Policy Reform Act: It also addresses no-knock warrants, the so-called “crack house” statute, civil asset forfeiture, and the harms of drug enforcement to immigrants. How realistic is it? Encouragingly, the bill includes many policies that have already been implemented in parts of the United States. Just look at Ban the Box in New York City, expungement for marijuana convictions in Illinois, marijuana decriminalization in Virginia and restoration of voting rights for people with felonies in Kentucky, to name a few. Nothing DPA is proposing is without precedent of some kind. The Limits of Decriminalization But a decriminalization framework comes with its own problems. Because it does not legalize drugs, it means that people who use them still have to seek them from unregulated sources. This puts them at continued risk of overdose or other harms from drug contamination or mixing. And because drug selling and trafficking would still be criminalized, there would certainly continue to be arrests and incarceration for those offenses under the DPA bill. People who aren’t arrested would likely still face civil citations and fines. That’s certainly better than a night in jail, but amounts to a regressive tax on people who would struggle to pay it. As the record has shown us, marijuana decriminalization—and even legalization—have not ended all arrests, although they have reduced them. Nor have they prevented those arrests from continuing to fall overwhelmingly on Black and Brown people. The Drug Policy Alliance acknowledges these shortcomings, and portrays its model bill as a move in the right direction, rather than the eventual goal. It perhaps reflects perceptions of what is realistic in Congress in the foreseeable future. “While all-drug decriminalization is a first step in ending the war on drugs and repairing the extensive damage it has done on communities of color and low-income communities, it is of course only that—a first step,” said Theshia Naidoo, DPA’s managing director for criminal justice. “It will not fully repair our broken and oppressive criminal legal system or the harms of an unregulated drug market. To fully end the war on drugs, we do have to look at legal regulation and supply, which is something that DPA is conscientiously exploring.” The Drug Policy Reform Act is nonetheless a welcome outline for a better future. It will be interesting to see how it is received by both Republicans and Democrats. * The Drug Policy Alliance has previously provided a restricted grant to The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, to support a Drug War Journalism Diversity Fellowship.
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Post by Admin on Sept 7, 2020 19:36:54 GMT
WATCH: How the British Empire Became One of the Biggest Drug Pushers in History A third of Brits believe countries were better off for being colonised by the British empire – but many don't know of the horrors inflicted on Britain's former colonies. www.vice.com/en_uk/article/y3z4pk/british-empire-biggest-drug-pushers-historyIt comes like clockwork, every month or so: What’s wrong with being British? What’s so wrong about being proud of our history? In August, the right-wing talking point came courtesy of Last Night of the Proms, which was forced to confirm that yes, they would play “Land of Hope and Glory” and “Rule Britannia”, contrary to earlier reports that suggested they wouldn’t. And that was the end of it. Except it wasn’t! After countless articles, #DefundtheBBC tweets, Bury Football Club issuing a formal statement, TalkRadio presenters doing their best to remember the words in a reverse-engineered-for-maximum-outrage Twitter video and, finally, Boris weighing in with all the grace of an elephant ballet choreographed by Dominic Cummings, we mark yet another depressing but unsurprising low point in the culture war over British identity and nationalism. I say unsurprising because the roots of this manufactured outrage are perfectly plain to see. According to YouGov research, a third of Brits believe countries were better off for being colonised by the British Empire. They are also more likely to be nostalgic for their empire than people from other former colonial powers, like France, Italy, Spain and Germany. The VICE News series Empires of Dirt is trying to take on this collective nostalgia in an ongoing series of videos. The series will cover the spread of colonialism from the various hearts of Europe’s different empires across the world, from Africa to Asia, Latin America and Australia. There are things that almost everyone knows about the British empire – it ruled India, for instance, and abolished slavery. There’s even an aesthetic – the white linen suits, the pith helmets, the porcelain china and teatime on the veranda. But scratch beneath that and suddenly things get a little more complicated. Where did the tea come from? Who made the porcelain? Whose hands gathered the cotton for the linen? Who was doing the actual enslaving? (Eric Williams, the Caribbean academic and then-prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, once wrote: “The British historians wrote as if Britain had introduced […] slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.”) I grew up in Singapore, which only stopped being a British colony less than six decades ago. In this former colony, a number of customs, institutions and bureaucratic processes still retain the flavour of Britishness. Take my old school. It was named after Queen Victoria and had a school song that praised both the institution (“Victoria thy sons are we / and we will not forget”) and the monarch herself by extension. We sat A Levels and spoke British English – “colour”, not “color”; “football”, not “soccer” – and went on holidays, not vacations. When I moved to the UK, I was surprised when people expressed shock at all this. Events that had been drilled into me at school – that the British abandoned Singapore to the Japanese army in World War II, that they’d simply surrendered and left thousands to die – were minuscule footnotes in the collective memory here, if they were even remembered at all. It was a little like running into an ex and realising that, actually, they don’t think of you at all. And that, actually, they have a ton of exes? And they’re really good at staying friends after the break-up, contrary to what a lot of people think?? Like millions of people around the world, I live with the aftereffects of colonisation – I am a postcolonial subject of a now long-gone empire, whatever that means. It’s a legacy that has touched my family both directly and indirectly. In the latest episode of Empires of Dirt, I talk about how my great-grandfather died in Hong Kong of opium addiction – opium that he got hooked on thanks to the British systematically trafficking drugs into China so they had something to trade for goods like porcelain, silk and tea. I felt the wandering hands of empire in subtler ways, too. As Empires of Dirt will cover in a later episode, homosexuality is banned in Singapore under Section 377A of the penal code – a colonial policy originally named Section 377 that was imported from the British during their time in India. Did I curse the first British settlers as me and my girlfriend hid from our homophobic classmates and school teachers to make out behind the gym? Not really – I was too busy putting my hand up her top. But did that prickly sense of fear and shame – of being in a country that would humiliate and punish me for who I was – creep under my skin and follow me all the way into adulthood, even after I came out as bi? Well, yes, obviously. I’m not the only one who grew up steeped in the tea-stained backwash of the British empire. The experience of colonisation unfolded differently from country to country, but what united these disparate places was the people who were doing the colonising and the policies they enacted to achieve it. Section 377 is just one example of a policy that was imported to ruinous effect for LGBTQ people in dozens of colonies – a colonial hangover that is still bearing poisoned fruit today. With Empires of Dirt, we wanted to focus the lens on the colonisers and institutions that enabled empire, and the singular worldview that had the effect of flattening entire populations into resources to be exploited and subjects to be ruled over. The products of the British empire – sugar, opium, tobacco – weren’t just numbers on the spreadsheet of a colonial governor. They didn’t spontaneously appear in the tasteful Georgian house of a merchant trader and his wife in Piccadilly. They came with lives and body counts attached, my great-grandfather included. This is our shared heritage – one that draws together the different experiences of people from all over the world, and their children and grandchildren, who might now be living in the beating heart of the former British empire itself. It’s one that should seek to recognise the commonalities of our experiences and honour our differences. It’s what defines us as Britain and as a commonwealth – this complicated, tangled legacy of empire. We need to recognise this history as the thing that unites all of us, but we can’t do that until we understand fully what that history even is. @misszing
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Post by Deleted on Sept 15, 2020 6:45:07 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Sept 16, 2020 12:58:20 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 21, 2020 14:29:02 GMT
Understanding alcohol use among people with lived experience of a mental health problem University of Liverpool "Do you have a diagnosis of either bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or other psychotic condition? Do you currently drink alcohol or are a non-drinker (but have previously drank alcohol)? Are you aged 18 or older?
If you answered yes to these questions, we would like to invite you to take part in a telephone-based research study at the University of Liverpool. We want to interview you about your experiences of drinking or not drinking alcohol and how this may have changed over time. We are a group of individuals who have lived experience of a mental health problem. If you take part you will be paid with a £20 voucher (Love2Shop).
If you are interested in taking part or would like more information please contact Jo-Anne Puddephatt via email at joannep@liverpool.ac.uk."
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Post by Admin on Sept 21, 2020 20:42:50 GMT
DRUG WAR End the War on Drugs Drug prohibition turns police officers into enemies to be feared rather than allies to be welcomed. JACOB SULLUM | FROM THE OCTOBER 2020 ISSUE reason.com/2020/09/19/end-the-war-on-drugs/?utm_medium=emailIn this month's issue, we draw on decades of Reason journalism about policing and criminal justice to make practical suggestions about how to use the momentum of this summer's tumultuous protests productively. Check out Damon Root on abolishing qualified immunity, Peter Suderman on busting the police unions, Sally Satel on rethinking crisis response, Zuri Davis on restricting asset forfeiture, C.J. Ciaramella on regulating use of force, Alec Ward on releasing body cam footage, Jonathan Blanks on stopping overpolicing, Stephen Davies on defunding the police, and Nick Gillespie interviewing former Reasoner Radley Balko on police militarization. "Critics of prohibition need to guard against the temptation to merely tinker with the drug laws." Jacob Sullum "The Fixers" December 1991 Louisville, Kentucky, police officers did a lot of things wrong when they killed Breonna Taylor, an unarmed 26-year-old EMT and aspiring nurse, during a fruitless no-knock drug raid last spring. But the litany of errors that led to Taylor's death would be incomplete if it did not include the biggest mistake of all: the belief that violence is an appropriate response to peaceful conduct that violates no one's rights. If politicians did not uncritically accept that premise, which underlies a war on drugs that the government has been waging for more than a century, Taylor would still be alive. The March 13 raid followed a sadly familiar pattern. Plainclothes police officers break into someone's home in the middle of the night and respond with reckless, overwhelming force when the residents have the temerity to defend themselves. After such incidents, we usually say that confused, bleary-eyed people—in this case, Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker—mistook the cops for criminals. But the reality is that the cops in situations like this are criminals, or would be but for the war on drugs. Drug prohibition legalizes conduct that otherwise would be instantly recognized as felonious, including assault, theft, trespassing, burglary, kidnapping, and murder. It makes police officers enemies to be feared rather than allies to be welcomed. The Louisville City Council responded to Taylor's death by banning no-knock raids—a welcome step of questionable relevance, since the cops who raided her apartment, notwithstanding their no-knock warrant, banged on the door before breaking it in and claim they identified themselves (a point disputed by Walker and by Taylor's neighbors). The police chief responded by initiating the termination of the officer who "displayed an extreme indifference to the value of human life" when he "wantonly and blindly fired 10 rounds" into Taylor's apartment. If judges did not routinely rubber-stamp search warrants, police investigating drug dealing might be less likely to invade the homes of people who are not actually drug dealers. And if cops were better trained in the appropriate use of deadly force, they might not fire wildly into an apartment building when the victims of such home invasions exercise their Second Amendment rights. But reforms like these do not address the fundamental problem. When politicians insist on using force to prevent consumption of drugs they don't like, bad things happen, starting with the violence that is required to enforce their pharmacological prejudices. That problem goes far beyond the cases, such as Taylor's, that are highlighted by Black Lives Matter. When a middle-aged white couple is killed in a drug raid instigated by a black narcotics officer who lied to obtain the search warrant (as happened in Houston last year) or a white 19-year-old is fatally shot by a white police officer during a marijuana sting (as happened in South Carolina several years ago), those outcomes are just as senseless and heartbreaking as the death of a young black woman gunned down by white drug warriors. Drug prohibition also fosters violence by creating a black market in which there are no legal, peaceful ways to resolve disputes. A 1989 analysis of New York City murder cases, for example, found that, contrary to the impression left by politicians and journalists at the time, "crack-related" homicides were not committed by people under the influence of crack. The vast majority grew out of black-market conflict. The black market that generates violence also generates artificially high profits, since traffickers can earn a risk premium by supplying contraband. According to a RAND Corp. estimate, Americans alone spend about $150 billion a year on marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. The worldwide value of illegal drugs may be three or four times as high. Profits from that business strengthen murderous criminal organizations and foster corruption throughout the law enforcement system. In one recent case, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent had a drug trafficker buy a $43,000 truck so he could seize it for his own use. In another case, a Customs and Border Protection agent was paid by drug traffickers for 10 years to facilitate smuggling. In yet another case, police officers in Philadelphia and Baltimore had a sideline in selling the drugs they seized. And then there's the perennial problem of correctional officers who smuggle drugs into prisons. As it did during national alcohol prohibition, that sort of corruption tends to undermine respect for the law. So does the sense that police are arbitrarily targeting a small percentage of lawbreakers for arrest and punishment, especially when enforcement has a racially disproportionate impact. In New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, annual arrests for the lowest-level marijuana possession offense, which had averaged fewer than 2,500 under the two mayors who preceded Giuliani, skyrocketed after 1996, peaking at more than 50,000 in 2011. Blacks and Latinos, who together represented about half of the city's population, accounted for 84 percent of the possession arrests that year. On its face, the surge in pot busts was puzzling in light of the fact that New York legislators supposedly decriminalized marijuana possession back in 1977. But possessing marijuana that is "burning or open to public view" remained a misdemeanor. Defense attorneys frequently complained that cops were manufacturing misdemeanors by patting down young men, ostensibly for weapons, and pulling out joints or bags of weed, which were then exposed to "public view." Another technique was asking people to hand over whatever contraband they were holding, at which point they could be charged with a crime. When you combine such trickery with the routine hassling of young black and Latino men that prevailed under the "stop, question, and frisk" program, it's not surprising that police are widely viewed as the enemy in many neighborhoods they're supposed to be protecting. And the disparities seen in New York are seen throughout the country: Nationwide, black people are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession as white people, even though they are only slightly more likely to be cannabis consumers. The FBI recorded more than 660,000 marijuana arrests in 2018, more than nine out of 10 for simple possession. While people arrested for possessing small amounts of marijuana usually do not spend much time behind bars, they suffer long-lasting ancillary penalties that make it harder to obtain an education, earn a livelihood, and find housing. Police in the United States reported a total of 1.7 million drug arrests in 2018. At any given time, nearly half a million people are incarcerated in U.S. jails or prisons for drug offenses. Drug offenders account for almost half of federal prisoners and 15 percent of state prisoners. Arresting all of those people for actions that violated no one's rights unjustly deprives them of their liberty and impairs their life prospects. It also hurts their families and communities. And it frequently entails draconian penalties, including sentences of years, decades, and even life, for nonviolent offenses. A man named Andy Cox, for instance, is serving a life sentence in federal prison for growing marijuana for recreational consumers, which is now a legal business in nine states. Prohibition obviously makes drug use more dangerous by exposing people who violate it to the risk of violence and arrest. It also makes drug use more dangerous by creating a black market where quality and purity are unpredictable, which is not typically a problem with legal drugs. As the government succeeded in driving down opioid prescriptions as part of the recent crackdown on pain pills, for example, the upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated. That was not a coincidence, since the crackdown drove nonmedical users from legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals toward highly variable black-market substitutes. The emergence of fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute has magnified the risks faced by illegal drug users. That phenomenon is also driven by prohibition, which pushes traffickers toward more-potent drugs because they are easier to smuggle. Just as alcohol prohibition drove a shift from beer and wine to distilled spirits, drug prohibition has driven a shift from opium to heroin, and now from heroin to fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, which are even more potent. By raising drug prices, prohibition encourages injection, the most efficient route of administration. And by obstructing access to sanitary injection equipment, prohibition fosters soft-tissue infections and the spread of blood-borne diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis. One thing that's especially notable about these burdens is that the people who bear them are not, by and large, the people who benefit from them. Prohibition makes life worse—in many cases, a lot worse—for people who defy it. Those harms supposedly are justified by the goal of protecting people who are deterred by prohibition from bad choices they might otherwise make, a tradeoff that is morally dubious even if you accept paternalism as a legitimate rationale for government intervention. Which is not to say that the burdens of prohibition fall exclusively on people who like illegal drugs. Everyone else pays too, in the form of squandered taxpayer money, diverted law enforcement resources, theft driven by artificially high drug prices, and eroded civil liberties. For decades the war on drugs has been the most important factor encouraging the Supreme Court to whittle away at the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. Among other things, the Court has blessed pretextual traffic stops, warrantless rummaging through our trash, warrantless surveillance of private property by low-flying aircraft, mandatory drug testing of public school students, search warrants based on anonymous informants who may or may not exist, and searches triggered by a police dog's alleged "signal." The war on drugs is also the main excuse for the system of legalized theft known as civil asset forfeiture, which allows police to take cash and other property they claim is connected to drug offenses. We could avoid these disastrous consequences if the government respected the individual's right to control his own body, including the substances that enter it. The government would still have a role, as it does with alcohol, in enforcing laws against fraud, protecting the public from reckless behavior such as impaired driving, and defending parents' authority by imposing age restrictions on drug sales. But it would otherwise leave adults free to make their own choices.
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Post by Admin on Sept 21, 2020 22:07:05 GMT
From Mass Incarceration to Plan Colombia: Biden’s Role in the Failed War on Drugs Former vice president Biden has a sordid history of opposing progressive criminal justice legislation, spearheading draconian police and immigration measures, and playing a central role in waging America’s failed war on drugs. by Alan Macleod www.mintpressnews.com/mass-incarceration-plan-colombia-biden-role-war-on-drugs/271375/September 21st, 2020 By Alan Macleod @alanrmacleod 0 Comments In an increasingly angry and bad faith campaign, Donald Trump and his team are presenting Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as an anti-police radical controlled by the far left. Last week, the Trump campaign sent a text message to supporters warning them that Antifa would raid their homes if Biden wins in November. “They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door,” warned Florida congressman Matt Gaetz. The reality, however, is that the 77-year-old former vice president has a long history of opposing progressive legislation and spearheading increasingly more draconian police, immigration, and criminal justice measures. Biden first shot to prominence in the 1970s, when, as a freshman senator, he became a leading voice against bussing, the practice of desegregating schools via public transport (something his now-running mate Kamala Harris grilled him on during the debates). He also maintained a close relationship with arch segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond, who left the Democratic party and became a Republican due to his vehement opposition to the Civil Rights Act. He even read the eulogy at Thurmond’s funeral, around the time of which it came out that Thurmond had fathered a child with a 15-16-year-old black servant girl working for him. “Hang People for Jaywalking” But Biden’s problematic history with race goes much further; the Delawarian has been one of the chief architects of the racist prison system we live under today. For decades, he pushed for more cops, more jails, more arrests, and more convictions, even criticizing the notorious Ronald Reagan for not locking enough people up. Throughout the 1980s, he and Thurmond worked on a number of bills that radically reshaped the criminal justice system, including the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act which limited parole and cut sentence reductions for good behavior. Biden continued to attack Republican George H.W. Bush from the right on crime, in 1989, condemning his draconian proposals as not going far enough. “In a nutshell, the President’s plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time,” he said, later demanding to know why Bush hadn’t executed more drug dealers like he wanted. Despite Bush pushing through substantial increases to the prison industrial system, Biden continually demanded more, publishing his own plans that included billions more in funding for increased numbers of police, FBI, and DEA agents. This all culminated in what in 2007 he called his “greatest accomplishment” in politics: the controversial 1994 Crime Bill. Often labeled the “Biden Crime Bill” because of its author and chief promoter, the bill laid the basis for an ever-increasing prison population, introducing the death penalty for dozens of new offenses and spent billions on hundreds of thousands of extra police and prison cells. Just as Bill Clinton was making a point of returning to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally handicapped black man, Biden was staking out his position as a new leader of the new, “tough on crime” Democrats, boasting that his bill meant that “we do everything but hang people for jaywalking.” As his biographer Branko Marcetic wrote, Biden makes Hillary Clinton look like [civil rights advocate] Michelle Alexander.
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Post by Admin on Sept 29, 2020 18:56:01 GMT
Addiction Treatment: How Many Meds Does It Take to Get Sober? www.madinamerica.com/2020/09/addiction-treatment-how-many-meds/Disclaimer: Consult a medical professional for medical advice. Stopping psychiatric drugs, especially abruptly, can be dangerous, as withdrawal effects may be severe, disabling or life-threatening. This article is not meant to deter anyone from recovery, or what they find helpful. Rather, this article is meant to shine a light on what leads to, or hinders, long-term outcomes and to offer relevant, and perhaps unknown solutions. This article does not represent the views, opinions, or experiences of any employer or organization with which I may be affiliated. “They said it wasn’t a gateway drug. My homie was taking subs (Suboxone) and he ain’t wake up. The whole while, these billionaires, they kicked up, paying out Congress so we take their drugs.” ~ Macklemore (from his song, Drug Dealer) In Macklemore’s lyrics, you could substitute “OxyContin” for “Suboxone” and it would accurately describe two of the main reasons why the opiate crisis got so bad: false marketing and corporate greed. I believe we are at the beginning of another epidemic, and it’s playing out in the addiction treatment industry (ironically, the very place designated to treat the first epidemic). I have been working in the addiction treatment industry for the past 15 years. I am also an individual in long-term recovery. I came into recovery in 2004, right as the ripples of the opiate crisis were beginning to hit the shores of treatment. Since 2004, I have seen the recovery rate drop and the relapse and overdose rate rise. This is my professional assessment, not scientific data, yet, most of us know someone struggling with addiction, or unfortunately, who has died from addiction: most likely, due to opioids. We may also know people in recovery; but probably fewer. During my professional and personal time in addiction recovery, I began to see an increase in the medications used in treatment. I started to wonder, “How many medications does it take to get sober?” I asked that question because I wasn’t seeing a lot of people recover using the medications. In fact…. The biggest correlation I’ve noticed with relapse and overdose is the amount of psychiatric medications being prescribed. It used to be against the law to treat narcotic addicts with narcotics (The Harrison Act). In 2000, the Drug Addiction Treatment Act (DATA) changed that. DATA gave physicians the ability to treat opioid dependency with narcotic medications, mainly buprenorphine (the main ingredient in Suboxone), which is considered a schedule III drug. Physicians were also allowed to use schedule IV drugs, schedule V drugs, or any combination thereof. To put this in perspective, schedule IV drugs include benzodiazepines, one of the most addictive substances known to man. “In the US, prescriptions for benzodiazepines more than tripled and fatal overdoses more than quadrupled in the past 20 years” since 2000, the year DATA was passed. ”Benzos” are becoming an epidemic in their own right.
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Post by Admin on Oct 1, 2020 10:17:56 GMT
Labour Must Not Turn Its Back on Drug Reform By Lola Brittain Under the Blair government, Labour led the way on the War on Drugs. Now, with clear evidence of its devastating impact on working-class and minority communities, the party must take seriously the demands for reform. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/09/labour-should-not-turn-its-back-on-drug-reformThe Labour Party’s approach to drug policy has long been a source of disappointment and despair for anti-prohibition activists. It has a dismal record that spans successive leaders; from drug testing in schools and abstinence orders during the Blair years to calls to outlaw nitrous oxide canisters in recent months. It has hardly stood on the side of fairness or reason, submitting instead to law, order and ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric. Fortunately, the party may finally be turning its back on the approach responsible for so much harm. On Wednesday, the Labour Campaign for Drug Policy Reform (LCDPR) published a report in a bid to drag it away from the moral panic-indued position. The report, which was the culmination of an eighteen-month long grassroots campaign rooted in public participation and open discussion, outlines recommendations to transform the party’s less than progressive approach into one that is fairer, more equal and more compassionate. From Gorseinon to Grimsby, Liverpool to Portsmouth, the recommendations speak to the experiences of over 700 attendees from 12 regions across the UK. With the aim to be representative in both geographical scope and focus, they are exclusive to neither the concerns of the ‘metropolitan elite’ nor inhabitants of the ‘Red Wall.’ As an ambassador for the LCDPR, I want to explain what those recommendations are and why they are so important. Let me start with the headline: “We have to accept to that we can no longer treat the millions of UK citizens who use drugs as criminals.” Though sections of Westminster remain somewhat engulfed by the false assumption that tough drug talk sells, a punishment-based approach has few beneficiaries. A case study in the report speaks to this reality far better than I ever could: My son would be alive if he had not been criminalised so readily as a young adult if there has been a safe space for him to go to inject and if the stigma of illegality had not forced him to hide his growing problem over many years. Kevin was intelligent, funny, held down a skilled job and had a lot to offer to society. But one day he hid himself in a locked toilet to inject and his life gradually ebbed away when it could so easily have been saved. Believe it or not, the UK was once a “world leader in harm reduction strategies.” That broke down in the Blair years, giving way to the ludicrous quest for a “drug-free society” and, as Lord Falconer admits in a self-reproaching article, the institutionalisation of prohibition. The report sets out ways to repair the damage. Responding to soaring drug-induced mortality rates (a total of 5,546 people died in 2018, and that’s only those on record) and the concurrent decay of and disinvestment in life-saving services, it calls upon the party to expand harm reduction measures that reduce the risk of overdose and infection. It recommends tried and tested methods including heroin-assisted therapy, drug consumption rooms and the expansion of the availability of wonder drug, naloxone. The report also outlines the need for investment in treatment services. To be frank harm reduction can save lives, but alone, they will do little to change them. With the crisis as bad as it is, a holistic approach is critical. The report calls upon the party to stimulate peer-led recovery networks and develop both accommodation support schemes and training schemes for those with a history of problematic drug use. Public health is not the only focus: it cannot be emphasised enough that the drug issue is also a class and race issue. Attempts to drag drug policy into the ever-erupting culture wars cannot obscure the fact that the most marginalised communities have suffered the most from prohibition. The Tories’ London mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey might want to shift the focus to middle-class coke habits, but it is no coincidence that the North East – the most deprived region of England – is also that which registers the highest number of drug-related deaths. As Lord Falconer admits, the drug war is “in effect, an attack on the working class.” To anybody familiar with the US-inspired drug war, it is also an attack on black and minority ethnic communities who suffer disproportionately at the hands of the not-so-effective and oh-so-discriminative use of stop and search. As the Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy tells Tribune, “the burden of criminalisation and harassment falls heaviest on low-income and BAME communities,” who are “the disproportionate victims of drug-related crime, death and addiction.” And racial discrimination also transposes into courts, whereby black and ethnic minority offenders are 1.5 times more likely to go to prison for drug offences than their counterparts. The report keenly acknowledges the prejudice and discrimination inherent in our criminal justice system; it’s clear that there is “one rule for the powerful and another for the rest” and Labour must end the criminalisation of people who use drugs. Decriminalisation is not the catch-all answer to racial injustice or class-based inequalities, but it’s a start. The first port of call though is diversion schemes. Some have queried this decision, but in the current context – with a 2024 general election a long way off – the schemes effectively offer a way to push through decriminalisation now, giving Labour mayors, as well as police and crime commissioners, the power to divert people from the criminal justice system and out of a criminal record. Possession shouldn’t be a mark on a person’s life, and this achievable policy will make sure it isn’t. Crime does briefly feature, but the take-home message is simple: society is sick and, it shows. The illegal drug market thrives on social dislocation and deprivation. Its allure is often rooted in a lack of stability and opportunity. To tackle the crisis, we need to address the structural causes that are manifest across the UK. The report doesn’t hold the key to that, but it’s an important point that requires this acknowledgement. Like many other issues that existed in the pre-pandemic world, the ensuing Covid crisis will only make things worse. With youth unemployment bubbling up to one million, the increased use of stop and search occasioned by the strengthening of police powers and national mental health on downwards slope, the conditions for drug use, abuse and enterprise have never been better. It figures that this has to be a turning point for Labour. The party has a responsibility to acknowledge its role in the consolidation of the drug war and stand for something better. It has to push against the climate of prohibition-supporting opinion that it helped to create and stand with those set to suffer under Conservative inertia. If taken onboard, these recommendations will push party policy much further than Corbyn’s Labour would go, but they are neither particularly radical nor controversial. Supported by a coalition of MPs from Ribeiro-Addy to Alex Sobel, they are a pre-packaged leap in the right direction that Keir Starmer would do well to take. A failure to do so – to borrow his term – would be nothing short of gross incompetence.
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Post by Admin on Oct 26, 2020 10:07:32 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 4, 2020 16:14:59 GMT
What the UK can learn from the US push towards the legalisation of drugsVoters in states across America have passed landmark drug reform measures. leftfootforward.org/2020/11/what-the-uk-can-learn-from-the-us-push-towards-the-legalisation-of-drugs/While the US election may be dominating the headlines, other important results are coming in from the roughly 120 ballot measures on policy and constitutional issues across the states. Voters in a number of states have endorsed landmark measures, including decriminalising all drugs, legalising cannabis and decriminalising psychedelics. The state of Oregan, for example, is voting on decriminalising possession of a small amount of any drug, while Arizona, South Dakota, Montana and New Jersey have all voted to legalise recreational and medicinal marijuana. They join 11 other states, plus DC – of different political hues – that have liberalised their drug laws in recent years. Washington DC, which legalised cannabis in 2015 (although it can’t be sold commercially), is voting on legalising psychedelic drugs. So where does that leave the UK in its treatment of drug use and possession? Just last week, Britain took a step towards decriminalising cannabis as police chiefs in a West Midlands pilot agreed to exempt repeat offenders from prosecution, The Times reports. If someone repeatedly uses cannabis, cocaine or heroin there, they won’t get a criminal record if they agree to go on a diversion programme, including rehab. Nonetheless, the UK is still behind many other countries, including Portugal, which decriminalised possession of a small amount of drugs back in 2001, and the US as mentioned. The decision around legalisation of use and possession of drugs has its pros and cons. On the one hand, those against legalisation believe it would send out the wrong message. There is a lot yet to discover about the dangers of different drugs, for example scientists have found there may be a link between cannabis use and mental illness. Moreover, the Centre for Social Justice released a report in 2018, finding that legalising cannabis could lead a lot more people to take it and as many as 100,000 more people to become addicted. This said, there is also much to be learned from taking steps towards legalising drug use. Those supporting it argue that drug use happens either way, so being able to regulate it will make it safer for those using. For people who are addicted to drugs, getting caught up in the justice system is not the help they need. Many argue it would be better to legalise use so people are more likely to get the medical help they need. Deaths are also less likely to happen if people feel they are free to get help rather than worrying about the legal implications. After Portugal decriminalised drugs, it has seen a huge decrease in both HIV infections and drugs-related deaths. In 2001, Portugal saw 80 recorded deaths as a direct result of illicit drug use. In 2012 that number had dropped to 12, as this report shows. Health Poverty Action, a group working to strengthen poor and marginalised people in their struggle for health, said: “The Home Office won’t legalise cannabis “because it is detrimental to health and mental health”. Criminalising drugs is detrimental to health & people’s lives too. Let’s make drugs & the drugs trade safer with #legalregulation“ There are clearly arguments for and against legalising drug use, and there are different levels at which you can do this. But as states across the US pass major drugs-related reforms, it’s an issue the UK must keep on its radar too. Lucy Skoulding is a freelance reporter at Left Foot Forward. Follow her on Twitter.
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Post by Admin on Nov 8, 2020 17:35:13 GMT
The Hungry Ghost: A Biopsychosocial Perspective on Addiction, from Heroin to Workaholism www.confer.uk.com/event/ghost.htmlSaturday 16 January 2021 - A Live Webinar A Webinar with Dr Gabor Maté Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event) Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 13 January For twelve years Gabor Maté was the staff physician at a clinic for drug-addicted people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where he worked with patients challenged by hard-core drug addiction, mental illness and HIV, including at Vancouver Supervised Injection Site. In his most recent bestselling book, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he shows that their addictions do not represent a discrete set of medical disorders; rather, they merely reflect the extreme end of a continuum of addiction, mostly hidden, that runs throughout our society. The book draws on cutting-edge science to illuminate where and how addictions originate and what they have in common. In this live webinar for Confer, Gabor will discuss how he has come to understand what is often claimed to be the source of addictions. He has discovered that this is not found in genes but in the early childhood environment where the neurobiology of the brain’s reward pathways develop and where the emotional patterns that lead to addiction are wired into the unconscious. Stress, both then and later in life, creates the predisposition for addictions, whether to drugs, alcohol, nicotine, or to behavioural addictions such as shopping or sex. Helping the addicted individual requires that we appreciate the function of the addiction in someone’s life. More than a disease, he will propose that it is a response to a distressing life history and current life situation. Once we recognise these roots – and the lack the addict strives (in vain) to fill – we can develop a compassionate approach toward them, one that stands the best chance of restoring that person to wholeness and health.
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Post by Admin on Nov 16, 2020 23:08:10 GMT
Published on Monday, November 16, 2020 50 Years After the Start of the War on Drugs, Americans Have a Chance to Fix the Harm It CreatedToday, policymakers and the public alike are increasingly adopting approaches that treat substance use as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice one. www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/16/50-years-after-start-war-drugs-americans-have-chance-fix-harm-it-createdNext year will mark 50 years since President Richard Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one,” launching a new war on drugs that has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into law enforcement, led to the incarceration of millions of people — disproportionately Black — and has done nothing to prevent drug overdoses. In spite of the widespread, growing opposition to this failed war, made clear yet again on Election Day, punitive policies and responses to drug use and possession persist. As President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris prepare to take office, it is abundantly clear that they have a mandate from the electorate to tackle this issue. Today there are more than 1.35 million arrests per year for drug possession, with 500,000 arrests for marijuana alone. By comparison, there are less than 500,000 arrests per year for violent crimes. Every 25 seconds a person is arrested for possessing drugs for personal use, and on average, a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though Black and white people use marijuana at similar rates. At least 130,000 people are behind bars in the U.S. for drug possession, some 45,000 of them in state prisons and 88,000 in jails, most of the latter in pretrial detention. While tens of billions of dollars are spent each year to prosecute this war, more than 70,000 people still die of drug overdoses. Deaths from heroin overdose in the United States rose 500 percent from 2001 to 2014. Overall deaths from drug overdoses remain higher than the peak yearly death totals ever recorded for car accidents or guns. The war on drugs has failed, and Americans on the right and left are ready for it to end. These views were on display at the ballot box this month, when voters across the county approved every ballot measure on scaling back the war on drugs. From Arizona, Oregon, and Montana to South Dakota, New Jersey, and Washington D.C., Americans turned out in droves to say that it’s time to stop criminalizing drug use. The effort in Oregon, led by the Drug Policy Alliance and supported by the ACLU, was the most groundbreaking. This ballot measure decriminalized the possession of drugs for personal use, replacing it with a maximum fine of $100 and funding drug addiction treatment and recovery programs with the savings and tax revenue from marijuana. Measure 110 will prevent more than 3,000 arrests per year for possession of drugs such as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines. Oregon is now the first state in the nation to decriminalize all drugs, laying the foundation for reorienting and grounding the government’s response to drugs in public health rather than criminal law. Other states also showed that drug law reform is a winning issue on both sides of the aisle. Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota all legalized marijuana, joining 11 other states and Washington D.C. South Dakota, where Trump received 62 percent of the vote, showed that legalizing marijuana is a bipartisan issue, as did Montana, which elected Republicans to every major office in the state, while also voting to legalize marijuana. The war on drugs is inextricable from the struggle for racial justice in the United States. President Nixon launched the war in an effort to win more white voters in the South. He knew that by linking drug use to civil rights protests and Black communities he could appeal to the white vote opposed to racial integration. John Ehrlichman, a prominent official in the Nixon White House, said in 1994: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” With resounding victories in red and blue states on marijuana, President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris have a clear decree from voters. The Biden-Harris administration will have numerous options to act. Sen. Harris is the primary sponsor of the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act (H.R. 3884, S. 2227), federal legislation that would decriminalize marijuana, remove it from the list of scheduled substances, expunge many past convictions and arrests, and support racial justice efforts. The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the MORE Act next month. The Biden-Harris transition team should provide their support. Beyond legislation, the Biden-Harris administration can act by using the president’s clemency power to commute the sentences of people in federal prison for marijuana offenses and other drug-related offenses, and pardon people who are living with past criminal convictions for marijuana and other drug-related offenses and are facing thousands of collateral consequences. They do not need congressional approval for these actions, which could help thousands of people. Today, policymakers and the public alike are increasingly adopting approaches that treat substance use as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice one. This recognition is bipartisan, and the war on drugs has not differentiated between blue states and red states. The Biden-Harris administration can begin healing our nation by moving decisively on this issue and beginning to repair the harm caused by 50 years of this failed war.
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Post by Admin on Nov 21, 2020 17:08:05 GMT
A new article, published in Noûs, explores how self and social identity can be used to better understand addiction, as an alternative to the traditional disease model understanding of addiction. An identity as an “addict” can become a primary avenue of connection to others, making imagining alternative identities feel like an existential threat, making the process of recovery much more challenging. The author, Hanna Pickard, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, identifies steps that can be taken to better assist those struggling with chronic substance addiction to develop alternative identities to that of “addict.” She opens up possibilities for addressing social injustices, like poverty and isolation, that prevent individuals with substance addiction from imagining a life and a self without drugs. Pickard writes: “For people whose identity as an addict provides their main if not only source of social reward and community, structure and purpose in life, self-esteem, and sense of self and social identity, the act of imagining their life and identity in the absence of their addiction is far from straight forward. Which people and relationships replace the people they know and care for? What activities fill the day? And most of all, who would they be? Abandoning their identity as an addict represents an existential threat: there may be no alternative social identities or underlying stable, core sense of self to fall back on.” Reimagining the “Addict” Identity Important for RecoveryPhilosopher Hanna Pickard examines the role that self and social identity play in perpetuating substance abuse and aiding with recovery efforts. www.madinamerica.com/2020/11/reimagining-the-addict-identity-important-for-recovery/“Living on the margins of society, addicts may love, protect, and care for each other, while they face their collective daily need for drugs in a context of poverty, homelessness, disease, disability, and police harassment and violence. Their identity as addicts is precisely what binds them together: quitting using would involve quitting the community and these relationships. Meanwhile, the lack of treatment, housing, health care, and employment opportunities, combined with the intense stigma surrounding this form of addiction, means that in reality, abstinence does not guarantee a better life, let alone the possibility of replacement relationships of comparable commitment and meaning.” The ways substance use and addiction are romanticized within Western society as something to be desired may also contribute to the sense of value that an individual might gain from holding onto the “addict” identity. The addicted lifestyle also provides its own sense of structure, giving individuals a sense of meaning and purpose. Life becomes centered on getting and using drugs. For some, losing this sense of purpose in life can make stopping use even more challenging. Some individuals struggling with addiction may also experience a sense of pride in their “addict” identity – not to say that they also do not experience feelings of shame or regret, but instead, that when other alternatives are not available, which is especially true of those who are socially and economically disadvantaged, it is easy to understand why the “addict” identity might provide some with a source of pride. Addiction and the selfHanna Pickard onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/nous.12328Abstract Addiction is standardly characterized as a neurobiologi-cal disease of compulsion. Against this characterization, I argue that many cases of addiction cannot be explained without recognizing the value of drugs to those who are addicted; and I explore in detail an insufficiently recog-nized source of value, namely, a sense of self and social identity as an addict. For people who lack a genuine alter-native sense of self and social identity, recovery represents an existential threat. Given that an addict identification car-ries expectations of continued consumption despite nega-tive consequences, there is therefore a parsimonious expla-nation of why people who identify as addicts continue to use drugs despite these consequences: they self-identify as addicts and that is what addicts are supposed to do. I conclude by considering how it is nonetheless possible to overcome addiction despite this identity, in part by imag-ining and enacting a new one. Importantly, this possibil-ity requires the availability of social support and material resources that are all too frequently absent in the lives of those who struggle with addiction.
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