DEA Administrator Karen Tandy: Intentional Deception As Propaganda
An Open Letter To The Washington Post, 4/3/06
Dear Editors:
The letter that you published by DEA Administrator Karen Tandy on March 29, "A Drug Dealer's Toll On Americans", contains several misleading statements offered as support for her advocacy for continued criminalization of marijuana. Link
For instance, she refers in her letter to the traffic crash that took the life of Victoria Rogers, alleging that the cause of the accident was a "marijuana-intoxicated motorist."
I find it significant that the only evidence that Administrator Tandy provides to underpin her allegation that marijuana use turns users into a menace on the highways is the reference to a single auto accident from February 2004.
That isn't the only problem with Tandy's account. The impaired driver in the accident to which she refers had not ingested marijuana alone- they were also using
cocaine and opiates.
Karen Tandy is well aware of the complete story. She featured it in a 2004 speech.
Link
I find it telling that Administrator Tandy didn't see fit to lay out all the facts of the case in the course of her anti-cannabis polemic. Instead, she knowingly resorted to an incomplete and misleading account of the accident in question.
Similarly misleading is Tandy's allegation that "marijuana feeds thousands of addictions -- so many that more teenagers enter treatment for marijuana
dependency than for all other drugs combined." Pete Guither does a thorough job of unpacking this canard on his Drug War Rant blog at Salon.com, using
statistics garnered from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive to note, for example, that most of the "referrals" for treatment of marijuana use- 58.1%- are the result of compulsory court orders associated with marijuana's criminalized status; and that in the case of voluntary individual referrals at the behest of affected teenagers and their parents, alcohol features in more than 5 times as many cases as marijuana. More Here
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Archive
But apart from Administrator Tandy's abuse of statistical evidence, there is a larger issue in regard to her referencing "teenagers" as though their use was the principal reason for keeping marijuana illegal. If all the criminal statutes were concerned
with was preventing easy access to cannabis by teenagers, it would be a regulated substance, not one that's illegal for all, including adults. Tandy's referencing "teenagers" camoflauges the fact that the laws against drug possession implicitly treat all citizens as though they were immature children subject
to the punishing hand of the State, taking the role of omnipotent parent. It also sidesteps the fact that unregulated contraband markets in this society are nowhere more rampantly found and difficult to dismantle than at the retail market level found in American high schools. Practically speaking, nothing would more effectively dismantle the widespread easy teenage access to drugs than drug law reform measures
that act to take the lucrative trade out of the hands of youth gangs and the antisocial criminal economy created by the manifestly ineffectual hardline
"prohibition" regime of the present day. For instance, allowing adults to cultivate and possess modest amounts of cannabis for non-commercial personal use
would largely dismantle the illegal market in the substance.
Lastly, Tandy's allegation that "users destroy their
lungs because marijuana smoke contains 50 to 70
percent more cancer-causing chemicals than tobacco
smoke" has not been borne out by medical studies,
including the recently concluded large-scale study of
long-term marijuana users by Donald Tashkin, a man
universally regarded as among the top rank of scholars
on the medical effects of cannabis.
Link
Heavy use of marijuana has been shown to increase the
risk of developing chronic bronchitis, but not cancer.
And since marijuana users typically smoke much smaller
quantities of their substance of choice than tobacco
smokers, few of them ingest amounts of smoke
sufficient to produce a heightened risk of obstructive
lung disease.
Even if her unproven allegations about the toxic effects of cannabis on the lungs were eventually found to have merit, for Karen Tandy's argument to carry any
weight logically, it would have to be extended to make all personal use and possession of tobacco products a crime. But that isn't an argument that she chooses to make, for whatever reason. And thus, she's left enmired in her own contradictions, as an apologist for a failed, unworkable, irrational regime of Zero Tolerance prohibition of marijuana that's been burdening and sapping resources from the wider
criminal justice system for decades.
Sincerely, Robert Reed, Jr.
( Whether or not you print this letter, I intend to
make it available on my blog, Another County-
http://anothercounty.blogspot.com/. Among other
advantages, it will have the added benefit of easy
access to the hyperlinks. In journalistic solidarity,
RDR. )
Dear Editors:
The letter that you published by DEA Administrator Karen Tandy on March 29, "A Drug Dealer's Toll On Americans", contains several misleading statements offered as support for her advocacy for continued criminalization of marijuana. Link
For instance, she refers in her letter to the traffic crash that took the life of Victoria Rogers, alleging that the cause of the accident was a "marijuana-intoxicated motorist."
I find it significant that the only evidence that Administrator Tandy provides to underpin her allegation that marijuana use turns users into a menace on the highways is the reference to a single auto accident from February 2004.
That isn't the only problem with Tandy's account. The impaired driver in the accident to which she refers had not ingested marijuana alone- they were also using
cocaine and opiates.
Karen Tandy is well aware of the complete story. She featured it in a 2004 speech.
Link
I find it telling that Administrator Tandy didn't see fit to lay out all the facts of the case in the course of her anti-cannabis polemic. Instead, she knowingly resorted to an incomplete and misleading account of the accident in question.
Similarly misleading is Tandy's allegation that "marijuana feeds thousands of addictions -- so many that more teenagers enter treatment for marijuana
dependency than for all other drugs combined." Pete Guither does a thorough job of unpacking this canard on his Drug War Rant blog at Salon.com, using
statistics garnered from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive to note, for example, that most of the "referrals" for treatment of marijuana use- 58.1%- are the result of compulsory court orders associated with marijuana's criminalized status; and that in the case of voluntary individual referrals at the behest of affected teenagers and their parents, alcohol features in more than 5 times as many cases as marijuana. More Here
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Archive
But apart from Administrator Tandy's abuse of statistical evidence, there is a larger issue in regard to her referencing "teenagers" as though their use was the principal reason for keeping marijuana illegal. If all the criminal statutes were concerned
with was preventing easy access to cannabis by teenagers, it would be a regulated substance, not one that's illegal for all, including adults. Tandy's referencing "teenagers" camoflauges the fact that the laws against drug possession implicitly treat all citizens as though they were immature children subject
to the punishing hand of the State, taking the role of omnipotent parent. It also sidesteps the fact that unregulated contraband markets in this society are nowhere more rampantly found and difficult to dismantle than at the retail market level found in American high schools. Practically speaking, nothing would more effectively dismantle the widespread easy teenage access to drugs than drug law reform measures
that act to take the lucrative trade out of the hands of youth gangs and the antisocial criminal economy created by the manifestly ineffectual hardline
"prohibition" regime of the present day. For instance, allowing adults to cultivate and possess modest amounts of cannabis for non-commercial personal use
would largely dismantle the illegal market in the substance.
Lastly, Tandy's allegation that "users destroy their
lungs because marijuana smoke contains 50 to 70
percent more cancer-causing chemicals than tobacco
smoke" has not been borne out by medical studies,
including the recently concluded large-scale study of
long-term marijuana users by Donald Tashkin, a man
universally regarded as among the top rank of scholars
on the medical effects of cannabis.
Link
Heavy use of marijuana has been shown to increase the
risk of developing chronic bronchitis, but not cancer.
And since marijuana users typically smoke much smaller
quantities of their substance of choice than tobacco
smokers, few of them ingest amounts of smoke
sufficient to produce a heightened risk of obstructive
lung disease.
Even if her unproven allegations about the toxic effects of cannabis on the lungs were eventually found to have merit, for Karen Tandy's argument to carry any
weight logically, it would have to be extended to make all personal use and possession of tobacco products a crime. But that isn't an argument that she chooses to make, for whatever reason. And thus, she's left enmired in her own contradictions, as an apologist for a failed, unworkable, irrational regime of Zero Tolerance prohibition of marijuana that's been burdening and sapping resources from the wider
criminal justice system for decades.
Sincerely, Robert Reed, Jr.
( Whether or not you print this letter, I intend to
make it available on my blog, Another County-
http://anothercounty.blogspot.com/. Among other
advantages, it will have the added benefit of easy
access to the hyperlinks. In journalistic solidarity,
RDR. )
posted by cabdriver at 3:12 PM
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