A report released today by the RAND Drug Policy Research Center undercuts the longstanding federal government claim that Mexican drug gangs are reaping the bulk of their profits from the exportation of marijuana to the United States.
States RAND, “The claim that 60 percent of Mexican drug trafficking organizations gross drug export revenues comes from marijuana is not credible.”
And just who was the source of this ‘not credible’ statistic? In this case, full credit must go to the nation’s top anti-drug office, the Office of National Drug Control Policy — aka the Drug Czar’s office.
Marijuana big earner for Mexico gangs
via The Associated PressPosted 2/21/2008 8:55 PM |
MEXICO CITY — Marijuana is now the biggest source of income for Mexico’s drug cartels and the U.S. is committed to cracking down harder on traffickers, U.S. drug czar John Walters said Thursday.
“We’re trying to increase the force with which we’re attacking this problem,” Walters said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “This is a focus because of the overlooked importance marijuana has in the violence.”
Walters made the comments following a meeting with Mexican officials who want the U.S. to prosecute marijuana cases more zealously to reduce the amount of cash gangs can spend on guns.
… Walters said the U.S. government is seeking additional resources to prosecute traffickers of marijuana, which now earns cartels about $8.5 billion or about 61 percent of their annual estimated income of $13.8 billion. Cocaine sales earn the cartels about $3.9 billion, and methamphetamine about $1 billion, he said.
Today RAND retorts, “Mexican DTOs’ annual gross revenues from illegally exporting marijuana and selling it to wholesalers in the United States are likely less than $2 billion.”
So who should we believe? On the one hand we have the federal government, which consistently lies about marijuana to further their own agenda. On the other hand, we have RAND, which also isn’t above making its own specious claims to further their own agenda — which in this case seems to be opposing California’s Prop. 19.
Ultimately, however, the dueling statistics don’t really matter. Regardless of whether Mexican cartels are reaping 60 percent of their profits from pot or 16 percent, the fundamental principle remains the same: the criminal prohibition of marijuana fuels an underground, unregulated, often violent black market economy that empowers criminal entrepreneurs and jeopardizes the public’s — and the marijuana consumer’s — safety.
If you want to bring control of this market over to regulators, lawmakers, and licensed business, then you support legalization. If you wish to continue to abdicate control of this market to criminal gangs and drug traffickers, then you support prohibition.
If you live in California, the choice is up to you.
Lifetime use of marijuana is rarely associated with emergency room visits, according to an analysis of epidemiologic survey data published online by the American Journal of Emergency Medicine.
Investigators at the University of Michigan reviewed the overall prevalence of drug-related emergency department (ED) visits among lifetime users of illicit substances. Researchers analyzed data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, which is a nationally representative survey of 43,093 residents age 18 or older. The study is the first to use nationally representative data to examine patterns and correlates of drug-related ED visits.
Among those surveyed, subjects that reported using cannabis were the least likely to report an ED visit (1.71 percent). Respondents who reported lifetime use of heroin, tranquilizers, and inhalants were most likely (18.5 percent, 6.3 percent, and 6.2 percent respectively) to report experiencing one or more ED visits related to their drug use.
Investigators concluded, “[M]arijuana was by far the most commonly used (illicit) drug, but individuals who used marijuana had a low prevalence of drug-related ED visits.”
A 2009 Swiss study published in journal BMC Public Health previously reported that the use of cannabis was inversely associated with injuries requiring hospitalization.
A prior case-control study conducted by the University of Missouri also reported an inverse relationship between marijuana use and injury risk, finding, “Self-reported marijuana use in the previous seven days was associated … with a substantially decreased risk of injury.”
Most recently, a RAND study published this month reported that fewer than 200 total patients were admitted to California hospitals in 2008 for “marijuana abuse or dependence.” By contrast, there are an estimated 73,000 annual hospitalizations in California related to the use of alcohol.
These findings belie the myth that adult marijuana use is a primary cause of hospitalizations or ED visits. The reality is that few if any therapeutic or psychoactive substances possess a safety profile comparable to cannabis.
Watch Rethink Afghanistan’s latest video: Worse Than Vietnam?
On Monday, June 7, 2010, the Afghanistan War will complete its 104th month, replacing Vietnam as the longest war in U.S. history.
That’s an incredible investment of blood and treasure, and one that deepens by the minute. We’re spending $1 million per troop, per year in Afghanistan. To date, Congress has approved almost $300 billion in spending on the Afghanistan War. Combined with the costs for the war in Iraq, we’ve spent more than $1 trillion so far on war since 2001, just in direct costs. Right now, Congress is considering charging the U.S. taxpayer another $33 billion to pay for an ongoing troop increase.
And, don’t forget that more than 1,000 U.S. troops have died so far in this war.
Most Americans now say that the Afghanistan War isn’t worth the costs. They’re right.
According to CNN:
[T]he Department of Homeland Security says ‘the number and pace of attempted attacks against the United States over the past nine months have surpassed the number of attempts during any other previous one-year period.’
After 104 months of war, the last 12 of which saw the U.S. triple the number of troops in Afghanistan, attempted terror attacks against our country are at an all-time high.
No one in their right mind would look at the costs and the “benefits” of this strategy and think, “Yes, I want to sink more human lives and national wealth into that!” U.S. policy in Afghanistan is broken. Inertia carries it forward, not return-on-investment.
We’ve seen this kind of inertia before. Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg explained it in 1971: “It was always a bad year to get out of Vietnam.” President Obama has set at start-date for a withdrawal, but no end date.
If we’re not careful, we’ll find that it’s always a bad year to leave Afghanistan, too.
As shown in the latest video from Brave New Foundation’s Rethink Afghanistan campaign, people across partisan lines and ideological camps are coming together with a simple message: Enough is enough. More than 32,000 people are working together on our Facebook page to spread a simple message: It’s not working, and it’s not worth the cost.
There’s no excuse for letting this disaster drag out any longer. Join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook and help us shut it down.
