The Potential for Unlikely Allies: Cory Gardner and Weed

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend, but despite everything I hate about Colorado Senator Cory Gardner (and there is plenty), if I saw him tonight I would buy him a beer. Or a joint. Or an edible. Dude has made it clear he's going to fight for our legal weed.

Weed was never on the radar of the Cheeto-in-Chief, but his shrunken apple doll of an Attorney General had a big stick up his butt about it. Way back at the beginning of the year, in a moment that must have aroused him more than the most tempting Siren, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III rescinded Obama-era guidance to the Justice Department to leave us potheads in Colorado (and an increasing number of states) alone. 

I imagine that nothing would have come of the rescission; the genie is out of the bottle and everyone knows how much money is in it. But rather than remain silent and hope for the best, Cory Gardner not only raised hell, he blocked the administration's DOJ nominees. He stopped doing that in February, ostensibly because progress had been made. Indeed, last week he secured a promise from the administration's boss that the feds really don't give a flying fuck about weed and there will be no raids. I can just imagine Sessions's weed hard-on going flaccid.

I've been proud of Cory Gardner for stepping up. Sure, it's all about money, and no, I'm sure as shit not going to go join his campaign or anything. But I like my weed, and I appreciate my representative's push to represent the will of his constituents despite his party's (completely wacky anti-federalist) platform.

Gardner's politics are mostly still repulsive however.

Thoughts on Scalia: Conspiracy and Consistency

When my husband came home yesterday afternoon, he asked me if I'd heard that there's now suspicion as to whether Supreme Court Justice Antonin "Nino" Scalia died of natural causes. I began typing "Scalia death" in Google on my phone.

"Oh," I said, "apparently the conspiracy theory is that he was smothered with a pillow."

It appears that in one interview the owner of the ranch where Justice Scalia was found dead said that Justice Scalia was found "with a pillow over his head." Add to that a Texas law which allows justices of the peace to declare cause of death without seeing the body, a family who turned down an autopsy, and a picture of the ranch owner shaking hands with President Obama, and you've got a conspiracy theory on your hands.

For the record, I actually know a dude who sleeps with a pillow on his face.

Mother Jones has an excellent guide to the assassination theories. I haven't seen anyone try to suggest that he arranged his own death yet, so I'm going to have a go at it.

Toward a Nuanced View of "Drugs"

This morning, Hsiu-Ying Tseng became the first doctor inhistory convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to a prison term forreckless opiate prescriptions. Apparently, she had been notified that three of her former patients died from opiate overdoses, and she kept prescribing them “to young patients who traveled long distances and paid cash for their prescriptions. She wrote them without performing meaningful medical exams and despite there being no medical necessity for the drugs. She ignored pleas from parents and loved ones concerned about the worsening addiction of sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters.” She was prosecuted for the deaths of three patients who died of opiate overdoses prescribed by her after she learned of the first three deaths.

Other doctors have been arrested and charged with other crimes relating to the overprescribing of opiate painkillers, and it is well-known that much heroin addiction begins with prescription painkiller abuse. Deaths and near-deaths from painkiller overdoses are common.

And yet, the DEA has painkillers classified as a schedule I drug, and marijuana classified as a schedule II drug.

Two days ago at a town hall appearance in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton said that she would change marijuana from a schedule I drug to a schedule II drug, and encourage research on the medical benefits. In the same breath, she spoke of the need to address the overdose problem. She then correctly noted that opiate addiction leading to heroin use is a primary culprit.

Nothing she said was untrue, but it was completely inappropriate to jump from a medical marijuana discussion to an indictment of drugs leading to overdose. No one has ever died from a marijuana overdose. There are conflicting stories about actions that marijuana users have taken that have been dangerous and/or fatal, but no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to find a story of someone who died simply from smoking, vaping, or ingesting too much weed.

I live in a small Colorado mountain town, where there are three marijuana dispensaries for a population of 2,200 and plenty of people are routinely stoned. Colorado is in its second year of legal weed, and the sky has not fallen. Other than a questionable ballot outcome in the last midterm election, our fair state is doing just fine, with so much of a boom in tax revenue from pot that we had to have a marijuana tax holiday last year.

And yet, so many – not just the puritanical – continue to wring their hands at the idea of legal weed. The stigma remains. Even in states where marijuana is legal and common, we hesitate to invite neighbors over for a bong the way we might invite them over for a cocktail.

Society’s attitude toward so-called drugs has to be more nuanced than “drugs are bad, mmmkay?” Now that more and more people understand that prescription opiates have a dangerous propensity to lead to serious addiction problems, and more and more people have the opinion that weed is no worse than alcohol, it’s an excellent time to reexamine all drug priorities and encourage the thoughtful, comprehensive reevaluation of federal drug laws. Non-enforcement is not enough; as long as marijuana remains illegal on the federal level, the tension between state and federal laws will continue to confuse, and to expose would-be entrepreneurs in a fledgling industry to unfair and unnecessary risk.

It’s great that attitudes toward marijuana are changing. It’s also great that attitudes toward more dangerous but more “legitimate” drugs are changing. Now is the time to put it all together and work toward comprehensive drug reform.