NEWSLETTER
SEPTEMBER 2000
VOLUME VIII
ISSUE 3
MEDICAL
MARIJUANA
UPDATE

As you know, our medical marijuana law requires all users of  medicinal marijuana to register with the Narcotics Enforcement Division of the Department of Public Safety. Various members of the DPFH have been in contact with the Department of Public Safety since the day that the bill passed the legislature. We formed a small working group that represented the legal, medical, and patient perspectives, and sought input from community resources. Our goal was to encourage the rapid writing and approval of a balanced set of rules that strictly adhere to our statute. 
A DPFH member graciously volunteered his consultation, rule writing expertise and countless hours of his time to help us produce an excellent set of recommendations for the Public Safety Department’s consideration. It’s our understanding that a draft of a registration form and potential rules is circulating within the department and we anticipate that the public hearing required of all proposed sets of rules will be announced within the next thirty days.
We share the community’s frustrations with the slow progress in the promulgation of a set of rules for the medical marijuana law, but have high hopes that a patient-friendly system of registration will soon be proposed by the Department of Public Safety. -Pau

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
The Shadow Knows. . .  . . . . .2
New Board Member . .  .  . . . . 3
Drug Courts Under Fire. . .  . . .5
 
The First Annual Hemp Field Day
by Pam Lichty

Rep. Cynthia Thielen peered through the fence at the reporters clustered outside the field. She wanted them to be sure to capture the image of the 10-foot high chain link fence with the curved barbed wire at the top. 
 
The image forms a perfect symbol of one of the absurdities created by the War on Drugs: a quarter acre patch of red dirt off a side road in rural Wahiawa surrounded by a massive fence and a security system. All to protect 8 or 10 rows of tiny young hemp plants ranging in size from 12-36 inches high.
The occasion was the first Annual Hemp Field Day designed to showcase the potential of this new agricultural crop for Hawai‘i. The former sugar cane fields were planted in December 1999 after the Drug Enforcement Administration agreed to let the pilot project, the Hawai‘i 		 Industrial Hemp Research Project, proceed. It was thanks largely to Rep. Thielen’s efforts that this happened at all. Even after ACT 305 was signed into law by Governor Cayetano in July 1999, it took literally months of effort for the DEA to finally agree – and then only with the requirement of absurdly rigorous security.
Dr. David West, founder of GamETec, a veteran of the commercial seed industry and a pioneer in agbiotechnology is managing the project. (Check out www.gametec.com for more info.) He planted 20 different European hemp 

COMING EVENTS
Public Forum
“Getting Real: Drug Use Prevention that Works”
September 28, 7:00-9:00 p.m.
 Ala Wai Elementary School

“Hawai’i’s Prison Crisis: Throwing Away the Next Generation”
October 21, 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
Central Union Church

    DPFH is sponsoring two public events which members will likely want to attend. The September 28 public forum (see enclosed flyer) will be on the controversial topic of drug education. The all-day program on October 21 (co-sponsored with the Community Alliance on Prisons) will focus on one of the most critical and urgent issues currently facing the State of Hawai‘i: What to do about the burgeoning prison growth?
    For this event DPFH and CAP have invited two prominent specialists on prison issues from the mainland, as well as several  people from the Hawai’i legislature, the Department of Public Safety, the private prison industry, and local community organizations.
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Hemp Field Day

(Continued from page 1)
 

varieties to learn which ones would perform best in Hawai‘i. The September 5th Field Day was designed to showcase his findings. Lovern, a Romanian variety, proved the best suited to Hawai‘i’s conditions. Due to the photoperiodism of hemp (it responds to the length of the day) this variety produced a full seed head in only two months. West considers this great news since the seeds of hemp are one of its most valuable products. In just three months, he explained, you could produce hemp suitable for fiber.
On a political note, the Field Day/press conference was planned to coincide with one that Ralph Nader held in Washington to discuss the future of industrial hemp and to denounce the proposed new DEA regulations which would tighten restrictions even more on this valuable crop. In the last few weeks the feds cut down a hemp crop growing on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation and seem to be tightening the noose just as this crop’s potential is being timidly explored in the U.S. 
West told the group that he’s not even permitted to save seed from his promising varieties. He said that Governor Cayetano continues to be supportive and had just written a strongly worded letter to the Acting Administrator of the DEA, Donnie Marshall, telling him that technology has been developed to distinguish hemp from marijuana by air – so the old rationale that you can’t tell the two crops apart no longer holds water.
Other politicians who were present to show their support included House Speaker Calvin Say, Representatives Marcus Oshiro and Nathan Suzuki and Senators Sam Slom, Lorraine Inouye and Robert Bunda. 
U.H.’s Dan Paquin, of Tropical Ag, has a tiny experiment going in the corner of the field. It seems that hemp has the potential to absorb contaminants in the soil, thus cleansing it for future crops. This unusual property demonstrates the potential of hemp for all sorts of applications, and only underlines the absurdity of treating this enormously promising crop as a criminal enterprise. -Pau
Report from Los Angeles: 
   . . . The Shadow Knows
by Pam Lichty

The August Shadow conventions 
 were held in Philadelphia and Los 
 Angeles during the Republican and Democratic Conventions. The sponsors were Arianna Huffington (right wing pundit turned drug war critic), Ethan Nadelmann of the newly merged Lindesmith Center/Drug Policy Foundation, Common Cause, The National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, United for a Fair Economy, Public Campaign,and Call to Renewal. The two Shadows were to highlight three topics ignored at the major parties’ choreographed events: the growing disparity between rich and poor, the necessity for campaign finance reform and the failed drug war. Each issue was highlighted on one day of the three day conventions. I attended the L.A. Shadow on August 15, the drug policy day.
The convention was held just six blocks from Staples Center where the Dems held court. The area (home of the infamous Ramparts Division of the LAPD) looked like a war zone. There were masses of police cars, roadblocks, occasional appearances of heavily armed SWAT teams, and helicopters hovering menacingly overhead. This intimidating atmosphere added a sense of urgency and relevance to the discussions in the downscale, stiflingly hot Shadow Convention venue, Patriotic Hall.
While the Philadelphia Shadow garnered more media attention because of its novelty, the L.A. one, held two weeks later, drew more politicians from down the street. An impressive array of Democratic Party luminaries spoke at the shadow: Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. John Conyers, Jesse Jackson, and a recent convert to some drug reform issues: Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York. 
In addition to these big names from the Congressional Black Caucus, some maverick Republican politicians appeared as well. Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico gave his newly refined stump speech about the need to rethink drug policy, including legalizing cannabis, decriminalizing heroin, etc. A new face 		 was the very eloquent Congressman Tom Campbell who’s challenging Diane Feinstein for one of the California Senate seats. He gave a withering condemnation of “Plan Columbia” characterizing it as “Vietnam in Spanish.” 
Democratic mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson, who gained notoriety for canceling his city’s contract with the DARE program, also spoke. His appearance gave credence to the buzz that was zipping around the conference hall. As an upbeat Ethan Nadelmann told the crowd, the elected officials beginning to openly criticize the drug war are only the tip of  the iceberg. Many others share their concerns, but have not yet gathered the courage to speak out. (It’s our job, as concerned citizens, to tell them our feelings and make it “safe” for them to do so.)
In addition to the politicians there was a parade of reformers, patients, writers, and entertainers denouncing the drug war.  At the beginning of a panel featuring such luminaries as Gore Vidal, Al Franken, Alexander Cockburn and others, there was a bomb scare. As we reconvened outside using a media van to broadcast, a phalanx of cops advanced on us menacingly, momentarily diverted from cracking the heads of demonstrators down the street. The building was declared safe before things came to a head. (Too bad, in a way. Gore Vidal getting beaten up would have gotten the press’s attention more than some hapless animal rights protestor.)
After the Shadow Conventions there’s a new sense of momentum among criminal justice and drug policy reformers. They not only brought together many of the critics of current policy, but reflected the growing strength of a movement on the brink of breaking through to mainstream politics. The Shadow Conventions website, www.shadowconventions.com, is packed with information and includes video from some of the presentations. Be sure to check out some of the speeches from Tuesday, Drug Policy Day. Get on board — this train’s leaving the station! -Pau
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New DPFH Board Member: Richard Mesco, M.D.

Elected last fall as board member, Dr. 
 Richard Mesco held until recently a 
 full time appointment as an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the medical school of the University of Hawai‘i. He lives on the big island, where he also maintains a small private practice. Prior to coming to Hawai‘i, for most of the 1990s Mesco saw patients, did research and taught at the University of New Mexico, providing mentoring and supervision to medical students, interns, residents and fellows, as well as to graduate students and post-docs in psychology, social work, and art therapy.
 For most of these same years Mesco was a medical officer in the Indian Health Service of the U.S. Public Health Service, in the role of Area Child Psychiatrist for New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas. This territory included the 19 pueblos of the All Indian Pueblo Council; the Canoncito, Ramah, and Alamo Navajo bands; the Jicarilla and Mescalero Apache; and the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain tribes.  While there, Mesco had the privilege of making several consultation visits — along with a group of friends including a psychologist, anthropologist, social worker, and art therapist — to work with members of the Tlingit and Haida Alaskan Native health corporation (SEARHC) in the coastal rainforest of Sitka and Juneau; with the Tanana Chiefs and Fairbanks Native Association in Fairbanks, Alaska; with the Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge, South Dakota; and the five river tribes in Chemawa, Oregon. 
One of his favorite public health projects involved writing funding grants and then setting up model mental health programs for preschool children in Indian Headstart Programs. This grew out of a collaborative transcultural research project using art therapy as a diagnostic and treatment modality with Zuni children.  The service model was a collaborative one, involving several clinical departments at the medical school. It was well received in several pueblos, and obtained budgetary funding on a recurring basis.
Over the past ten years Mesco had the privilege to work side by side or in parallel with healers from a variety of North 		 American traditions, including roadmen of the Native American Church. During this period at the University of New Mexico school of medicine, Mesco organized and directed the first university based course in the U.S. on Native American Mental Health. Taught primarily by Native American healers, educators and artists, it was offered for undergraduate, graduate, medical school and professional CE credits over a five-year period. He also helped organize a seminar in New Orleans that brought Tlingit elder Walter Austin from Sitka, Alaska, Navajo healers Marie McCray from Crownpoint, New Mexico and Mike Kiyaani from Tuba City, Arizona to speak to the Amercian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry annual meeting
After making pilgrimages to Knossos and Delphi, and other places in Europe, with three generations of the women in his family, Mesco undertook a journey to Tibet with two of his teenage daughters. The pilgrimage across the Himalayan plateau “was made that much more meaningful, and dicey, by the girls’ presence,” he notes.  “We began our stay in Tibet with several hours of internment by some friendly Chinese People’s Army officers inside their base at Gongkar.  This was occasioned by our driver not making it to the airport. One of his four bald tires had gone flat, and he was without a spare. After a couple of uncertain hours, my daughters and I were escorted the 90 km to Lhasa via military transport, perched on our packs in the back of a Beijing jeep that was piloted by a sergeant who sported a Fu Manchu and long curling fingernails.” 
 The ensuing adventure included off road travel across rivers and through checkpoints without permits to Tshurpu Gompa, and from there on an 800 km. journey through the highest mountain passes on earth to Shongang and Nyelam, then through the waterfall and mudslide covered terrain of the Pochu Gorge. 
Back in the U.S., Mesco worked with Huichol curandera, Guadelupe de la Cruz Rios. Calling her “a delightful 		 woman working as a gifted healer for over 60 years,” Lupé was one of the original informants for Peter Furst and other anthropologists in Mexico, beginning in the 1950s. Mesco worked with her in ceremony on a pilgrimage to Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly with a group of women survivors of sexual abuse. This particular work remains to date as “among the most profound healing experiences in which I have been fortunate to share in my entire life,” says Mesco, “thanks largely to Lupé.” This work continues to be validated after several years of follow up with the participants.
Recent interests here in Hawai‘i include working with Awa (Piper methysticum), known in the south Pacific as Kava , Yanqona and Sakau.  Mesco’s ongoing study with a mestizo vegetalista in the Peruvian Amazon provides an opportunity to work in another rainforest environment.  Mesco says he supports “rational drug legislation, including the medical use of marijuana as provided for in the recently passed law in Hawai‘i.”  He does not favor a blanket approach to legislative reform, but prefers to consider each issue individually. -Pau

 DPFH Wins Grant
For Video Production

DPFH has been awarded a grant of $30,000 from the Educational Foundation of America to conduct an educational awareness campaign about the ineffectiveness and counter productivity of current law enforcement approaches to problems surrounding substance abuse.
The campaign will consist primarily of professional video-taping of DPFH-sponsored public forums for airing on ‘Olelo and other public access channels, and of producing paid 30-second commercials for radio and TV to raise awareness of the issues among a broader segment of the public.
Work on this project is scheduled for the period 7/1/00 to 6/30/01. -Pau 
 
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Can We Believe Our Drug Czars?
In 1999, Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, 
 created the state’s Office of Drug 
 Control. To head the program, Bush brought in James McDonough, a former U.S. Army colonel who served as head of strategy for the ONDCP from 1996 to 1999.  Recent reports issued by the Florida Drug Czar’s office aroused the curiosity of an investigative reporter of the Orlando Sentinel, who published a critical report detailing the inflated figures on drug-related deaths.
The practice of “playing with the numbers” is a fairly common tactic among law enforcement agencies when seeking additional funding for their anti-drug efforts. The Florida case targeted ‘designer drugs’, especially Ecstasy and GHB. The detailed expose by the Orlando Sentinel is too long to reproduce here. Some of the highlights are given below.
Bad Research Clouds
State Death Reports
Copyright 2000. Orlando Sentinel (c)
Talking about drug deaths, Jim McDonough, the state’s chief drug fighter, tells a summit in February in Tallahassee about club-drug deaths. His numbers have since been questioned.
Pearl Mastros, 80, died in a nursing home. Mitchell Waters, 15, died playing basketball. Tavani Smith, 4, died in a hospital. Each of these Central Floridians died of known causes. Yet they and many others like them were portrayed by the state as victims of designer-drug abuse.
An analysis by The Orlando Sentinel found glaring mistakes in research by the Office of Drug Control in its campaign to spotlight the dangers of so-called “rave” drugs.
Its official tally of rave-drug deaths reached 254. But blaming that many deaths on the club scene was grossly misleading. 
The state’s research included dozens of errors. Lumped together with the deaths of hard-partying teens, the state counted: terminal cancer patients who committed suicide;senior citizens who took painkill-		 ers under doctors’ supervision in hospitals and nursing homes; a 58-year-old St. Petersburg man who died after a heart-bypass; a  Miami crib death.
Based on the Sentinel’s analysis, the death count across Central Florida is 25 — a tragic statistic, but less than half what the state claims. The drug office has begun removing cases from the list since the Sentinel raised questions.
Since then, McDonough has defended the work. He asked why a reporter would question shortcomings in the research instead of helping his staff fight drug abuse.
“If we made a mistake, we want to correct the mistake,” he said. “There’s no attempt here to put out bad data.”
The Office of Drug Control, interviews and records show, would take responsibility for deciding which deaths were designer-drug-related. The list included such common rave drugs as MDMA, an amphetamine-based hallucinogen; and GHB, a sedative once sold legally in health-food stores.
McDonough said he was too busy overseeing the drug-fighting effort to discuss cases like that of Rose Pope, 82, who died in St. Petersburgh eight days after being hit by a car.
Drug-treatment specialists say the flaws in the research are so significant that they could hurt efforts to convince the public about the deadliness of designer drugs. “Questionable data on the nature of the problem will tend to put all data in question,” said Jim Hall, executive director of Up Front Drug Information Center in Miami. “. . . There’s a tendency not to believe any of that government drug data.” 
Hall’s colleagues in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Jacksonville, Tallahassee and west Florida voiced similar concerns. Provide misleading or false information to teenagers — the most at-risk group — and they’ll never trust you, they said. -Pau
NEW STUDY:

Pot’s Effect on Sick
by Susan Duerkson
The San Diego Union-Tribune
8/30/00

Looking for scientific answers to a 
 raging political and medical 
 debate, the UCSD (University of California San Diego) School of Medicine announced yesterday it is setting up a statewide program to research potential medical uses of marijuana.
With $3 million a year in state funding, the three-year program will test whether marijuana helps patients who have cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, nerve damage and other conditions. The program is a partnership of the University of California San Diego with UC San Francisco.
The doctors who will head the research applauded the state government for making the first serious effort nationally to pin down the medical effects of the illegal street drug.
“California has taken an enormous step,” said Dr. Igor Grant, a UCSD psychiatry professor who will direct the new Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research. “Our objective is to really answer some questions that have been out there a long time. There is a long history of controversy around cannabis products, and it has been difficult to do research in this area.”
The new program’s directors plan to take proposals for studies in the next few months from researchers across the state. With advice from a national review board, they will select projects to get the state funding.
The first patients could be enrolled in the studies as soon as January.
(Dr. Donald Abrams of UC San Francisco, co-investigator on this project, was a guest speaker for a DPFH forum in 1996.)
4


Drug Courts Under Fire
(Posted online by Kevin Zeese of Common Sense for Drug Policy)



Drug Courts have been something  that many of us have been  struggling with. Finally, there is an excellent, detailed, well-footnoted analysis of drug courts in the current issue of the North Carolina Law Review. The nearly 100 page article, “The Drug Court Scandal,” is written by a state court judge from Denver, Morris B. Hoffman.
The article deals with the research supporting drug courts (and finds it very weak) as well as the problems of creating a permanent drug court bureaucracy, a new justice system for drug offenders and the problem of the bigger net which will result in more people incarcerated. Some key conclusions:
- “We have succumbed to the lure of drug courts, to the lure of their federal dollars, to the lure of their hope, and to the lure of their popularity. Drug courts themselves have become a kind of  institutional narcotic upon which the entire criminal justice system is becoming increasingly dependent.”
“. . .  the promises of drug courts do not measure up to their harsh reality. They are compromising deep-seated legal values, including the doctrine of separation of powers, the idea that truth can best be discovered in the fires of advocacy, and the traditional role of judges as quiet, rational arbiters of the truth-finding process. In their mad rush to dispose of cases, drug courts are risking the due process rights of defendants and turning all of us — judges, prosecutors, and public defenders, alike — into cogs in an out-of-control case-processing machine.
“And what have they delivered in exchange? Reductions in recidivism are so small that if they exist at all they are statistically meaningless. Net-widening is so large that, even if drug courts truly were effective in reducing recidivism, more drug defendants would continue to jam our prisons than ever before.
“It is time for all of us to take a much harder look at drug courts, at their awkward placement straddled among the three branches, at their true effectiveness, and at their real operational and institutional
 costs. It is time, especially for judges, to resist the lemming-like dash toward a society in which bedrock legal principles that have served us for generations are sacrificed for the immediate gratification of a political fad.”
 “We should spend less time feeding the fanaticism of drug courts and more 		 time in an honest debate about the deep moral and social issues inherent in drug use, drug abuse, and drug control.”
This is an article very worth getting. You can contact the NC Law Review, Chapel Hill, NC at nclrev@unc.edu, 919-962-3926 or 919-962-1527 (fax). (DPFH has sent for a copy of the article.) -Pau
TAKE NOTE:

 National Drug Survey of Teens: Juggling Data?

While the Democrat-appointed drug czar makes claims that drug use is going 
 down among teenagers, their Republican opponents claim that it is going up 
 due to the relaxed attitude of the current administration. 
Given the flexibility of statistics and data, both can argue their case. The recent SAMSHA national survey is a case in point. The following are some quick notes about the data from the Household Survey provided by fellow reformers Doug McVay, of Common Sense for Drug Policy, and Jerry Epstein, President, Drug Policy Forum of Texas.
From Doug McVay: There are two sets of national data reported in the summary report available online, derived using different methods of data collection. One is the new CAI (Computer Assisted Interviewing) method; the other is PAPI (Paper And Pencil Interviewing). The stats reported in the news release, which the NY Times quoted, are contained in the Trends Analysis in Section 4. Those numbers are simply different from the numbers presented in Section 2. The Section 4 data were derived from a supplemental sample surveyed using the traditional PAPI method to provide a basis for analyzing trends, given the major changes in this year’s survey. Thus, the different figures for use rates and trends.
The authors do caution in the report that because of problems the data in Section 4 are not as solid as they wanted, so they weren’t able to make as much use of them as had been planned. They also caution against comparing 1999 CAI data (section 2 of the report) with previous years because of the change in methodology — which doesn’t stop the feds from doing precisely that, of course.
The main point being, the data may be bad, but what was reported was contained in the survey. The feds were simply selective about which numbers to use in the news release, and selected whichever bits made their case.
From Jerry Epstein <JerryEp138@aol>: Friends, The thot plickens: 12 to 17 “use” was conveniently reported for 97 to 99. It turns out that the real data from 1996 [thank John Chase again] is almost exactly what was reported for 99. In any case, it gives a very different picture for “any illegal drug.”
Any illegal drug: 1996 - 9%    1999 - 10.9%
Marijuana:     1996 - 7.1%  1999 - 7.7%
This tactic of carefully selecting one time frame to obscure the overall pattern is a common one and needs to be brought to the attention of every reporter/media outlet possible. When the announcement is followed soon after with a story about the duplicity of the original presentation, a lot of fun may begin.
 

5


 
 

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