Legal marijuana=exploding homes?

January 19, 2015 ~ Jason Schwartz

Interesting. I assume that this will lead to regulation that will benefit big marijuana.

When Colorado legalized marijuana two years ago, nobody was quite ready for the problem of exploding houses.

But that is exactly what firefighters, courts and lawmakers across the state are confronting these days: amateur marijuana alchemists who are turning their kitchens and basements into “Breaking Bad”-style laboratories, using flammable chemicals to extract potent drops of a marijuana concentrate commonly called hash oil, and sometimes accidentally blowing up their homes and lighting themselves on fire in the process.

The trend is not limited to Colorado — officials from Florida to Illinois to California have reported similar problems — but the blasts are creating a special headache for lawmakers and courts here, the state at the center of legal marijuana.

The Link Between Overcrowded Prisons and a Certain Drug

February 4, 2014 ~ Jason Schwartz ~ 4 Comments

images (1) Keith Humphreys points out a common misconception about incarceration rates related to drugs.

Over the past few months, I have given some talks about public policies that could reduce the extraordinary number of Americans who are in state or federal prison. The audiences in every case were blessedly bright and engaged. Yet they also had a broadly shared misunderstanding about how two drugs are related to the U.S. rate of imprisonment.

At each talk an audience member expressed the view that over-incarceration would drastically diminish soon because states were now legalizing marijuana. I responded by asking everyone present to shout out their estimate of what proportion of people currently in a state or federal prison were serving time for a marijuana-related offense. The modal answer across audiences was around one third, which explains the shocked looks that greeted my pointing out that even under the most liberal possible definition of a marijuana-linked incarceration (e.g., counting a marijuana trafficker with 10 other felony convictions as being in prison solely due to marijuana’s illegality), not even 1% of the U.S. prison population would be so classified.

Not wanting to discourage people, I said that there was a different drug that was responsible for many times as many imprisonments as marijuana and for which we could implement much better public policies. I then asked people to guess which drug it was. Give it a try yourself (answer after the jump).

It’s alcohol. People at my talks guessed every illegal drug imaginable but not alcohol, which for cultural, commercial and political reasons is not generally thought of as a drug, even though chemically that’s exactly what it is.

Police make more arrests related to the drug alcohol than they do for every other drug combined. Sizable proportions of people who commit homicide, rape, simple assault, aggravated assault and robbery are drunk at the time. And as everyone knows, alcohol is also a leading cause of vehicular manslaughter.

Why is this fact invisible in our culture?

This is not an argument for locking people up for possession, but it’s clear that legalizing a drug doesn’t end a drug problem. And, one has to wonder, how many of these harms would be reduced if alcohol weren’t a celebrated, legal drug.

via The Link Between Overcrowded Prisons and a Certain Drug.

My Dad Will Never Stop Smoking Pot

January 20, 2014 ~ Jason Schwartz

The Atlantic published an personal essay about the impact of her father’s marijuana addiction on herself and her siblings.

Then there’s my sister, the baby, the one who struggled harder than any of us. She tried so desperately to finish high school, a rare feat in my family. Then she tried community college. As we sat outside at a café this year, talking about my dad’s temper and his rambling mind, she told me how she herself has started to smoke.

“I’m so sorry,” she kept repeating. “But it’s really not that bad, is it? And it’s relaxing. It makes everything okay for a while. Don’t be angry, please don’t be angry.”

I can’t be angry. I understand the appeal of marijuana: its soothing properties, its potential to help chronic pain sufferers, its medical implications. I also believe it should be legalized. In a world where alcohol and nicotine can be purchased at most corner shops, the argument against bringing pot sales out into the open is a weak one.

Yet I can be sad. So very little is understood about how marijuana impacts families. I can’t help but thinking that the cool, carefree users of today will be the parents of tomorrow.

My dad will never stop smoking pot. Sometimes I wonder about the man he might have been, and the lives we all might have had, if he’d never started.

via My Dad Will Never Stop Smoking Pot – Leah Allen – The Atlantic.

Only 2.6% of welfare applicants test positive

April 20, 2012April 19, 2012 ~ Jason Schwartz ~ 1 Comment

Not surprisingly, drug testing of welfare recipients does not confirm the assumptions of supporters:

Of the 4,086 applicants who scheduled drug tests while the law was enforced, 108 people, or 2.6 percent, failed, most often testing positive for marijuana. About 40 people scheduled tests but canceled them, according to the Department of Children and Families, which oversees Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, known as the TANF program.