FAIL: Dr. Kevin Sabet’s Anti-Marijuana Legalization Arguments Debunked

 Posted by RadicalRuss at 4:04 PM on August 29, 2012

This week, the Huffington Post is doing a feature called “Shadow Convention” where they address topics that neither the Democratic nor Republican conventions will address.  Today they took a look at the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs and my one non-pot-smoking friend Dr. Kevin Sabet appeared likePunxsatawney Phil on Groundhog Day to see his shadow and declare six more years of Drug War.  And like the movie Groundhog Day, the repetition of his fallacious anti-legalization arguments is beginning to sound like the opening to I Got You, Babe by Sonny & Cher.  Let’s relive some of the classics:

A balanced and nuanced approach based on evidence, common sense, public health and public safety has been shown to produce results.

The Obama Administration’s drug war budget is still tilted two-to-one in favor of interdiction and incarceration over treatment and rehabilitation, just as it was during the George W. Bush Administration.  (Speaking of Groundhog Day, have you noticed how much Bush’s DEA Administrator looks like Obama’s?)

(a) Community-based prevention that focuses not only on preventing drug use among school kids, but also on changing ill-conceived local laws and ordinances that promote underage drinking, smoking and marijuana use (so-called “environmental policies”);

You mean like drug testing 11-year-olds for the school orchestra?  Maintaining school policies that punish underage marijuana use worse than underage drinking, thus promoting use of a more harmful substance?  Cancelling student aid for college kids who get caught with a joint?  And since pot smoking among kids is now more prevalent than tobacco smoking, and tobacco’s highly addictive and available to eighteen-year-olds legally, why didn’t we have to lock up adult cigarette smokers in cages to achieve the drop in lifetime tobacco smoking for youth from the high 70-percents to the low 40-percents?

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Lo and behold, they want to reschedule cannabis

After discussing a topic with facebook friends and activists I learned that there is a growing desire to reschedule cannabis in Washington state.   I posted my opposition to this yesterday, because after having this idea myself in 2009 and collecting signatures on a petition to do just that, I have learned a lot of things about this process that has made me change my mind.

Now the CDC, Cannacare and other medical marijuana groups in WA are proposing rescheduling.
I thought it was entirely peculiar that so many people were talking about this all at once.
Well, read it and weap, cannabis is about to be changed forever as we’ve known it:
http://cdc.coop/docs/2011_rescheduling_petition.pdf
http://xcannabis.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2011_rescheduling_petition.pdf

Here are my thoughts and at the bottom I will give you some research to consider:

1. Rescheduling cannabis rather than removing it from the list, will NOT prevent MOST cannabis consumers from going to jail.
2. Rescheduling cannabis in Washington will not over ride federal supremacy clause via Article VI, etc.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause
3. This will open more doors to BIG pharma (not the little guys) for getting into the cannabis business, and leaving the rest of us out.
4. Once big pharma is involved and once they put their money into cannabis, prohibition will not decrease, they will fight harder to keep it a schedule II, because it benefits them more.
5. The US government already has dozens of patents on cannabis, and when it is rescheduled those patents will be more effective for them.  Meaning they will further OWN cannabis as opposed to now.   As a schedule I, those patents can’t really be utilized.  Under schedule II they can give their big pharma friends and contributors the rights to utilize those patents

• I have known about the patent for neuroprotection and anti-oxidants for years now.
  US Patent 6630507
• There are also many OTHER patents on cannabis:

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by Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director August 2, 2012

Infamously, America’s federally created Cannabis Prohibition marks its seventy-fifth anniversary this August 2, 2012. The so-called ‘great failed social experiment’ of Alcohol Prohibition of the 1920s barely lasted a dozen years in effect. Rightly, it took a constitutional amendment to both ban and restore alcohol products to the free market. Is there a similar constitutional amendment for cannabis products in 1937?

No, of course not.

And that is where the sophistry, hypocrisy and duplicity begin regarding America’s modern cannabis policy of vilifying, arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating cannabis consumers, cultivators and marketers.

Even though virtually every other country’s farmers have the choice whether or not to cultivate industrial hemp, even in countries where cannabis policy is decidedly worse than America’s, can American farmers prosper from cultivating this environmentally-friendly and productive crop?

No, of course not.

Do Americans support this failed, expensive and unconstitutional public policy of criminalizing cannabis?

No, of course not.

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