Milk: The Gateway Drug

Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen is revealed to have an enlightened attitude about marijuana in this exchange with drug war dinosaur Robert Mueller. The tired-looking FBI director seems to be reciting his false arguments like a pull-string puppet. (Via The Agitator)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

MORE: Civlib

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Enormo

“there has been some success when it comes to children in high school and college.” Really, “children” in college?

Why stop there? Drug laws also help protect children in grad school, children who are gainfully employed and pay taxes, children who are willing to give their lives for the defense of this country, children who are entrepreneurs generating wealth and opportunity for this country, middle aged children who are dying of cancer, and children who are Nobel Prize winning scientists… just to name a few.

How about this? You quit treating us like children and start treating us like free men who can do as we please with our own bodies. And for good measure, stay out of my bedroom and go fuck yourself.
Anonymous

I assure you, most college students are in many ways still children

No. They’re not. At all.

Ye gods, if we set the legal age of adulthood at 25, people would say “In many ways, 28-year-olds are still children.”

The longstanding, centuries-old English Common Law standard of majority was “21 years old, or married with your parents’ permission.” Can we please get over that already? The 21 standard was not about adulthood, it was the end of a period of indentured servitude to your family as a young adult. It was about patriarchy.

Today we define a period of probationary semi-adulthood, where you’re allowed to run around loose without constant supervision, but you don’t have the same rights as everybody else yet. It starts around 12 and ends at 18. It doesn’t start to end at 18, it’s completely ended at 18. If you think 20-year-olds are still children, you need to readjust what you think a child is. Spend some time with some eight-year-olds. Those are children.
Anonymous

I see, it’s sooooooooooooo dangerous it’s never resulted in a single person’s deathâ€”it makes perfect sense to spend billions of dollars prohibiting it and putting people in jail for decades.

That’s our tax dollars hard at work for We the People.
Anonymous

#19. You were an adult the day you turned 18. Deal with it.

You may act like a child, but that doesn’t make you one.
Anonymous

With the problems on the border, there is beginning to be some weed shortages. Meth came in with a bang during past shortages because it was cheap—weed shortage– pure cause and effect.
Remember Paraquot? Remember Crack Cocaine? Pure cause and effect
OleJeffy

Go Cohen! I voted for that man!
jso

@5 HERURAHA

Watch yourself! Smoking milk leads to smoking beer and then smoking bourbon!!
Takuan

Paraquat? hysteria. Crack? CIA.
Gemma

#4 Anonymous…. thank you for the YouTube link, which I did indeed need.

Funny stuff.
arlopickens

If these people are so concerned about drug use they should raid Pfizer and shut them down.
bklynchris

3 does have a very valid point. But, yes, the gentlemen from Tennessee must have been wicked on his debate team. I have yet to hear that succinct, and well put argument. That being, focus the enforcement on “crack, meth, and heroin”. It might actually work.

Fellow Boingers, given the state of California’s budget (their capitol has retained the services of a law firm specializing in bankruptcy). A change is a comin’…..it WILL be legal, at least in CA, in the very, very near future (eg-discussion of early release of prisoners for certain offenses as a cost saving measure).

So the question is, how can we make some cash off this info? Is there any publicly traded company that stands to immediately cash in? I will cut you in on my chedda if you provide a lucrative lead.
Anonymous

98% of all Heroin users drank Milk as a child.

Scary stuff.
M

@#19
Being only 60 myself, I can sympathize with you, but I assure you, most adults are in many ways still children. It’s easy to lose track of this being young, especially when most of your interactions with people your age are with friends or in classes, but it’s definitely true.
Takuan

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/05/jihad-lite/
js7a

Eric Holder said a few weeks ago that he was suspending federal anti-marijuana efforts which were permitted under state law. The new drug czar is promising, too. Not much, I know, but it’s something.
Bloodboiler

What an a-hole. The senator I mean.

I suppose that logic makes sense if you are stoned enough, but really?

If you have hard scientific evidence that gateway drug theory is wrong, refer to it instead of being a dick. Print a stack of published scientific articles from reputable journals and show them, IF such articles exist, I am sure finding them is not a problem. As a regular Digg.com visitor I know that pot fans know about every study about every atom present in Marijuana.
Halloween Jack

First of all, Steve Cohen is a congressman, not a senator. (And a great guy–I used to see him all the time when I lived in Memphis.)

Second, the idea that the Justice Department just enforces the laws, doesn’t make ‘em, and therefore has no leeway on which crimes to concentrate on is bullshit, as has been noted here before, and which is Cohen’s point.
vibrotronica

That’s my Congressman! He may be the last sane politician in Tennessee.

BTW, Tennessee’s state motto is “Agriculture and Commerce”. Marijuana is the state’s leading cash crop.
Anonymous

@26
Clearly the senator’s argument would be more powerful if he was able to show some studies supporting ‘his’ side, but the FBI director could have tried to do the same (showing some empirical evidence) instead of just repeating his weak arguments.
Takuan

I tolt ya they wuz Mooslims!
http://www.alternet.org/world/140209/fbi_blows_it%3A_supposed_terror_plot_against_ny_synagogues_is_bogus/
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Bogus terror plot? Inconceivable!
Rindan

That was awesome. The look on Mueller’s face when he gets shot down for the gateway theory was awesome. He didn’t even have a response, he just looked like a deer caught in headlights. Wonderful.
Xopher

No, Daemon, you’re an adult when you finish adolescence—and that doesn’t typically happen until the mid-20s.

I do agree that the law is fucked up on this. A 15-year-old can be tried as an adult, but the fact that he doesn’t have an adult brain is somehow not admissible in court.

Our legal system is not a justice system, and I refuse to pretend that it is.
mistersquid

That was pretty awesome. Common sense prevails regarding international drug trafficking? Unpossible!
Anonymous

Robert Mueller’s response should simply have been that his organization is charged with enforcing the laws that Congress makes.

Bullshit. There are “blue laws” all over the country that never get enforced. Cops see jaywalking etc. a hundred times a day and don’t do shit. Cops have complete discretion to enforce or not enforce anything they want, as do D.A.’s to prosecute or not prosecute.
ral8158

Bloodboiler: Your name really is apt. But the onus is on those against marijuana to explain why it needs to be restricted; otherwise, why just restrict something for no reason? There is no good explanation.
Anonymous

@ #15
Being only 23 myself, I can sympathize with you, but I assure you, most college students are in many ways still children. It’s easy to lose track of this being young, especially when most of your interactions with people your age are with friends or in classes, but it’s definitely true.
macemoneta

Robert Mueller’s response should simply have been that his organization is charged with enforcing the laws that Congress makes.

If Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen thinks the law regarding marijuana is wrong, HE is the one that is charged constitutionally with changing it.

I consider the video great too, but rather because it strikes me as the Congressman talking to himself, asking “Why am I not changing this law?”

Robert Mueller’s personal opinion on drugs is really immaterial to the discussion.
Takuan

like all racketeers, “law”-enforcement is fundamentally lazy.

They have enjoyed such a cushy, free ride on the backs of the innocent for so long, they have forgotten how to work. Unimaginative too. If it so distasteful to go after criminals that steal and hurt others, they could have easily spun the past decade into farming political prisoners using the Warofterror Industry.

Stupid, dishonest AND lazy.
Xopher

I’ve heard that marijuana was originally restricted because William Randolph Hearst owned timber interests, and wanted to make sure that hemp could not be grown in the United States (because hemp is renewable and makes a superior paper to that made from wood pulp). So he launched a campaign against it in his newspapers, clandestinely (by bribing public officials), and by funding films like Reefer Madness to make people think marijuana was more dangerous than it really is.

Great reason, huh? One of the biggest scumbags in our nation’s history is responsible for the entirely gratuitous (and now actively counterproductive) banning of a harmless weed.
Takuan

you’re a dirty, dirty boy, Mueller
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/05/fbi-director-mueller-was-at-center-of-alleged-bcci-coverup-in-1991/
Anonymous

On youtube, for those for whom CNN fails to work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY0TQ1uOn3k
Anonymous

No, Daemon, you’re an adult when you finish adolescence

Yes, and “adolescence” begins at puberty and ends whenever older people say so. That makes perfect sense.

Surveys have shown most people think you’re “really” an adult when you have kids of your own, so as people put it off later and later in life, the knuckleheads come to believe that unmarried 25-year-olds are “children.”

Those of us who have never had kids and don’t plan to are presumably suffering from “immaturity” of some sort. (“Arrested development”? Somebody’s operating under a kind of cognitive disability here anyway.)
HeruRaHa

I’m gonna go home and smoke some milk
kleer001

I feel embiggened!
Anonymous

#3′s response doesn’t make sense–a congresserson can’t change the law all by himself. He needs to persuade other congresspeople, and the American public who elect congresspeople, that the law should be changed. One important way of doing that is through Congressional hearings. If an FBI director testified that he had to enforce the law as it stands but that a change in the law made sense, then that would be very helpful for gathering support for changing the drug laws. Since, here, Mueller argues for maintaining the status quo drug laws, Congressman Cohen’s very effective cross-examination of him helps accomplish the same end.
Anonymous

#3: Robert Mueller’s opinion on drugs is immaterial to the discussion?!?!

if we have even slightest chance at changing the current drug laws, i think the opinion of THE FRIGGIN’ FBI DIRECTOR would make a big difference in the matter.
Lucifer

The real problem isn’t the consumption of marijuana by people in the US. That will continue to happen without really affecting our nation’s resources in any significant manner. It is the judicial system’s costs in processing marijuana-related cases that is a real burden. I’m not even talking about the cost of prison and jail overcrowding due to marijuana cases but the sheer amount of police work, DAs filing criminal charges, and all the legal processing involved… It is a significant amount of manpower devoted to a futile mission.
Takuan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_u-Ka4E7k8
Daemon

#22/#23: Actually, you’re an adult the moment you finish puberty. The law just pretends that happens when you turn 18.
Wingo

Holy Jumpin’ Jupiter! Mr. Senator’s viewpoint is enlightened, indeed. In fact, it’s quite surprising how rational he sounds.

The FBI/DEA/Drug Czar guys are certainly starting to sound like tired, broken records.

We need more of this.
Salty

@ #8

So the FBI is a default expert in things they might have to police? Sure they deserve a say, but to intimate they are the arbiter of the topic is out of line. I can’t count the times the Government has been divorced from scientific or statistical fact.

You make the FBI out to be the Overlords of Drug Knowledge. Patently untrue.
Anonymous

#10: I am not at all asking for anyone to be an expert. it is exactly because “Government has been divorced from scientific or statistical fact” that I believe questioning someones opinion’s on one of the prime subjects they enforce should very well be carried out.
HotPepperMan

It is clear the FBI Director was ill-prepared, ill-informed, and presented himself poorly.

In order for the DEA and anti-drug persons to have any credibility it is important for them to have facts rather than scare-mongering.
Rindan

So the FBI is a default expert in things they might have to police? Sure they deserve a say, but to intimate they are the arbiter of the topic is out of line. I can’t count the times the Government has been divorced from scientific or statistical fact.

I don’t think anyone thinks that they are the end all and be all experts on drug addiction, its social costs, and the social cost to fight it. They are a large piece to the equation. If the director of the FBI had just said, “I don’t make law, I enforce it.” and refused to go beyond that, we might more easily defer to other experts. The fact that he sits up there and defends the policy instead of just implementing it means he is throwing weight behind the policy beyond what the job title calls for. In that case, making him look like a jackass with his inane opinion as a method of chopping down people who might think his opinion is worth something is exactly the right thing to do.
ben

Since noone has said it yet…

Oh snap son!
Joe MommaSan

What Enormo said. Doubled, and in spades.
orangebag

@#10 I can’t count the times the Government has been divorced from scientific or statistical fact.
You make the FBI out to be the Overlords of Drug Knowledge. Patently untrue.

The goal was not to obtain expert advice from the govt, but to demonstrate to those dead set against drug law reform (esp marijuana legalisation) that “trustworthy” people admit the war on drugs is failing. It is trying to plant seeds of reason in the minds of those who think that only drug peddlers want to relax drug laws.