The Violent, Drug-Addled Brown People Are Coming!

1986 really has to rank as a low point in American drug policy. Swept up in a wave of terror of a drug claimed (inaccurately) to produce instant addiction in first-time users and to lead to violent behavior, Congress passed sentencing "guidelines" mandating especially stiff sentences for possession of crack cocaine.

It seems on a cursory glance that the main real differences between powdered cocaine and crack are:

1) users sniff powder, but smoke crack;

2) powder's effects last longer;

3) more affluent users sniff. Poor people smoke. Take a wild guess what this means for racial demographics in this country.

The result has been over two decades of grimace-inducingly sharp racial sentencing disparities.

Recently, the federal government has (finally!) twigged on to the problem here, and has been thinking about correcting it-- maybe just a little, maybe entirely. So far, though, it doesn't look like anything has come of this-- and please note that the linked bit of news dates to 2007.

Happily, Washington State doesn't seem to make any distinction. Crack possession is seemingly charged as, "Possession of a controlled substance (cocaine)."

Mind you, that's still a class C felony, but it's one more topic we're a bit ahead of the federal government on.

Psilocybin, or "Magic," Mushrooms - what do a glass jar, a paper bag, and a chunk of fungus have in common?

Magic mushrooms are an odd case, as far as drugs go. Psilocybin, the typical active ingredient providing the "magic," is a Schedule I drug under federal law. The same goes for another mushroom-manufactured hallucinogen, psilocyn. So far, so good, right?

The catch is that psilocybin mushrooms grow wild pretty near everywhere, and their primary negative effect seems to be the risk of eating the wrong mushroom (a problem I gather is inherent to mycology). The mushrooms themselves aren't often mentioned on drug schedules, and so have had their illegality challenged-- sometimes with success.

Not so much in Washington State.

Washington State courts first tackled the issue of whether psilocybin mushrooms are illegal in 1984 in State v. Patterson. The court decided that, by the wording of Washington's Schedule I (more on drug schedules, coming soon!), even though coca leaves and opium poppies (the natural origins of cocaine and heroin, respectively) are mentioned elsewhere in the schedules, mushrooms qualify for the full ton of bricks that comes with a Schedule I drug because they are, in the schedule's language, a "material ... which contains" psilocybin.

The court thus put naturally-occurring, raw mushrooms in the same category as, say, pills, and went on to pound a few more nails in by declaring that 1) the mention of psilocybin in Schedule I, even without mentioning mushrooms, was enough warning and 2) the common confusion over whether the mushrooms are illegal (a "mistake of law") is no defense.

The courts don't seem to have looked back, since. "Magic mushrooms" are a Schedule I drug in the State of Washington, as illegal as LSD.

An Interesting Resource

This is a media guide to drugs published in Britain by the apparently-frustrated independent drug-information organization, DrugScope. It seems they got tired of seeing British media pouring on the hysteria when covering drugs, drug addiction, and drug addicts, and therefore published this handy (and free!) booklet.

Please keep in mind when using this that it's a British publication, and its legal discussions apply only to British law. Certain bits of drug user culture also seem to differ: I didn't even know that cannabis came in any edible form that didn't involve a lot of baker's cocoa until I read this.

http://www.drugscope.org.uk/Resources/Drugscope/Documents/PDF/Publications/DrugScopeMediaGuideSpreads.pdf