The government may be shut down but the crackdown on medical marijuana in California will roll on.
The sweeping shutdown does not include about 87 percent of the staff at the Drug Enforcement Administration, reports Reason.com, which has a copy of the Justice Department’s contingency plan.
That is because “DEA investigations need to continue uninterrupted so that cases are not compromised and the health and safety of the American public is not placed at risk,” Justice states.
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Cue the laugh track.
Reason notes that according to the latest research, the DEA has done nothing to reduce the strength of drugs, which have also gotten cheaper over the last two decades.
Regarding weed: “In the United States, cannabis seizures have increased by 465 per cent between 1990 and 2009. Despite this, the average inflation- and potency-adjusted prices of cannabis decreased by 86 per cent over the same period, and the average potency of the drug increased by 161 per cent.”
“With few exceptions and despite increasing investments in enforcement-based supply reduction efforts aimed at disrupting global drug supply, illegal drug prices have generally decreased while drug purity has generally increased since 1990.”
Good thing you can’t overdose on cannabis, unlike legal pharmaceuticals, which will kill about 23,000 Americans this year by overdose.
