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SentLTE-Digest Friday, July 8 2016 Volume 16 : Number 004

001 LTE: Marijuana Legalization in New England Is Stalled by Opiate Crisis,
    From: John Chase <>
002 LTE: Police stops: trivial, deadly. July 8th
    From: John Chase <>


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Subj: 001 LTE: Marijuana Legalization in New England Is Stalled by Opiate Crisis, 20 April
From: John Chase <>
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2016 23:36:29 -0700

Editors -

Re: Marijuana Legalization in New England Is Stalled by Opiate Crisis, 
20 April

The concern expressed by opponents to legalization is understandable, 
but not  supported by evidence. Recent research comparing overdose death 
rate in medical marijuana states to the other states shows that opiate 
overdose death rate decreased 25% when state medical marijuana laws took 
effect. So it is very unlikely that opiate overdose deaths would 
actually increase when marijuana is legalized. That research was 
published in August 2014 by the peer-reviewed JAMA Internal Medicine 
Journal.

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Subj: 002 LTE: Police stops: trivial, deadly. July 8th
From: John Chase <>
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 10:36:32 -0700

Sent to the Tampa Bay Times 08 July

In her Op-Ed, Dahlia Lithwick writes of the fear and anger felt by 
African-Americans when stopped for trivial reasons as happened to 
Philando Castile, the young Black man killed near St. Paul. His 
girlfriend reported in her cell phone video that "We had a busted tail 
light. And we had some weed in the car that’s about it." That "weed" 
would have justified an arrest in Minnesota, even if the stop had ended 
without violence. As recently as 2013, Blacks in Pinellas and its 
municipalities were being stopped for trivial offenses, then arrested 
for marijuana possession seven times as often as other demographics. 
Public pressure to make marijuana possession a civil citation has moved 
us in the right direction. A trivial offense, even marijuana possession, 
does not justify upsetting a man's life with a lifelong record of 
arrest. In April, the Tampa Bay Times wrote in favor of a solution 
proposed by Sheriff Gualtieri. It is time for a status report.

John G. Chase

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End of SentLTE-Digest V16 #4
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