AS TERRIBLE as the tragedy of Garrett Reid's death was, the massive amount of play it received in the media and elsewhere - a moment of silence before a Phillies game for a nonplayer who died essentially of self-inflicted wounds? - yanked me back to a question I have grappled with over the years - whether it's time to decriminalize drug use.

Every time I get close to "yes," a case like Reid's pulls me back to "no." Easing up on hard drug enforcement will bring more misery, more addiction, more death.

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Ten minutes before intravenous drug users began walking through the door of the Allegheny County Health Department building in Oakland on a recent Sunday, Ron Johnson of Prevention Point Pittsburgh was arranging syringes. "Browns," the biggest needles, sat next to "pogos." Nearby were cotton balls, alcohol wipes, cookers, where drugs are dissolved, and tourniquets, which ease vein access.

By the end of the day, 65 users had visited Prevention Point Pittsburgh to exchange their dirty syringes for clean ones. PPP, the only needle exchange program in Western Pennsylvania, works to reduce the transmission of blood-borne diseases like HIV and hepatitis C by giving addicts clean needles to use in place of shared, dirty ones.

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Seven men who grew up together gathered in an alley near a notorious Camden drug corner. The month before, at least two of them had celebrated a birthday with a barbecue and champagne. But this day, a squabble over drug turf erupted into an argument.

The men came from at least three sets of the Bloods street gang. They were packing guns. Eventually - perhaps inevitably - bullets flew near Sixth and Royden Streets in the Lanning Square neighborhood.

When the firing stopped, Robert Carstarphen, 27, was down. It wasn't the first time, his mother said. He had survived being riddled with nine bullets in 2007 and six more in 2011.

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Amid the grandeur of the Luzerne County Courthouse, where ornate wooden mouldings adorn the courtrooms that represent the pillars of the justice system, an inmate accustomed to cold prison walls seeks a second chance.

Whether he gets that is up to a judge presiding over a new speciality court.

The inmate jailed for a drug-or alcohol-inspired crime initially may be looking for a quick way out of prison, but he eventually finds reform through a relatively new arm of county court.

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In September 2007, he stood inside Rainbow Jewelers in Kingston, intent on taking what he wanted.

Then 34 years old and "high out of his mind," he swiped six rings from the sales counter and ran. He wanted to trade the jewelry for heroin.

It wasn't the first time Mark W. Donovan had a brush with the law, as he had spent most of his life fueling his drug and alcohol addiction.

Donovan said it wasn't until two to three days later in jail that he realized he did something serious.

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JOHNSTOWN - This fall, The Learning Lamp will launch a new drug and alcohol prevention program targeting elementary school students in Cambria and Somerset counties.

Thanks to funding from a two-year $122,886 grant from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, the program will be available free to participating schools.

Too Good for Drugs is a research-based curriculum designed to help students develop the skills to resist influences that lead to risk-taking behaviors such as drinking alcohol.

Lisa Stofko, grant writer for The Learning Lamp, said the agency was awarded the grant after several studies showed the need for early intervention in this area.

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Cops Tend to Be High When Giving Drugs 'Street Value'

IT HAPPENS before the news conference, before the plasticwrapped bricks of dope are arranged on the table for the TV cameras and before headlines are made.

Cops calculate the "street value." It's a branch of mathematics in which economies of scale meet public relations.

By envisioning thousands of transactions that will never occur - and sometimes padding the numbers on top of that - law-enforcement agencies can wind up doubling, tripling, quadrupling, quintupling, sextupling or even septupling what the confiscated drugs are worth to the bulk-level dealers who got popped.

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Last week the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration kicked off an offensive against so-called designer drugs, confiscating bath salts and synthetic marijuana in raids that reached into Lehigh and Northampton counties. No arrests were made locally. DEA officials said they seized more than $36 million in cash and 4.9 million packets of drugs, and arrested 91 people in a crackdown that covered several states.

In Pennsylvania, more than 300,000 doses of synthetic drugs were confiscated, along with 50,000 pieces of drug paraphernalia and $250,000 in cash. Ordinarily that qualifies as a haul, but there are reasons to think that legislators and law enforcement are coming late to this game, and that this wave of drug production is just starting.

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Over the past few decades, America has locked up more and more people. Our prison population has tripled. Now we jail a higher percentage of people than even the most repressive countries: China locks up 121 out of every 100,000 people; Russia 511. In America? 730.

"Never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little," The Economist says.

Yet we keep adding more laws and longer jail terms.

Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin's secret police in the old Soviet Union, supposedly said, "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime." Stalin executed anyone he considered a threat, and it didn't take much to be considered a threat. Beria could always find some law the targeted person had broken. That's easy to do when there are tons of vague laws on the books. Stalin "legally" executed nearly a million people that way.

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Chris Christie is not a wimp, a hippie or a countercultural icon. He's not known for taking time out from budget negotiations to smoke dope, or for his sympathy for drug dealers.

Yet he is a soft-liner on the war on drugs.

That the combative New Jersey governor and Republican rock star - just tapped to keynote the GOP convention in Tampa, Fla. - vocally dissents from drug-war orthodoxy is another sign that the tectonic plates of the drug debate are shifting.

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One of the most humanizing elements about the recent revelations regarding President Barack Obama's youthful marijuana use (in David Maraniss' book "Barack Obama: The Story") isn't that he was an enthusiastic pot smoker, but that he and his pals called themselves "the Choom Gang." Cannabis goes by many names - one of the reasons it has had such a checkered legal history - but "choom" has a quaint veneer of nostalgia about it for those old enough to have developed an extensive vocabulary for this simple weed.

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As intelligent as he may be, President Barack Obama is also a creature of habit. He will not hesitate to embrace progressive positions he has drifted away from, especially as an election looms. That always has been his modus operandi.

Last year, various Democratic constituencies began publicly grumbling about Mr. Obama's lack of progress on legislation and actions he promised as a candidate. There was talk about a growing enthusiasm gap, especially among young people and recent college graduates burned by the economic downturn.

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The reason the war on drugs is a failure is that the negative effects which have evolved for our protection are more easily washed away with chemicals than corrected by alteration in our thinking and behavior ("Efforts to decriminalize marijuana growing," Monday). Except for emotional emergencies, psychotropic drugs can be counterproductive. Legalization in the name of personal freedom makes sense and will reduce criminal behavior and save us much money and aggravation - profiteering by drug companies aside - but we should not lose sight of the fact that anxiety, distress, anger, shame, "depression," and the like are warning signals in our lives.

John Brodsky, Swarthmore

[end]

I would shrug and say "So what?" to the latest details from President Barack Obama's pot-smoking past, except for one thing: He stirred so much hope as a candidate for sensible marijuana policy reforms but, as president, has delivered so little change.

David Maraniss brings all that back to mind with his forthcoming book, "Barack Obama: The Story," which has been leaking like a sieve to major media in advance of its publication. Published accounts of his days at Punahou, the private Hawaiian prep school that Obama attended in the 1970s, make the future president sound like a classic stoner.

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Regarding your May 23 editorial, there is a big difference between condoning marijuana use and protecting children from drugs. Decriminalization acknowledges the social reality of marijuana and frees users from the stigma of life-shattering criminal records. What's really needed is a regulated market with age controls.

Separating the hard and soft drug markets is critical. As long as organized crime controls marijuana distribution, consumers will continue to come into contact with sellers of hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. This "gateway" is a direct result of marijuana prohibition.

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With a Big Bust in January and a Major Conference This Fall, We've Been Psychedelicized

IT TOOK A POLICE battering ram to bust down the door of the West Philadelphia apartment. Once inside, police discovered a colorful cache of psychedelic drugs - enough LSD to open thousands of "doors of perception" for six to eight hours at a time.

The Jan. 31 raid appeared to be a true flashback to a bygone era, with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration calling the 9,500 hits of LSD on tie-dyed images of Homer Simpson and Jerry Garcia an "anomaly" in Philadelphia. And since two of the five suspects arrested were Drexel students, the raid became known as the "Drexel LSD bust" in the media, with reporters interviewing students and getting statements from university officials.

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It makes more sense to fine persons caught with small amounts of marijuana.

A bill introduced in New Jersey that would impose fines rather than jail time for marijuana possession offers a more reasonable approach to the war on drugs.

Under the measure, a first-time offender arrested with 15 grams of marijuana or less would face a $150 fine. The fine for subsequent offenses could increase to up to $500, along with referral to a state drug-education program. The bill won unanimous approval with bipartisan support Monday from the Assembly Judiciary Committee. A Senate version was introduced last week.

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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is adamant about getting low-level, nonviolent drug offenders out of the criminal courts and into special drug courts -- a move that would save the state millions and get people into rehab programs, while avoiding lengthy criminal records.

The Legislature is taking a different path. This week an Assembly committee unanimously approved a bill that would decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, making the punishment similar to a traffic ticket. The Senate is preparing to consider a similar bill.

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TEWKSBURY, Mass. -- Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: "What country are we in?" He and his wife Pat are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language.

This town's police department is conniving with the federal government to circumvent Massachusetts law -- which is less permissive than federal law -- in order to seize his livelihood and retirement asset. In the lawsuit titled "United States of America vs. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts" the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Mr. Caswell's father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give up to 80 percent of that to the Tewksbury Police Department, whose budget is just $5.5 million.

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According to a study of traffic stops along a portion of I-95 in Maryland, African-Americans made up 70 percent of those who were stopped and searched even though they only made up 17 percent of drivers on the road. A similar study of the New Jersey Turnpike found that although African-Americans accounted for only 15 percent of speeding violations, they made up 46 percent of those pulled over.

These were only some of the many startling statistics revealed at the "Declaring War on the War on Drugs" Town Hall Meeting on May 11. The event sponsored by the Institute of the Black World 21st Century examined the disparate role of the criminal justice system in the "War on Drugs."

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