(AP) LOS ANGELES - Three men who pleaded guilty to distributing marijuana to seriously ill patients received probation instead of a prison term after a judge expressed admiration for their work and called the prosecution "badly misguided."

Scott Imler, Jeff Yablan and Jeffrey Farrington each received one year of probation and up to 250 hours of community service on Monday. They had faced up to 30 months in prison.

Judge Howard Matz of U.S. District Court said he was navigating "somewhat uncharted shoals," but pointed out that the three men did not distribute the marijuana for money or political leverage. prison.

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Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's acknowledgment that opium production is on the rise in Afghanistan is most welcome if it spreads to others in the Bush administration. For more than two decades, Washington's war on drugs has tilted heavily toward supply-side strategies: arresting drug smugglers and dealers, attempting to squeeze off the production and availability of narcotics. But this approach has failed in Afghanistan, where U.S. forces and the U.S.-backed government have been less effective than the Taliban in controlling the production of opium and heroin.

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Ed Rosenthal, an advocate of medical marijuana, is to be sentenced this week on marijuana cultivation charges. His conviction, by a California jury that was made to believe he was a common drug trafficker, was a miscarriage of justice.

Growing marijuana for medical use is legal under the California Compassionate Use Act, passed by the voters in 1996, and Rosenthal was authorized by the City of Oakland to grow it. But U.S. law does not distinguish between growing medical marijuana and run-of-the-mill drug cultivation. At Rosenthal's trial, Judge Charles Breyer prohibited the jury from hearing a medical-marijuana defense.

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The views of United States drug czar John Walters and Attorney General John Ashcroft are not shared by most Americans -- nor by the leaders of other more enlightened countries.

These officials are living in a fantasy world of their own creation, as evidenced by their belief that the U.S. government is currently winning the war on drugs.

Jeff Moore, Staunton, Virginia

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Regarding the report "Canada splits with U.S. on drugs" (May 20):

In all fairness, while Canada has been criticized by the United States for legalizing marijuana for medical purposes, America has been criticized for its discredited, zero tolerance, draconian drug policies and its associated use of the prison system.

I don't condone injecting drugs, but Canada's safe injection sites must be a more humane way of dealing with drug use than anything America is doing. Locking up drug addicts to forget about them is reminiscent of America's prohibition era. It doesn't work.

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PARIS, Jan. 11 - There's no rush to choose a new team, Jan Ullrich keeps saying, even though training camps are being held everywhere and the first races of the new bicycle season are just weeks away.

The Tour Down Under begins Jan. 21 in Australia, followed by the start of the Tour de Langkawi in Malaysia and the Tour of Qatar, both on Jan. 31. Secondary races all, they offer riders a chance to put some kilometers in their legs in racing conditions, under a hot sun, not the sleet and cold that mark the early European races.

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France is planning to tighten restrictions on the smoking of cannabis in an attempt to curb its steadily rising popularity.

Campaigners claim that millions of people are regularly defying existing laws as more plantations of cannabis are discovered, particularly in the south of the country.

At normal levels of consumption, up to three million French people will have smoked the drug on Christmas day.

France's hardline interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, has been consulting cabinet members and government officials on raising the maximum penalties for cannabis use, from the present level of a year in prison or a UKP5,000 fine.

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A federal appeals court in California last week struck an important blow for medical marijuana, and for the First Amendment. It held that the government cannot revoke the licenses of doctors who recommend marijuana to their patients. The federal government should now abandon its misguided policy of targeting doctors and sick people to fight marijuana use. The ruling gives new life to the medical marijuana initiative, also known as Proposition 215, which California voters passed in 1996. The law permits seriously ill people to use marijuana on the advice of their physicians, and it says that doctors may not be punished for recommending marijuana to their patients. Shortly after it became law, the federal government announced that it would use its authority under the Controlled Substances Act to revoke the prescription licenses of doctors who recommended marijuana to a patient.

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On a recent summer tour through south London, I saw the future of drug legalization. A young couple injected heroin inside the filthy ruins of an abandoned building. In this working-class neighborhood, residents weave in and out of crowded sidewalks, trying to avoid making eye contact with dealers who openly push heroin, marijuana and crack.

Scotland Yard aggressively targets international drug traffickers, and I applaud its strong overall anti-drug policy. But last year, a local police commander initiated a pilot program in which people caught possessing marijuana were warned rather than arrested. Often, they were just ignored. In news reports and my interviews, residents criticized the program for bringing more drug dealers, more petty criminals and more drug use.

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The French National Assembly has voted through a law making it an offence to drive while under the influence of drugs.

Offenders will be liable to two years in jail and a fine of 4,500 euros.

The law - which now goes before the upper house or Senate at the end of the month - also authorises police to conduct random testing.

The new law was aimed mainly at smokers of cannabis, which is by far the most popular drug among young people.

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October 8, 2002 -- You know how to walk like an Egyptian - now scientists say they can make you smell like one, too.

Researchers in France have recreated the perfume of the pharaohs, a scent believed to have been used by the ancient Egyptians to boost their love lives.

But there's a hitch: The ingredients of Kyphi perfume, an aphrodisiac that helps wearers relax, include marijuana, so it can't be made commercially.

The legendary aphrodisiac was concocted by experts from L'Oreal and the Center for Research and Restoration of French Museums.Researcher Sandrine Videault based the formula on the writings of Greek historian Plutarch.

The numerous ingredients include pistachios, mint, cinnamon, incense, juniper and myrrh.

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Cultivation And Consumption Of The Plant In France Have Soared In Recent Years

In France the secret growing of Cannabis sativa , which existed on only a small scale a few years ago, is booming. More than 50 shops around the country now sell the equipment required for this new form of "gardening", whose practitioners, according to Ananda, a specialised wholesaler, number tens of thousands.

The craze for home-grown cannabis is also evident from the proliferation of books, magazines and websites devoted to the subject, as well as from the increase in the number of events that aim to promote the plant's legal and industrial form, hemp, which contains almost no psychoactive substances. This has already given its name to a trade show, the Salon Europeen du Chanvre, which has been held in Paris for the past two years, to a line of mass-market cosmetics, and to a folkloric festival in Montjean-sur-Loire, western France.

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PARIS - The French Navy's dramatic high seas raid in June of a ship suspected of smuggling drugs has been attacked by Greek and Spanish officials for a lack of professionalism, France's Le Monde newspaper said on Saturday.

The "Winner," a Cambodian-flagged freighter bound for Spain from the Caribbean, was seized in the Atlantic in an operation ordered by the French interim right-wing government three days before the decisive second round of the legislative elections.

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin had at the time hailed the operation "a great success against international drug trafficking."

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The tribes of the French rave movement were massing yesterday for what may turn out to be their last stand. The frontier of France and Italy, high in the Alps, was the battleground chosen by the ravers for a confrontation with the French government, which they claim is engaged in a "genocidal war" against youth culture, techno music and large rave parties.

The French authorities have pledged to enforce rigorously a new law, giving them the power to seize the sound equipment at any rave that takes place without written permission. The ravers said the government has blocked all reasonable efforts to seek such permission in recent weeks. They insisted that Europe's biggest rave of the year, the Teknival " due to last until Sunday, and attract up to 20,000 people and dozens of bands or "sound systems" from several countries " would go ahead regardless.

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Regarding "An atrocity of arrests in a Panhandle town" (Meanwhile, July 31) by Bob Herbert: The problem of racial profiling in America is by no means limited to Texas. U.S. government statistics reveal that the drug war is waged in a racist manner through the nation.

Blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates. Although only 15 percent of the nation's drug users are black, blacks account for 37 percent of those arrested for drug violations, over 42 percent of those in federal prisons for drug violations, and almost 60 percent of those in state prisons for drug felonies. Support for the war on some drugs would end overnight if whites were incarcerated for drugs at the same rate as minorities.

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The British organizer of a giant rave in France threatened yesterday to halt the country's holiday traffic in protest against a government policy against free music festivals.

Allan Blinkhorn, an organiser of the Teknival, due to start "somewhere in the south of France" on Thursday, said he planned a slow-moving convoy of trucks carrying loudspeakers on the main motorway south from tomorrow night.

"Two trucks packed with sound systems travelling at 50kph (30mph), means 400 kilometres (250 miles) of jams," Mr Blinkhorn said.

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France's new government looks set to take the opposite line from Britain on drugs, handing down stiff penalties even for casual users of cannabis, writes Jon Henley

A couple of days before the British home secretary, David Blunkett, announced he was reclassifying cannabis as a less dangerous drug, the doorbell rang at Jerome Expuesto's home in Le Tour-de-Salvagny near Lyon.

The gendarmes on his doorstep were there to escort the 29-year-old off to Saint-Paul prison, where he is now serving a three-year term for drug dealing in what many see as the latest distressing injustice in France's increasingly aggressive war on drugs.

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NEW YORK When I was a high school social studies teacher in Vermont, one of my duties was to instruct a state-mandated unit on alcohol and illegal drugs. Our curriculum encouraged us to lead "discussions" about these substances, but there was one fact we could never discuss: They make you feel good.

That's right: They make you feel good. You read it here first.

And soon, New Yorkers will be reading it on the subway - right under a photograph of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Earlier this week, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws unveiled a $500,000 advertising campaign featuring a quotation from Bloomberg. Asked last year whether he had ever smoked marijuana, Bloomberg told New York magazine, "You bet I did. And I enjoyed it."

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LONDON - Colombia should have everything in its favor. An Atlantic and Pacific coastline, the wealth of oil, coal, diamonds and coffee, a rich potential for tourism and a long history of respect for democratic institutions should make the country a model Latin American nation. Instead, Colombia has a long history of violence: 40,000 have been killed in nearly four decades of guerrilla and paramilitary violence. Illegal armed groups routinely kidnap, take hostages, commit murder and extortion, and show unrestricted contempt for international humanitarian law, both against the civilian population and against their political opponents.

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French Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin stirred controversy by suggesting that occasional smokers of cannabis should be treated with leniency.

Supporters of conservative President Jacques Chirac, his neck-and-neck rival in the April 21 vote, slammed the remarks as irresponsible, while the pro-legalization lobby called for a debate on reform of France's tough drug laws.

Jospin said legalization would send the wrong signal to the young but insisted that France's 32-year-old drug laws should be applied "in an intelligent manner" toward users.

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