A person who carries a small amount of marijuana with a doctor's note allowing medical use can't be convicted of dealing the drug just because police thought he was a dealer, a state appeals court ruled Friday.

In overturning an Orange County man's conviction for possessing marijuana for sale, the Fourth District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana said the prosecutor needed more evidence of sales than the opinion of a sheriff's deputy who specialized in investigating narcotics dealers.

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The Popular Drug's Prices Have Changed Little in 25 Years

A car, a home, a gallon of milk -- most everything costs more now than a generation ago. Except a baggie of Mexican marijuana.

Give or take a few dollars, authorities say, pot grown in Mexico and sold in Houston and other Texas cities still goes for about the same price as 25 years ago: $60 to $80 for an ounce.

In economic terms, marijuana is far cheaper since the decade when a three-bedroom home in upscale West University cost $150,000, a new ride was less than $6,000 and first lady Nancy Reagan urged kids to "Just Say No."

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Boca Raton - City police have new offices thanks in large part to a 28-foot boat named Lassie, loaded with 1,400 pounds of cocaine.

That's not all: Boca Raton Fire Rescue has new headquarters. And municipal employees from across the city, and soon the region, have a new training center at 6500 Congress Ave.

City officials recently dedicated the 117,000-square-foot building, which still has about 50,000 square feet of unfinished space. Plans call for city's emergency operation center and 911 center to be housed there as well.

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As a physician and public health professional who has dedicated my career to improving the lives of those with addiction to heroin and other opiates, I read with dismay The Sun's articles on buprenorphine ("The 'bupe fix,'" Dec. 16-18). I have never seen a newspaper report so lacking in balance and context. Every medication has side effects; what's critical is the balance of risks and benefits.

Buprenorphine is an effective treatment for the dangerous disease of opiate addiction. Balanced against the benefit of saving thousands of lives is the small risk of diversion of the drug, which is a tiny slice of the overall illegal drug trade.

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Little Effect Seen

Regarding Lynne K. Varner's column, "Common sense replaces hysteria with high court's cocaine rulings," Opinion, Dec. 18:

Mandatory minimum prison sentences have done little other than give the land of the free the highest incarceration rate in the world.

The deterrent value of tough drug laws is grossly overrated. During the crack epidemic of the '80s, New York City chose the zero-tolerance approach, opting to arrest and prosecute as many offenders as possible. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry was smoking crack and America's capital had the highest per capita murder rate in the country. Yet crack use declined in both cities simultaneously.

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Sparta - Four months after the intended September start date, the Sparta High School random drug testing program finally got the green light.

School officials announced at the Board of Education meeting Monday, Dec. 17, preparations are underway to begin random testing sometime after the new year. With board of education approval in the spring, the program was to be implemented by the start of school. However, the state Department of Education said last summer that it would reevaluate sample collection and testing procedures with an eye toward consistent policies. Sparta opted to put the program on hold until it could determine if additional costs would be incurred.

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Each week Editorial and Opinion Editor Jeanne Mariani-Belding hosts The Hot Seat, our opinion-page blog that brings in elected leaders and people in the news and lets you ask the questions during a live online chat.

On The Hot Seat last week was Vanessa Chong, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawai'i, who answered questions on civil rights issues, including drug testing for Hawai'i's public school teachers. The following is an excerpt from that Hot Seat session. To see the full conversation, go to The Hot Seat blog at www.honoluluadvertiser.com/opinion and click on "The Hot Seat." (Names of questioners are screen names given during our online chat.)

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What Cop Learned From Years on Front Line

(Re: Dec. 12 guest column, "Prison not part of solution to drug, alcohol addiction," by Hal Don House. Dec. 16 rebuttal, "Arguments against jailing drug users have become totally wasted," by James A. Farren.)

As a retired police officer and detective who worked in the trenches of the drug war for 18 years, I heartily agree with House's remarks.

I know my profession has failed to make a difference in drug price, purity and availability. Indeed, these crucial factors are worse than they were 36 years and a trillion U.S. tax dollars ago. Illegal drugs are more plentiful, cheaper, stronger and easier for our kids to buy.

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Counseling, Tests and Other Services Are Offered, Too, Trying to Stem a Major Source of HIV Infection.

ATLANTIC CITY - Bobby Jones, a self-described heroin addict, had never been to the Oasis Drop-In Center on Tennessee Avenue before.

But last month, when word on the street spread that the social service agency was offering drug users salvation in the form of the state's first legal needle-exchange program, Jones was among those lined up at the former union hall waiting for clean syringes.

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THERE IS only one illicit drug in America for which one is sentenced differently, depending on how it's ingested: Cocaine.

Until recently, the federal sentencing guidelines for powder and crack cocaine were vastly different. For instance, the penalty a person would face for possessing only five grams of crack equaled the penalty a person would face for possessing 500 grams of powder cocaine.

Now, federal authorities have rightly taken steps to make the sentences more equitable.

Crack might be more addictive than powder cocaine, but on a scale of relative evils, a coke dealer is a coke dealer.

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Cheap, highly addictive drugs such as methamphetamine and crack cocaine cripple families. In Robeson County, the casualties can be counted in child-welfare cases and on foster-care rolls.

Drugs fuel child abuse and neglect there. According to the state Division of Social Services, there is a disproportionately high number of drug-related child-welfare cases in the county.

A two-year-old state law that limits access to the raw ingredients for methamphetamine is slowly reducing the use of that drug across the state, according to law enforcement agencies. But the state's emphasis on imprisonment and law enforcement over social services and health care has done little to keep families together.

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But for the 30 or so people who gathered at University Congregational Church to memorialize Prosser on Wednesday, it's easy to see how her hand was forced.

By pain. By depression. By poverty. By her own government. * "We can't properly honor Robin and her life without recognizing the truth of what the government's marijuana prohibition policy did to her, physically, emotionally, spiritually," said Tom Daubert. "We can't properly honor what Robin struggled for years to achieve without crying out in rage at the forces of insanity and even sadism that destroyed her."

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Re "DEA alerts pot-store landlords," Dec. 15: Landlords are responsive to and dependent upon government agencies for policing authority. Landlords have no policing authority.

In a recent call to the Sheriff's Department, we were advised that eviction for selling drugs was an option only if the resident went to jail. So, if the sheriff doesn't take action, we can't. The person we talked to also indicated it would be considered "vigilante" behavior for which the sheriff would take action against the landlord. The DEA says we could lose our property for failure to act; the sheriff penalizes if we act. The result is we are governed by two authorities with diametrically opposed views. If this went to court, landlords would expend private funds for defense in what appears to be an interagency dispute.

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Punishment - Prosecutors Say Penalties for Big-Time Traffickers Are Too Soft; Lawmakers and Activists Are Working to Change That

In the spring of 2004, the U.S. government freed a sophisticated young drug dealer named Isidro Linares from prison and deported him to Mexico.

Linares shrugged off this inconvenience by sneaking back to Oregon and legally registering a Corvallis business called La Poderosa Mexican Store. Soon he'd turned the grocery into the hub of a drug gang that moved up to 40 pounds of methamphetamine a month through the heart of the Willamette Valley.

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BRENTWOOD - Tuesday night, the Brentwood City Council unanimously approved a permanent ban on medical marijuana dispensaries in the city. Police Capt. Brian Strock and Brentwood Planning Manager Heidi Klein made a presentation on the ordinance before the voting.

California voters approved Proposition 215 in 1996, making marijuana legal for medicinal purposes while possession of marijuana remains illegal under federal law. City code neither allows nor explicitly prevents the presence of such dispensaries in Brentwood. Just last year the city council approved a temporary ban pending investigation of negative impacts of facilities on neighborhoods and communities.

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It was as low a blow as has lately been landed in national politics. And it had all the subtlety of a surprise kick to the groin.

Bill Shaheen, husband of ex-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, a national co-chair of the Clinton campaign, volunteered to The Washington Post his concern at what might happen to Barack Obama, were he to be nominated.

"The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight, and one of the things they're certainly going to jump on is drug use," said Shaheen. And, as Obama has admitted in his autobiography to using drugs, this will "open the door" to further probing.

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Damon Fuseyamore vividly recalls smoking "my last nickel of crack" on June 16, 1997, while sitting on the steps outside his New York City residence.

He said he owed loan sharks money and had been arrested two weeks before "with six nickels of crack and a bunch of money."

He was charged with selling crack and was looking at two to seven years in prison. But he had another option.

"I had a choice of doing jail time or changing my life and going through treatment," he said. "If you have a choice between doing two to seven or going through the program and going into treatment, any smart person would take the program."

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LANSING (AP) --Michigan's November 2008 ballot could become a bit more crowded, possibly including proposals to provide universal health care coverage and allow marijuana use for medical purposes.

Those proposals, among others, took procedural steps forward Wednesday with action by a state elections panel.

Other possible petition drives in the works would create a part-time Legislature in Michigan and require a statewide vote to raise certain taxes, a proposal that also could repeal tax increases put in place this year.

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As a Christian, I must speak up about what Jonathan Troutman thinks is "moral" (Legalizing marijuana a dangerous prospect, Dec. 16), concerning the relatively safe God-given plant cannabis.

Caging responsible adult humans for cannabis is immoral, sinful and just plain wrong. One reason to re-legalize cannabis that doesn't get mentioned is because it is Biblically correct since God indicates he created all the seed-bearing plants, saying they are all good, on literally the very first page.

The only Biblical restriction placed on cannabis is that it is to be accepted with thankfulness (see 1 Timothy 4:1-5).

Does Jonathan Troutman even realize He supports caging people for using what God says is good?

Stan White

Dillon, Colo.

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Iowa historically has been an island of sanity on prisons, especially when compared to states such as Texas and California. Iowa long believed that prison should be the last option. That has changed in recent decades, however, and Iowa has racked up some of the fastest prison-growth rates in the nation.

In the past 20 years, the state's prison population has tripled - to 8,727 inmates as of Tuesday. At the same time, the number of convicts in community-based corrections programs has doubled, to more than 30,000. In the past decade alone, those two populations combined increased by nearly 60 percent.

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