Prevention Works Clients Are Mostly Gay White Men When a methamphetamine user approaches Kristen Degan, she offers a practiced response. She regularly welcomes meth addicts to Prevention Works, a privately funded program in D.C. that operates a needle exchange program and encourages addiction treatment. Degan, a program assistant who specializes in meth issues, counts the number of needles brought to her, disposes of them, then provides an equal number of clean needles in return. She also gives meth users several condoms, towelettes and antibiotic ointment. [continues 1060 words]
Today, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Corrections and Rehabilitation is scheduled to hear findings from the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons' report, released today. The commission began last year as a nonpartisan effort co-chaired by former LBJ Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and former appellate court Judge John J. Gibbons to study the state of America's prison system, which holds on any given day 2.2 million prisoners at an annual cost of $60 billion. The magnitude of the prison system, although trumpeted often enough by the liberal media, remains a troubling part of our society, all the more so since, as the report found, data collection remains poor to nonexistent. [continues 351 words]
High rates of disease and illness among inmates in the nation's jails and prisons, coupled with inadequate funding for correctional health care, has put the nation's 2.2 million prisoners at risk, along with corrections officers and the public, a report said yesterday. Every year, according to a report by the 21-member Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, more than 1.5 million people are released from jails and prisons nationwide carrying life-threatening contagious diseases, and another 350,000 inmates have serious mental illnesses. [continues 378 words]
It's hard to imagine that Patrick Kennedy would have gotten elected to Congress a dozen years ago without his last name. It's equally hard to imagine that the media would be going wild about his late-night car crash and prescription drug addiction if he weren't a Kennedy. The only lingering mystery is why national news organizations didn't pounce earlier on the Rhode Island Democrat's long history of alcohol and drug abuse, depression and a series of downright embarrassing incidents. [continues 1175 words]
It's hard to imagine that Patrick Kennedy would have gotten elected to Congress a dozen years ago without his last name. It's equally hard to imagine that the media would be going wild about his late-night car crash and prescription drug addiction if he weren't a Kennedy. The only lingering mystery is why national news organizations didn't pounce earlier on the Rhode Island Democrat's long history of alcohol and drug abuse, depression and a series of downright embarrassing incidents. [continues 2493 words]
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit discovered a new constitutional right yesterday: "the right of a mentally competent, terminally ill adult patient to access potentially life-saving post-Phase I investigational new drugs, upon a doctor's advice, even where that medication carries risks for the patient" and has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. If you don't remember reading those particular words in the founding charter, don't kick yourself. [continues 483 words]
Tommy Chong, the comedian and actor of Cheech and Chong fame, will be the keynote speaker for the Washington-based National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws' 2006 national conference, which begins tomorrow in San Francisco. "I guess you could say it's Chong sans bong," says NORML media guru Nicholas Thimmesch II, one-time communications director to former Rep. Steve Largent, Oklahoma Republican, and son of the late Los Angeles Times Syndicate columnist Nick Thimmesch. This columnist once asked Mr. Thimmesch, who began his career in the Reagan White House -- and later served on the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign, ditto on the 1996 Dole-Kemp campaign, and huddled with former drug czar and conservative moralist Bill Bennett at Empower America -- what would Ronald Reagan say if he knew he was peddling marijuana decriminalization? [continues 196 words]
As the parent of two alumni of Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, I was incensed by an April 5 Metro article about three Smith students arrested in Israel for allegedly buying or using marijuana at a school there. I wonder about the motives behind this coverage of an event that should have been handled privately among the teens, their parents and the school. According to Montgomery County police, there were 438 arrests of juveniles in the county on drug charges in 2005. Very little, if any, media coverage surrounded these unfortunate incidents. How then did Smith students become such a focal point of media attention? [continues 76 words]
Jonathan Magbie was a 27-year-old man who was paralyzed from the neck down as a result of a childhood accident. Although he had never been convicted of a criminal offense and although he required private nursing care for as much as 20 hours a day, Magbie was given a 10-day sentence in the D.C. jail in September 2004 by D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith E. Retchin for possession of a marijuana cigarette. He died in city custody four days later. His story has been the subject of several previous columns. [continues 735 words]
At an Exxon station in Southeast Washington, behind a thick pane of protective glass, an attendant in a white Yankees cap peddles chips, cheap cigars and fake roses inside tiny glass tubes. The little cloth flower looks like a novelty item, something a smitten teenager might buy his sweetheart. But the rose is a ruse, police say, a distraction to be thrown away. The real attraction is the four-inch-long tube that holds the flower. It's a thinly disguised crack pipe, law enforcement officials say. [continues 974 words]
Marc Emery, who distributed millions of marijuana seeds throughout the country, admits the accuracy of the Drug Enforcement Administration's charges against him, but he denies harming Americans ["High Crimes, or a Tokin' Figure?" Style, March 18]. Like all dealers, Mr. Emery turns a blind eye to marijuana's victims - -- people like Victoria Rogers, a mother driving with her children when she was killed by a marijuana-intoxicated motorist. Marijuana feeds thousands of addictions -- so many that more teenagers enter treatment for marijuana dependency than for all other drugs combined. Thousands of adolescents whose brains are still developing also suffer from depression, memory impairment and diminished judgment because of marijuana. Users destroy their lungs because marijuana smoke contains 50 to 70 percent more cancer-causing chemicals than tobacco smoke. That Mr. Emery sees no consequences of his actions does not change the fact that they destroy innocent American lives and that he should and will face legal consequences as a result. Administrator Drug Enforcement Administration Arlington [end]
The House yesterday approved an amendment calling for $99.4 million in emergency anti-drug funds to assist in Colombia's war against narco-terrorists by replacing 23 aircraft that have been shot down or crashed since 2000 and buying three new ones for the Colombian National Police and the country's navy. The money was included as an add-on to a pending $72.4 billion appropriations bill for the war on terrorism and passed 250-172 amid a flurry of votes on several spending projects. It faces formal approval in the House and then will be sent to Senate for a vote. [continues 382 words]
A former D.C. fire cadet assigned to the firehouse that routinely provides support for helicopter landings at the vice president's mansion was reinstated this month after being arrested twice on charges of drug possession, distribution and resisting arrest last year. Kevin. E. Steve, 23, pleaded guilty in Montgomery County in October to possession with intent to distribute Ecstasy and marijuana. He was handed an 18-month suspended sentence and placed on probation for two years. The sentence stemmed from a June 14 incident in which police stopped Steve at about 11 p.m. in Silver Spring for driving 50 mph in a 25 mph zone. According to charging documents, a search of Steve's car turned up a paper bag filled with 17 baggies containing white pills that police later determined were the drug Ecstasy and 12 small baggies containing marijuana. Steve was carrying $795 in cash, and two burned marijuana cigarettes were in the ashtray. Two months later, on Aug. 29 at 9 p.m. in Capitol Heights, two Prince George's County police officers on routine patrol saw Steve sitting on a parked motorcycle that had its plates turned inward. The officers thought the motorcycle might be stolen and approached Steve to ask him about it. According to court records, Steve backed away from the officers as they approached. When an officer ordered him to stop backing away, Steve ran down a hill. "As he ran, he reached to the front of his pants and grabbed his waist line," one of the officers stated in court records. The officer said Steve fell, "simultaneously throwing the contents of his pockets to the ground." The officer said he ordered Steve to lie on his stomach and put his hands on his head. "The defendant refused, remaining on his side, and reaching for his waistband," the officer said. "I then employed the use of my ... baton, striking the defendant in his upper arm, ordering him again onto his stomach." At that point, Steve complied. [continues 311 words]
Westley Clark is a doctor and a lawyer, no small accomplishment for a black guy who grew up poor in Detroit. He could have gone on to make plenty of money, no doubt, and never looked back. But he couldn't forget where he came from or ignore the devastated lives of those left behind. Clark, 59, is director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That position gives him a unique perspective on one of the most serious problems ever to plague black America. [continues 664 words]
As we were watching a story on the evening news about the extravagance and excesses of lobbyists, my son asked me, "Aren't you a lobbyist?" Yes, I said. "You must not be very good at it," he said. By some modern standards, maybe not. I don't own an airplane. I've never played golf at St. Andrews. The most I ever paid for a suit was $450, and I got married in it. I don't have an office on K Street, although sometimes I hold meetings at a Starbucks on K Street. I don't buy lavish dinners for members of Congress on behalf of my clients. In fact, I have nothing of value to offer a member of Congress except an occasional $15 plaque and an invaluable cause. [continues 602 words]
This week a House subcommittee held hearings on a bill, the Second Chance Act, which is meant to deal with the problems that prisoners encounter on their reentry into society and also with their need for substance abuse treatment. The concern over prisoners and recidivism is justified. Though national crime rates declined steadily over the past decade, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the percentage of released prisoners re-arrested within three years increased from 62.5 percent in 1983 to 67.5 percent in 1994. And given that offenders are arrested for only a fraction of the crimes they commit, even this depressing statistic is an underestimate. Few would dispute that the correctional system must be changed. But how? [continues 729 words]
Maybe it's time to get soft on crime. That's because many criminals are more likely to go astray once they get out of prison if they faced longer sentences and more punitive conditions in the slammer, claim economists M. Keith Chen of Yale University and Jesse M. Shapiro of the University of Chicago. "Harsher prison conditions are associated with significantly more post-release crime," they report in their updated working paper posted on the university Web sites, a finding that suggests doing hard time often may only produce more hard-core crooks. [continues 240 words]
It is the ultimate parental nightmare: Your affectionate child is transformed, seemingly overnight, into an out-of-control, drug-addicted, hostile teenager. Many parents blame themselves. "Where did we go wrong?" they ask. The kids, meanwhile, hurtle through their own bewildering adolescent nightmare. I know. My descent into drug addiction started in high school and now, as an adult, I have a much better understanding of my parents' anguish and of what I was going through. And, after devoting several years to researching treatment programs, I'm also aware of the traps that many parents fall into when they finally seek help for their kids. [continues 1452 words]
One man confesses to raping a 7-year-old girl countless times and gets 60 days in jail from a Vermont judge who no longer "believes" in punishment. Another man, a quadriplegic in D.C., basically gets a death sentence for getting caught with a single marijuana joint. There's much to be said for judicial discretion, but this point spread is ridiculous. There no longer seems to be any national - or rational - standard in matters of crime and punishment. In September 2004, D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith Retchin sentenced 27-year-old Johnathan Magbie to 10 days in the D.C. Jail for his first offense, a misdemeanor. Magbie, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a drunken driving accident when he was 4, never made it out alive. [continues 186 words]
Former D.C. Council Member Struggles to Cope With 1 Grandson's Slaying, Another's Arrest By the time a stray bullet killed Jon Allen Jr., a lot of people in Southeast Washington knew just who he was. "I'm Sandy Allen's grandson," the 15-year-old liked to say. Almost everyone in Southeast knows or has heard of Sandy Allen. She was born in the District, a fifth-generation Washingtonian, a one-time welfare mom of two sons who became a community activist and then a member of the D.C. Council until last year. A woman of stature and influence, from the neighborhood. [continues 2284 words]
Inside District of Columbia
