I read with interest Ms. Lisa Kaiser's reporting on how the Milwaukee County district attorney views the pot scene in "Want Saner Marijuana Laws?" (Oct. 18). Ultimate reform must come from Washington, and like most huge issues, it will one day have its day at the polls.

America is ever-so-slowly waking up to the folly of drug prohibition, especially marijuana, and may one day come to know they have been propagandized into a $42 billion a year "Blackwater" operation that is never supposed to end, complete with asset forfeiture, corruption, expanding prisons and drug testing. It tears us apart as a country and we must fix it. The internecine relationship of guns, money and drugs worldwide can only be reined in through regulation and treatment. The talking points of the drug war industrial complex are based on fear, gutter science and racism thrown in when necessary, like any war--but this one is against ourselves. I ask District Attorney John Chisholm to contact LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, www.leap.cc, and have a visit with his colleagues to discuss prohibition as law enforcement professionals and not drug war sycophants.

Peter Christopher

Hurdle Mills, N.C.

[end]

Wisconsin's prison system is like an out-of-control carousel.

In 2005, for example, 7,700 new inmates got onboard just as 8,800 parolees stepped off and headed for home -- up from 1,600 in 1980. Wisconsin towns and cities are struggling to cope with the special services needed by this growing number of new parolees returning home each year.

America's lock 'em up drug laws are keeping this merry-go-round spinning faster and faster. Nationally, the portion of inmates leaving state prisons after serving time for non-violent drug offenses has shot up from 11 percent in 1985 to 37 percent in 2005. Here is how this trend plays out in Wisconsin.

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Change Would Mean Ticket for Simple Possession

Waukesha - Joining a movement to decriminalize certain marijuana cases, Waukesha County officials are considering handling minor instances of possession like traffic tickets.

If the County Board approves, first-time offenders caught by sheriff's deputies with small amounts of marijuana or drug paraphernalia would be required only to pay a fine and would not get a criminal record. Currently, deputies refer all such cases to the district attorney's office for possible prosecution as misdemeanors, with penalties of up to six months in jail possible.

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Onalaska lawmakers are moving slow on an ordinance supported by police officers and landlords to allow speedy eviction of tenants convicted of drug or gang activity.

Sgt. Keith Roh, an Onalaska police officer, helped introduce an ordinance to the city's Administrative and Judiciary Committee that grants landlords the right to evict tenants after five days if they live in homes used for drug or gang activity. Now, landlords must wait 30 days to begin the eviction process.

Roh said he got the idea to introduce the ordinance after speaking with police officers from La Crosse, where a similar law is already on the books.

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While Jimi Reinke has trained 109 people to administer an antidote for heroin overdoses, he never thought he actually would have to do it himself. The drug users he works with aren't usually high when he sees them.

But on Oct. 8, Reinke had parked his van in front of Luke House on Ingersoll Street, where he offers AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin services during the free meal program there, when a woman ran up and said, "You have any Narcan?"

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I'm bipartisan in my criticisms of politicians, depending on the issue. Republican Rep. Leah Vukmir, chair of WI Assembly's health-care committee, refuses to give a hearing to a bill legalizing medical marijuana in our state. The current bill has several Democratic sponsors and just one Republican. But again this year, such legislation will likely not get an up-or-down vote by our elected representatives.

My mother-in-law is in her final months of a several year battle with lung cancer. Hospice workers have provided her morphine if needed. Should she be denied morphine out of objection to the drug being legal in general? What a lack of compassion that would be! When Lyn Nofziger of the Reagan Administration provided marijuana to his daughter to fight the side effects of chemotherapy, he wasn't arguing that marijuana should be legal. But he understood the value of the plant in fighting nausea and generating appetite.

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Among the casualties of the war on drugs are those who use marijuana to relieve their pain and suffering.

Sean--not his real name--lives in Milwaukee County and smokes pot to help him cope with multiple sclerosis (MS) and other health problems. He walks with a crutch and his joints are stiff, but he manages to get around when he needs to, thanks to his use of marijuana as medicine.

"I'm a bad spokesman for MS," he said. "Pot gives me energy. Usually people with MS are kind of out of it. I'm paralyzed on one side and it hurts to walk. But pot helps me get around. It makes me more flexible. I've tried different pain medications. Morphine is a joke compared to marijuana. Pot is a much better painkiller, without the nasty side effects."

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If the $42 Billion War on Pot Isn't Working, What Will?

One obvious solution is to stop demonizing and criminalizing marijuana and, instead, allow people to grow their own or buy it legally and use it as they please.

But those who deal with federal, state and local drug laws say that legalizing marijuana isn't an option.

"I'm sensitive to the argument that enough's enough, just legalize it and derive some revenue from it," said Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm. "But that's just not practical. The reality is the feds are never going to legalize it."

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RIPON -- A group promoting the rebirth of the hemp industry in Wisconsin will meet this week in Ripon.

The advocacy organization, Wisconsin Hemp Order, will meet at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 18, in the Little White Schoolhouse on Blackburn Street in Ripon.

The meeting takes place on the 90th anniversary date of the founding by regional hemp growers and processors of the Wisconsin Hemp Order in Ripon.

While the last American hemp mill in Brandon closed in 1957, the area is still ripe to be the center of a revived hemp industry once legal impediments are removed, according to a press release from the Wisconsin Hemp Order.

The keynote address Thursday will be delivered by David P. West, the last holder of a government permit for hemp research.

More information is available by contacting Order Secretary Ben Masel at (608) 442-8830 or bmasel@tds.net or West at davewest@gametec.com.

[end]

"20/20" co-anchor John Stossel spoke to University of Wisconsin students Monday evening at the Memorial Union Theatre encouraging individual liberty and capitalism in a lecture presented by Collegians For a Constructive Tomorrow.

Stossel graduated from Princeton University in 1969 and joined the ABC news program in 1981. He became an anchor in 2003 and has received 19 Emmy Awards.

Stossel focused his lecture on the dangers of government and the importance of protecting individual rights.

"Individual liberty is the most important thing," Stossel said in an interview with The Badger Herald before the event. "Central planning of all kinds takes people's freedom and their money and makes life worse."

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Fleischman's Attorney Denies Allegations

The chairman of the Republican Party in Brown County faces criminal charges for allegedly fondling a 16-year-old Ethan House runaway and providing the boy with beer and marijuana late last year.

Donald Fleischman, 37, of Allouez, was charged last month with two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child and a single charge of exposing himself to a child.

He was summoned to Brown County court for his initial appearance on Sept. 28. He is free having posted a signature bond as his promise to return to court.

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After 25 years on the bench, U.S. District Judge John Shabaz says he's ready to scale back his caseload and President Bush should start looking for his successor.

In a letter to Bush dated Oct. 4, Shabaz, 76, said he will assume senior status if the U.S. Senate confirms his successor by Jan. 20, 2009, Bush's last day in office.

A federal judge can leave active status and take senior status beginning at age 65, said Joel Turner, deputy U.S. clerk for the Western District of Wisconsin. The senior designation means the judge takes on a reduced workload.

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More than 30 states passed medical marijuana bills in the 1970s and '80s, including Wisconsin, but all of those left the responsibility of supplying the marijuana up to the federal government.

"A bill was passed in 1981 with overwhelming majorities in both houses," said Madison marijuana activist Gary Storck. "It was signed into law by Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus in 1982, but, unfortunately, it was kind of a watered-down law that required the federal government to supply the medical marijuana, which the state would then dispense to approved patients who had glaucoma or were undergoing cancer chemotherapy. The bill was basically rendered symbolic."

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After some research into the effects of marijuana, you might just begin to be convinced it is a miracle medicine, perhaps even Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth.

The beneficial effects among patients with everything from AIDS to Alzheimer's have been documented by doctors and scientists around the world. It was a legal medicine from mid 19th century and well into the 20th century. Tincture of cannabis - marijuana in alcohol - was available in pharmacies and recommended for a variety of circumstances - as an analgesic, muscle relaxant, anticonvulsant, for asthma and rheumatism, to ease labor pains, migraines and menstruation problems, to name a few of the most popular medical uses.

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Marijuana activists, advocates and adventurers will converge on Madison Oct. 5-7 for the 37th Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival.

Political activist Ben Masel has been involved with the annual festival from the beginning. He was a fresh-faced freshman from New Jersey when he arrived in Madison to attend UW in 1971.

"I just got to town as a freshman for that first one," he said. "It was more closely in context with the anti-war movement then."

The Vietnam War ended and we've moved on to conduct wars in other parts of the world, but our internal war with marijuana goes on.

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Need proof that marijuana has been demonized by your government?

Consider hemp. Hemp is not marijuana. Hemp is a non-psychoactive plant that grows best in temperate climates like ours. It is a variety of the tropical cannabis sativa, or marijuana. Trying to get high on hemp is like trying to get drunk on NA beer.

Your federal government makes us all look like dopes by being unable and unwilling to separate industrial hemp from marijuana.

Forget that hemp was legal tender in the American colonies and beyond, that the first American flags were made of hemp, that both Washington and Jefferson raised hemp, that Ben Franklin printed publications on hemp paper, that American ships were caulked and rigged with hemp, and that hemp played an important role in both World Wars.

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Critics of "big government" point to the alleged excesses of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs of the 1960s to make their case. The critics have prevailed: by the late 1990s a Republican backlash aided by Democratic capitulation succeeded in dismantling the Great Society's "War on Poverty." By the mid 1990s the poverty war had become, in the words of sociologist Herbert Gans, the "war on the poor," with Project Head Start, Medicare, and Medicaid the only major surviving programs.

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Nearly 300 people gathered on Library Mall this weekend for the 2007 Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival and parade to the Capitol.

Harvest Fest has been put on by the Madison chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws for the past 37 years.

"The purpose of the Harvest Festival is to celebrate the harvest of marijuana, to keep lobbying for the legalization of this medically beneficial substance and to keep the tradition of the festival alive," said Gary Stork, director of Madison's chapter of NORML. "This is like a family -- you come to the festival year after year and see the same people and get to know them."

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Mary Powers of Madison takes marijuana to relieve nausea caused by AIDS and cancer.

Brian Barnstable of Milwaukee uses it to ease multiple sclerosis pain.

Both patients can get the pot they smoke and bake with on the black market, but they say medical marijuana should be legal.

"Why should it be so hard?" asked Powers, 48.

That question was the focus of the 37th annual Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival Saturday on State Street Mall. The event continues at 1 p.m. today, with a walk to the Capitol at 3 p.m.

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Violent crimes are on the rise in Oshkosh, new statistics compiled by the FBI show.

Although four people were murdered in 2006, murder remains rare in the city, forcible rape numbers have not risen in recent years and robberies dropped in 2006. What's driving the increase in violent crimes is aggravated assaults, which in Oshkosh accounted for 87 percent of the violent crimes documented in the FBI's annual Unified Crime Reports.

According to the Unified Crime Reports, there were 197 violent crimes committed in Oshkosh in 2006. Of those crimes, four were homicides, but an overwhelming number of the crimes were aggravated assaults, attacks on individuals that may involve weapons and result in severe injury or great bodily harm.

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