CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Fewer than 1 percent of students tested positive last year in Putnam County Schools' random drug screening program.

The school system tested 1,072 of the 3,000 students signed up for the screening program last year.

Any Putnam sixth-through 12th-grader who wants to participate in an extracurricular activity or drive themselves to school must be registered in the program. Parents also can sign up their children.

In all, there were about 5,000 sixth-through 12th-graders in Putnam schools last year.

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WELCH - Officials are hoping to have a drug treatment center up and running in McDowell County sometime this fall.

Judy Akers, director chief executive office of Southern Highlands Community Mental Health Center, said the organization is working with West Virginia University to have the clinic set up sometime this fall.

"We are working with West Virginia University on setting up the clinic and they are waiting on grant approval," Akers said. "They have submitted an application. We wanted to start the first of September, but we have to wait on grant approval. Right now we don't have a projected date, but my hope is we will just have a couple weeks delay. We have our staff ready and just need the approval from WVU to go ahead. WVU will supply the doctor who is required for the clinic. I don't anticipate a long delay. It is just a matter of them getting the go ahead."

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TAZEWELL, Va. - One billboard shows a basketball player leaping for the hoop. Another features high school students wearing college sweatshirts, but a conspicuous gap shows that one of them is gone. There is also a billboard showing a basketball team that's missing a member. All of the billboards convey the same message: What could you lose if you abuse drugs?

Sharon Kitts of Substance Abuse Taskforce in Rural Appalachia (SATIRA) attended a press conference Aug. 3 concerning a revised Virginia law prohibiting the possession and distribution of synthetic marijuana, a dangerous substance often presented in colorful packaging featuring cartoon characters designed to appeal to young people. Educating local students about the dangers synthetic marijuana presents is among the actions SATIRA is taking in Tazewell County, she said.

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Editor:

Kudos to The Charleston Gazette, for recognizing that the criminalization of marijuana is a failed and destructive public policy that needs amending ("Pot: Almost legal," June 25).

According to the federal government's own surveys, over 100 million Americans have consumed cannabis despite the drug's prohibition, and one in 10 use it regularly. Criminalization hasn't dissuaded anyone from consuming marijuana or reduced its availability. But it has ruined the lives and careers of millions of people who chose to use a substance that is objectively safer than alcohol.

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Editor:

Regarding your thoughtful editorial: "Pot: Almost legal" (June 25), I agree that marijuana use should not be a criminal act. While reducing the penalties to an infraction is preferred to having it a felony or misdemeanor, I believe the real long-term answer is full legalization.

Only fully legal products can be regulated by any government agency. Only fully legal products can be controlled by any government agency. And only fully legal products can be taxed by any government agency.

Only full legalization takes the distribution of marijuana out of the hands of criminal gangs.

Kirk Muse

Mesa, Ariz.

[end]

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2016, wants to reduce penalties for simple marijuana possession.

Long ago, New York's Legislature decreed that private possession of less than 25 grams of pot is a mere "violation" -- less than a misdemeanor -- subject to just a ticket and fine. Like a parking ticket, it creates no criminal record. However, police stop-and-frisk tactics used chiefly against black and Hispanic youths force them to empty their pockets, displaying bags of pot in public view, which raises the offense to misdemeanor level.

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Regarding Diane Mufson's thoughtful May 23 op-ed, the drug war is largely a war on marijuana smokers. In 2010, there were 853,839 marijuana arrests in the United States, almost 90 percent for simple possession. At a time when state and local governments are laying off police, firefighters and teachers, this country continues to spend public resources criminalizing Americans who prefer marijuana to martinis. The end result of this culture war is not lower rates of use.

The U.S. has higher rates of marijuana use than the Netherlands, where marijuana is legally available. Decriminalization is a long overdue step in the right direction. Taxing and regulating marijuana would render the drug war obsolete. As long as organized crime controls distribution, marijuana consumers will come into contact with sellers of hard drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin. This "gateway" is a direct result of marijuana prohibition.

Robert Sharpe

Policy analyst

Common Sense for Drug Policy

Washington, D.C.

[end]

U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., says his fellow lawmakers in Congress must act, and "act swiftly," in helping the states and communities combat the scourge of prescription drug abuse. He's absolutely correct.

Lawmakers received their marching orders last April during the National Prescription Drug Abuse summit in Orlando, Fla. They were told to enlist, organize and share resources and talents to combat the prescription drug abuse epidemic. Rahall correctly notes that the national summit was a "wake-up call" for Congress to act on legislation that directly tackles the scourge of drug abuse.

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Most of us can agree that drug abuse is a serious problem. We have all seen the dreadful things that heroin, crack, "meth" and other hard street drugs have done to individuals, families and society.

As a result we tend to place all illegal drugs into dangerous and destructive categories. Yet until the recent prescription drug abuse era, we treated legally approved drugs as always beneficial or desirable. The "oxy" generation woke us up.

Yet, our laws still consider using any amount of marijuana as a dangerous activity, worthy of prison sentences. It is time to re-evaluate decriminalization of marijuana.

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- It is possible that the hospital doctors and nurses who care for you in the future will be tobacco free but stoned, if things get any more squirrelly.

Let us put aside parsing legal terms and requirements contained within various federal and state laws and regulations, including the Americans with Disability Act and analyze the situation from a common sense perspective.

From a medical standpoint, with a few rare exceptions, almost all physicians would advise their patients and employers that smoking tobacco and marijuana has negative health and safety consequences for the smoker and those in the smoker's close proximity. From a public policy perspective, "Drug Free Workplace" and "Clean Air" statutes and ordinances have supported this advice for several decades.

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For the second consecutive year, some West Virginia officials will attempt to legalize the medical use of marijuana. After an abrupt dismissal of the proposal last year, Delegate Mike Manypenny of Taylor County has introduced a new bill in the West Virginia House of Delegates.

House Bill 4498 seeks to legalize physician-supervised use of marijuana by patients suffering from diseases such as cancer, HIV and Glaucoma.

Why does this continue to be an issue?

If a substance has a unique medical application that can't be replaced by a medication already on the market, it should be exploited to the fullest extent. Especially one that is virtually harmless when compared to other treatments.

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CHARLESTON - Delegate Mike Manypenny is convinced the Lord put marijuana in his grand scheme of creation to provide mankind with a measure of relief from chronic pain.

Trouble is, most folks rolling a joint are smoking it to get high, unless, of course, like one famous politician, they don't inhale.

Manypenny says the Bible itself proves that God intended that man use marijuana strictly for medical reasons. And he thinks fellow members in the House of Delegates realize this.

A fresh bill put to the chamber Friday would decriminalize pot to some degree, limiting its use strictly for medical reasons.

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To the Editor:

The use of synthetic marijuana is an unintended side-effect of the war on natural marijuana. Consumers are turning to potentially toxic drugs made in China and sold as research chemicals before being repackaged as legal incense. Expanding the drug war will do little other than add to what is already the highest incarceration rate in the world. Chinese chemists will tweak formulas to stay one step ahead of the law and two steps ahead of the drug tests. New versions won't be safer. Misguided efforts to protect children from drugs are putting children at great risk.

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Keyser, W.Va. -- If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and flies like a duck... then it is a duck.

Same goes for synthetic marijuana too. That's right if it looks like pot, feels like pot, and is packaged and marketed like pot... it's to be treated by law enforcement as if it is pot... and this is not just my opinion it's the law in West Virginia.

According to the law passed in West Virginia last March (H. B. 2505 which passed March 12, 2011 and was in effect thirty days from passage): "Imitation controlled substance" means: (1) A controlled substance which is falsely represented to be a different controlled substance; (2) a drug or substance which is not a controlled substance but which is falsely represented to be a controlled substance; or (3) a controlled substance or other drug or substance or a combination thereof which is shaped, sized, colored, marked, imprinted, numbered, labeled, packaged, distributed or priced so as to cause a reasonable person to believe that it is a controlled substance. I believe the synthetic marijuana being sold in Mineral County would fall under what is described as: (2)... a drug or substance which is not a controlled substance but which is falsely represented to be a controlled substance ... and (3) a controlled substance or other drug or substance or a combination thereof which is sha! ped, sized, colored, marked, imprinted, numbered, labeled, packaged, distributed or priced so as to cause a reasonable person to believe that it is a controlled substance.

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- State lawmakers will once again debate a bill designed to curb methamphetamine production in West Virginia.

The legislation -- called the Larry Border Act after the late delegate from Wood County -- would require a prescription for cold and allergy medicines containing pseudoephedrine. The drug is a key meth-making ingredient.

Sen. Dan Foster, D-Kanawha, introduced the bill Thursday.

"What we're trying to do is eliminate the meth labs," Foster said during a press conference. "There's the toxic issue. [Meth labs] affect our children. They're like bombs."

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Nearly a century ago, America's historic attempt to ban alcohol was a monumental failure. Prohibition turned millions of Americans into criminals because they visited illegal "speakeasies" for drinks or bought furtive bottles from bootleggers. It created the Mafia as smuggler gangs fought each other over lucrative hooch-hauling. It filled prisons with harmless offenders. It corrupted police and courts as enforcers took payoffs to ignore the booze traffic. Prohibition finally was abandoned as a wasteful mistake.

Today, the "war on drugs" fills the same role that Prohibition did. Billions of taxpayer dollars are wasted on undercover police work and overcrowded prisons jammed with petty, pathetic users. Many American families are hurt as youths are jailed, their futures wrecked. The endless crackdown achieves little, because the narcotics flow doesn't diminish.

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I feel it would be helpful to go into further detail regarding marijuana prohibition, as it has been a topic of the Journal Junction recently.

Marijuana has been widely recognized in recent years not as a "demon plant" (whatever that is) but as a heavily misunderstood resource with a variety of uses dating back thousands of years. Its original prohibition was not based on any scientific or medical observation, but was instead purely politically and racially motivated. Fear and manipulation have kept it at bay.

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Each day, I drive out of the dark hills and into the city of Huntington when I go to class. Each day, I pass trailer park meth labs and flop house apartments as I wriggle out of the trees and on to Marshall's campus. Drugs are ubiquitous; there's no escaping it.

The War on Drugs isn't a war, it's one group of people sandbagging for a flood while another group is swimming in the water. They're never going to leave, and it'd be in our best interest as a society to learn to live with it rather than against it.

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Appalachia is being ravaged by a flood from shady Florida "pill mills" that shell out painkillers to addicts and drug dealers, no questions asked. As our "Pillage" series pointed out, West Virginia leads America in overdose deaths. Police invest vast time and energy prosecuting "pillbillies" and their suppliers.

Florida's legislature passed a tough monitoring law to catch illicit clinics -- but Florida's controversial Tea Party governor, Republican Rick Scott, says he will scuttle the project. Scott claims it's an "invasion of privacy" to keep tabs on stooges buying carloads of pills.

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PRINCETON -- As the nation's "Drug Czar" tours West Virginia today, local officials hope he will be persuaded to include Mercer County in a regional federal organization devoted to fighting drug crimes.

Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy will be visiting areas of southern West Virginia today. A letter written by U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., sent to Kerlikowske, asked to include Mercer County in the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) as well as for resources to help Mercer County law enforcement combat drug trafficking and prescription drug abuse.

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