WASHINGTON - The war against terrorism is diverting federal agents, patrol boats, and other resources from the war on drugs, the nation's chief drug officer said yesterday. "It's a battle of resources right now," said Asa Hutchinson, chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration. It's particularly an issue for the Coast Guard and the FBI, he said. "When the dust settles, there will be discussions." The FBI has yanked agents off drug cases for counterterrorism duty, Hutchinson said, and Coast Guard cutters that once were dedicated to patrolling for drug shipments now watch over vulnerable seaports. [continues 427 words]
EL PASO, Texas - At the Santa Fe International Bridge in El Paso, customs inspectors looking for terrorists are flinging open hoods and trunks, knocking on body panels, and getting down on their hands and knees to peek under vehicles. Last week, inspectors dug out nearly 50 packages of marijuana, weighing a total of 70 pounds, from a false gas tank in a shiny Toyota Tercel. The seizure illustrates what Customs Service and Border Patrol officials are seeing: Drug smugglers are getting back to business - and drug seizures are up sharply - after a lull prompted by the stepped-up security along the U.S.-Mexican border that followed Sept. 11. [continues 479 words]
As Coffee Prices Keep Plunging, Many Farmers Are Looking To Their Only Viable Cash Crop. APURIMAC-ENE VALLEY, Peru - For 10 hours a day in a field in Peru's southern jungle, Lucia Huarca strips green coca leaves off bushes with calloused hands and collects her harvest in her wide blue skirt. Her day's haul - typically 66 pounds, for which she is paid around $3 - will probably end up in the hands of drug traffickers to be transformed into cocaine. [continues 730 words]
Training and equipment for elite anti-kidnapping and bomb squads are among plans, an official said. BOGOTA, Colombia - The United States is planning to go beyond helping Colombia battle drugs by providing counterterrorist aid as part of the new global war on terrorism, Ambassador Anne Patterson said yesterday. The Bush administration plans to train and equip elite anti-kidnapping and bomb squads, assist civilian and military counterterror investigators, and help Colombia guard its oil pipelines from rebel bomb attacks, Patterson said in an interview. [continues 418 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombian fighter jets streaked over a vast rebel safe haven this week to search for airstrips used for drug smuggling, the army said yesterday. Rebels called the flights a threat to fragile peace talks. Two Mirage jet fighters flew over the safe haven Tuesday at an altitude of at least 10,000 feet after taking off from Tres Esquinas, a base where U.S. intelligence experts have worked alongside Colombian military personnel, said a Defense Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. [continues 349 words]
LIMA, Peru (AP) -- Peru plans to urge Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to resume the U.S.-backed antidrug flights suspended after the Peruvian air force mistakenly shot down an American missionary plane this spring. Powell is scheduled to visit Lima on Monday and Tuesday for an assembly of the Organization of American States. Foreign Minister Diego Garcia Sayan said Peruvian officials would ask for clarification of "the dates and conditions in which aerial drug-interdiction flights could restart." The missionary plane was shot from the sky April 20 after it was initially identified as a possible drug flight by a CIA-operated surveillance plane and then fired on by a Peruvian military jet. A Baptist missionary, Veronica Bowers, and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, were killed. [continues 177 words]
Crispin Sartwell presents an important argument for drug legalization: That which pertains to an individual -- certainly to his or her body -- is no one else's business (Commentary, Aug 17). Almost everyone self-medicates: coffee, sugar, cigarettes, chocolate, TV, alcohol. While some may seek only mild chemical adjustments -- or none at all -- others run the gamut of stronger substances, legal or illegal. It's all about physical chemistry and physiology -- healthier organisms vs. unhealthy ones -- not good people vs evil people. [continues 191 words]
Crispin Sartwell asks us to acknowledge the right of someone to tell us what we can ingest (Commentary, Aug. 17). I suggest that right increases in proportion to how "right" the action is. Sartwell tries to keep his 1-year-old from swallowing dishwasher detergent. If he were to feed her dishwasher detergent, he would be punished for it, just as we punish drug dealers for feeding people drugs. Just as a parent is responsible for the welfare of a family, the government is responsible for the welfare for its citizens. [continues 56 words]
WASHINGTON - Drug offenders spend a year more in prison on average than they did 15 years ago, and drug offenses now make up about one- third of federal criminal cases - both the result of tougher drug sentencing, according to new figures from the Department of Justice Bureau of Statistics. More than 38,200 suspects were referred to federal prosecutors in 1999 for alleged drug offenses, up from 11,854 in 1984. About 84 percent of these suspects were subsequently charged in a U.S. court, according to the figures released yesterday. [continues 414 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia - The U.S. State Department has directed its largest private contractor in Colombia to hire foreign pilots to fight the drug war, an order that helps get around Congress' attempt to keep the United States from slipping further into this country's messy civil war. Last year, Congress limited to 300 the number of civilian contract workers participating in U.S.-financed drug-eradication efforts in Colombia. But in a little-noticed decision, the State Department has counted only U.S. citizens toward that limit. [continues 513 words]
KINGSTON, Jamaica - In the heart of Kingston, about a dozen men stand in an open-air emporium, stacking long buds of marijuana even though the crop is illegal in Jamaica. "High-grade, the best. ... Smell it," says a Rastafarian at the Luke Lane market, who gives his name only as Toro as he beckons to a passerby. Sale completed, he lights a joint of rolled marijuana and smiles. He has a lot to be happy about. A national commission recommended Thursday that marijuana be legalized for personal use by adults - a move the government is considered likely to endorse despite opposition from the United States, which has spent millions to eradicate the crop on the Caribbean island. [continues 367 words]
The new head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has pledged to end the agency's use of inflated drug-arrest and performance statistics and to focus on growing drug problems in rural America. Rep. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican from Arkansas, was confirmed to the post this week. In an interview, he said that he hoped to lift America's confidence that the drug war can succeed. "We have engaged in this for decades, and there's a lot of frustration out there both on the law enforcement and public side," he said. "Everyone has to understand that there's hope we can make a difference." [continues 340 words]
After OxyContin abuse killed three teenagers in St. Anne's parish, the Rev. Patrick E. Sweeney began comparing the drug to a plague. "It's ruined these families," said Father Sweeney, 57, who for three years has been pastor of the Roman Catholic church that serves the Fishtown, Kensington and Port Richmond areas. "It's ruined so many young people's chance for happiness or success in life. "It seems right that we're having funerals for 80-year-olds," he added quietly. "But it doesn't seem right that we're having funerals for teenagers." [continues 219 words]
A False Perception Of Safety Swiftly Ends With Addiction On Jan. 18, parishioners at St. Anne's Roman Catholic Church mourned the death of Lauren Meehan, a bubbly 18-year-old training to be a medical technician. Meehan had spent much of her childhood chastising her drug-addicted mother. So the teenager's family was stunned when authorities blamed her death on abuse of the prescription painkiller OxyContin, a growing drug scourge on the streets of the Philadelphia neighborhoods of Fishtown, Kensington and Port Richmond. [continues 1915 words]
Heroes Stood Up Against OxyContin If a dangerous new drug showed up in your neighborhood, how far would you go to protect your neighbors and their children from it? Say you co-owned a pharmacy and realized that phony prescriptions were being used to dispense the drug. Would you keep careful copies of the fake prescriptions and also warn other pharmacies? Would you alert the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and keep bugging people there when it seemed no one was following up? [continues 347 words]
Prescription Abuses Turn A New Drug Bad (29 July 2001, Part 1A of 3) http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1382/a08.html?11283 Doctors Cover For A Colleague In Trouble (29 July 2001, Part 1B of 3) http://mapinc.org/drugnews/v01.n1382.a03.html A Persistent Pharmacist Tries To Stem Drug's Flow (30 July 2001, Part 2A of 3) http://mapinc.org/drugnews/v01.n1382.a04.html DEA Drug-Tracking Leads To An Arrest (30 July 2001, Part 2B of 3) http://mapinc.org/drugnews/v01.n1382.a05.html Doctor Is Charged In Overdose (30 July 2001, Part 2C of 3) http://mapinc.org/drugnews/v01.n1382.a06.html [end]
Federal and state drug agents visited Dr. Richard G. Paolino on Jan. 16 to put him on notice: Because his medical license was invalid, any prescriptions he wrote for controlled substances would be illegal. The warning did no good, the agents say in a police affidavit. Immediately after they left his office, Paolino allegedly prescribed OxyContin for their confidential informant. Paolino later sought to hire a licensed doctor to help him cover his lucrative practice. [continues 341 words]
As The Prescriptions Pour In, Suspicion Leads To Action Second Of Three Parts One day last July, a tall, heavyset man walked into Esterson's Pharmacy in Fishtown and handed over prescriptions for the painkiller OxyContin and the sedative Xanax. Pharmacist Ron Hyman was suspicious: He'd never seen the man before, never heard of the doctor, and believed the dosages to be unsafe. "Have you ever taken this before?" Hyman asked. The man said no. [continues 1842 words]
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration keeps a computerized eye on oxycodone, the family of painkilling drugs that includes OxyContin, tracking it and other controlled substances from manufacturer to pharmacy to patient. After Dr. Richard G. Paolino was arrested in March, investigators pulled the DEA's drug-audit records for the five-county Philadelphia area for 2000. They learned that a pharmacy near Paolino's office was receiving and dispensing a large amount of oxycodone products. [continues 247 words]
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - A doctor was charged with murder for allegedly improperly prescribing the painkiller OxyContin to a man who died of a drug overdose. Denis Deonarine, 56, also was charged with racketeering and drug trafficking in an 80-count indictment issued Friday. The indictment was sealed because other defendants remained at large, prosecutor Barry Krischer said. Deonarine was jailed pending a bail hearing. He was charged in May with related Medicaid-fraud charges. His office manager also has been charged with fraud, trafficking and racketeering. The first-degree-murder charge involved the Feb. 8 death of Michael Labzda, 21. [continues 83 words]
Some Plaintiffs Say They Became Hooked Using The Correct Dosage. The Company Calls That Unlikely. The maker of OxyContin has been hit with at least 13 lawsuits from patients who say they have become addicted to the painkiller and others who want to hold the company responsible for a wave of overdoses and deaths among abusers. "This drug has been like a cancer attacking the very fabric of our little corner of the world," said Ira Branham, a lawyer and state legislator from Pikeville, Ky., who is suing on behalf of three people and the estate of a dead woman. [continues 428 words]
A Powerful Painkiller Brings A Deadly High First Of Three Parts Ron Hyman, co-owner of Esterson's Pharmacy in Fishtown for more than a decade, had never heard of a Bensalem doctor named Richard Paolino before last July - much less handled one of his prescriptions. So Hyman was more than surprised by the flurry of prescriptions that began to come from Paolino, 16 miles away, for patients Hyman did not recognize. And the pharmacist was alarmed that the prescriptions called for unusually large doses of the powerful painkiller OxyContin, often coupled with orders for the sedative Xanax. [continues 1810 words]
Deaths Linked To The Narcotic Show Abuse Is On The Rise. A spike in Delaware County deaths linked to abuse of the oxycodone family of prescription painkillers - including the powerful drug OxyContin - indicates that the number of such deaths in the Philadelphia region may be increasing, authorities said yesterday. The number of oxycodone-related deaths reported by medical examiners throughout the eight-county region in 1999 already led the nation, a federal drug-abuse survey showed. Delaware County District Attorney Patrick Meehan, who is expected to be nominated as U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, said most of the county's 22 oxycodone-related deaths in the last 18 months - many involving other drugs as well - were among middle-aged white males. But, he said, recent anecdotal evidence shows OxyContin abuse increasing among the county's teenagers. The youngest Delaware County fatality reported was 19. [continues 1034 words]
According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network. Rank/Category Deaths 1. Heroin/morphine 454 2. Cocaine 448 3. Alcohol in combination 267 4. Codeine 188 5. Diazepam (Valium); 94 6. Diphenhydramine (Benadryl) 57 7. d-Propoxyphene (Darvocet) 50 8. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) 44 9. Alprazolam (Xanax) 42 (tie) Methadone 42 (tie) Oxycodone 42 *Includes medical examiner reports from Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, Philadelphia, Burlington, Camden and Gloucester Counties. Includes Percocet 5, Percodan, Tylox, OxyContin and others. [end]
NEW HAVEN, Conn. - When an epidemic of crack and gang violence erupted in cities like New Haven in the 1990s, police and lawmakers struck back hard. The war on drugs yielded dozens of new laws, including mandatory sentences for drug dealers and heavier penalties for dealing crack rather than powdered cocaine. But those laws also had unintended consequences in minority communities. Black men make up less than 3 percent of Connecticut's population but account for 47 percent of inmates in prisons, jails and halfway houses, 2000 census figures show. [continues 532 words]
They are among 32 charged with participating in a $10 million ring. The area was targeted by Operation Sunrise 3 years ago. Three years ago, federal and city authorities descended on the 3000 block of North Lawrence Street in one of the first Operation Sunrise raids to eradicate drug dealing in Fairhill. Yesterday, they returned to the neighborhood with a federal indictment charging 32 people in a $10 million round-the-clock drug market that authorities said threatened to erase their gains over drug dealers. [continues 636 words]
About to be sentenced yesterday to life in prison for "managing" two street corners where lots of crack cocaine was sold, a convicted North Philadelphia drug dealer insisted he had been framed. "I been convicted because I associated with people. That's hard," Anthony "Chester" Watson, 25, of Oakdale Street near 26th, complained to U.S. District Judge J. Curtis Joyner. "I might never get a chance to really play with my daughter again." Seated behind him, Watson's mother, two sisters, and his daughter's mother all wept. [continues 223 words]
In the first hours of his last day of temporary duty in Colombia, DEA Special Agent Charlie Martinez was shot straight through the chest. The bullet tore a hole just above Charlie's right nipple and ripped an exit wound the size of a quarter through the top of his right shoulder. The man who shot him was Rene Benitez, a wiry little Cuban American wanted in Florida for cocaine trafficking. Benitez had already shot Charlie in the hip. Now he aimed his .380 automatic at the center of Charlie's forehead and squeezed the trigger. [continues 4653 words]
The historically cautious group is being asked to change policy to assist seriously ill patients. CHICAGO - One month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the medical use of marijuana, the American Medical Association is being urged to endorse the illegal drug as last-resort pain relief for seriously ill patients. At its policy-setting annual meeting starting here yesterday, the AMA also is being asked to support a moratorium on executions nationwide, although it rejected a similar proposal last year. The measures are among more than 250 reports, resolutions, and proposals that conference delegates are asking the nation's largest group of doctors to approve. [continues 637 words]
Alcides Ramon Magana Allegedly Worked With A Former Governor To Move 200 Tons Of Cocaine. MEXICO CITY - Police and soldiers captured a top Mexican drug suspect as he used a pay phone, the government announced yesterday, the same day U.S. prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging that he and a former governor moved 200 tons of cocaine through Mexico's Caribbean coast. Authorities say Alcides Ramon Magana was the chief drug runner in the Caribbean state of Quintana Roo, allegedly aided by the state's former governor, Mario Villanueva. [continues 362 words]
The Eight States With Medical-Marijuana Laws Say It's Been Business As Usual Since The Decision. SAN FRANCISCO - In the month since the U.S. Supreme Court said it was illegal to sell or possess marijuana for medical use, the decision appears to be having little effect in the eight states with medical-marijuana laws. "I dispense a couple pounds a month," said Jim Green, operator of the Market Street Club, where business has thrived even after the May 14 ruling. "All of my clients have a legitimate and compelling need." [continues 463 words]
A Pa. grand-jury investigation found dealers from across the state came to the "Badlands" to buy, reselling at big profits. A sure supply of pure, cheap heroin in Philadelphia regularly lures dealers from across Pennsylvania who then sell the drug for up to a 400 percent profit, according to an 18-month statewide grand-jury investigation released yesterday. Pennsylvania Attorney General Mike Fisher said at a news conference that buyers from as far away as Greene, Luzerne and Blair Counties made lucrative profits off the heroin they bought in parts of North Philadelphia known as the "Badlands." [continues 356 words]
A cannabis-eradication campaign worked. But nothing offered as an alternative has been as lucrative as the drug plant. HERMEL, Lebanon - Eight years after international pressure pushed the Lebanese government to eradicate cannabis farming, the illicit crop has made a strong comeback here in the fertile, sun-drenched Bekaa Valley. Cannabis is the hemp plant from which marijuana and hashish are made. "People are hungry; we need to feed our families. We know drugs are haram [forbidden by God], but isn't starving your children haram too?" asked one mother of six from the town of Hermel. For the first time in eight years, she has planted 12 acres of marijuana. She knows she might go to jail for this, but is willing to take the risk so she can afford to send her children to school again. [continues 606 words]
The drug is more dangerous than its users think, experts say. Yet keg parties have become passe, as teens throw "E parties." The arrest of a Philadelphia man this week on charges of recruiting Lower Merion High School students to sell ecstasy, LSD and marijuana underscored a concern expressed by local police and teen counselors: that ecstasy's popularity is rising. The illegal euphoria drug, long a staple of the dance scene in the United States and Europe, had been expected to sell for $20 or more per tablet to students at the Lower Merion school prom on May 26, Montgomery County authorities said. The arrest of Joel Meltzer, 31, and a 17-year-old Lower Merion student derailed the delivery. [continues 900 words]
Since The Early 1970s, States That Reported Trouble Rose From 19, Mostly In The Northeast, To All 50. WASHINGTON - Thousands of young Americans in all 50 states are joining gangs, according to a Justice Department study released yesterday that blamed profits from drug trafficking, new immigrant groups trying to assimilate, and a growing number of households without male role models. As a result, gangs and gang-related problems have increased dramatically nationwide, but especially in the South, according to the 93-page study "The Growth of Youth Gang Problems in the U.S.: 1970-1998." [continues 452 words]
THORNBURY - A Delaware County prison guard turned herself in yesterday on charges of supplying inmates with cigarettes, alcohol and marijuana, authorities said. Lisa Clark, 27, of Philadelphia, was caught in April with 13 packs of cigarettes, according to an incident report from the George W. Hill Correctional Facility. She later admitted to Delaware County detectives that she had been smuggling marijuana, cigarettes and alcohol into the prison to sell to inmates, authorities said. If convicted of the felony charge of smuggling controlled substances into a state facility, Clark could be sentenced to a minimum of two years in prison. Clark was suspended without pay pending a disciplinary hearing, according to the incident report. [end]
Thousands of current and future college students who have been convicted of drug-related offenses - and admit it - are ineligible for federal tuition aid for at least one year under a 1998 law that is being fully implemented for the first time. The law is nearly impossible to adequately enforce, government and college officials say, and has produced an unlikely alliance of critics - groups such as the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws - who say it amounts to double punishment for drug offenses and unfairly penalizes low-income students. [continues 1111 words]
A good move on use of medical marijuana. Bummer. That sums up much of the reaction from marijuana-growing cooperatives to this week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that federal law will continue to bar the growing or sale of the drug for medical purposes. The ruling appeared to ignore long-standing reports that marijuana has benefited people suffering from AIDS, glaucoma, chemotherapy-related nausea and other maladies. While the ruling did not affect laws in nine states that condone use of "medical marijuana," it effectively threw a monkey wrench into national efforts to legitimize the illegal drug as legal medicine. [continues 331 words]
Reducing Demand Cuts The Supply, He Said In Naming John Walters To The Cabinet-Level Post WASHINGTON - President Bush promised yesterday to reinvigorate efforts to reduce demand for drugs and provide treatment to users, naming as drug czar a man known for his get-tough policies: veteran antidrug crusader John Walters. In his first extended comments on the issue, Bush spoke out strongly against any move to legalize drugs or accept drug use. But he said little about interdiction efforts, emphasized community programs and parent involvement, and never used the term drug war. [continues 482 words]
The deaths of two innocent members of an American missionary family in Peru should serve as a wake-up call (Inquirer, April 24). Autocratic former President Alberto Fujimori practiced a scorched-earth campaign against Peru's Shining Path guerrilla movement, which was financed by coca profits. Allegations of rampant human-rights violations and civilian deaths are remarkably similar to the situation in Colombia. How many innocent Peruvians have been sacrificed at the altar of America's drug war? Often touted as a supply-side success by U.S. drug warriors, Peru's democratic institutions are in shambles. [continues 75 words]
2 Agencies Were Deeply Split In '94, Mostly Over Civilian Risk. Right from the beginning, back in 1994 when U.S. officials were debating the idea of helping Peru interdict drug-smuggling planes - and possibly shoot them out of the air - loud voices already were warning that the chances of an accident were just too great. "There was intense agency fighting," said one former State Department official familiar with the history. "The hawks were in State, the doves in Defense." For the Defense Department, according to this source, it was Brian Sheridan, the assistant secretary in charge of counter-narcotics policy, who expressed fears about just the kind of incident that occurred Friday when a missionary aircraft mistaken for a drug-smuggling plane was shot down, killing an American woman and her infant daughter. [continues 681 words]
Lewis Winokur, 63, Is Charged With Helping Supply The Street Trade Of OxyContin. It's The Third Arrest Of A Medical Professional In Recent Weeks Involving The Painkiller. For the third time in recent weeks, a Philadelphia-area medical professional has been charged with helping supply the growing and lucrative street trade in the popularly abused cancer painkiller OxyContin. Bucks County pharmacist Lewis Winokur, 63, a manager at Shelly's Pharmacy No. 8 in Bristol Township, was charged yesterday with illegally dispensing the drug and other potentially deadly medications, such as the sedative Xanax. [continues 852 words]
The Air Force Has Shot Down Traffickers, But Apparently Some Bribed Their Way To Freedom RIO DE JANEIRO - The Peruvian air force's downing of a single-engine Cessna plane, in which an American missionary and her infant daughter were killed, is only the latest chapter in the troubled story of Peru's armed forces and their fight against drug traffickers. The Clinton administration regarded Peru's 120,000-member armed forces as a vital partner in U.S. antidrug efforts, thanks in large measure to an aggressive shoot-down policy that has wiped out at least 30 small aircraft operated by suspected drug traffickers. Peruvian production of coca, the raw material used to make cocaine, dropped sharply. [continues 491 words]
Hippie new year. Pot smoker's holiday. A counterculture kind of coffee break. That's 420. Four twenty. To marijuana users, this insider term means it's time to chill, pull out the papers, and roll a joint. And on this April 20, as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) holds its annual conference in Washington, marijuana smokers around the country remain as clueless as ever about how this national day of weed worship began nearly 30 years ago. [continues 609 words]
A bereaved mother, bearing her daughter's ashes, was part of a police program at Cardinal Dougherty High. Photographs of addicts, their bodies pocked by needle marks, drew solemn stares yesterday from students at Cardinal Dougherty High School. They heard about the dangers of the latest drug that could knock them and their friends down - OxyContin, a powerful painkiller. The students felt and saw the heartbreak of Kathy Berry, 42, of Port Richmond, who lost her daughter, Karen Lynn, to a heroin overdose in 1998. [continues 612 words]
The Lost Boys Inquirer magazine last week captured beautifully the quiet courage of the Lost Boys of the Sudan, those orphans who survived a war not of their making in the wildernesses of their world and ours to seek salvation and carve new lives. There is another kind of lost boy, though, neither courageous nor a victim of any war other than that of his own making. That wilderness is a drug-infested nightmare created by contemptuous drug czars but voluntarily bought into by boys who should know better. Some don't ever seek salvation or redemption, just destruction. [continues 771 words]
His afternoons were for mowing the lawn or tinkering on the car. But mornings were for coffee and blues. Mornings were for sitting in his favorite room in the early sun, sipping his cup and listening to hundreds of 45s gathered over 60-something years of living. Mornings were for plain-spoken old songs about cheating women and cheated men, for pain sermons and joy testimonies from Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson, Snooky Pryor and Big Mama Thornton. [continues 654 words]
A Calif. Cannabis Group Is Asking The Supreme Court To Recognize A Medical Exception To Federal Drug Laws WASHINGTON - An attorney for an Oakland marijuana cooperative asked the Supreme Court yesterday to let sick people obtain marijuana to help alleviate their symptoms, in a case that pits the movement for state medical-marijuana laws against the federal war on drugs. The court should recognize a "medical necessity" exception to the federal prohibition on possessing and distributing marijuana, said Gerald F. Uelmen, who represents the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, one of several "cannabis clubs" that sprang up after California voters, in a 1996 referendum, legalized the doctor-approved use of marijuana. [continues 588 words]
The United States has pledged $1.3 billion to help Colombia wipe out drugs. Congress approved the funds in 1999 to help halt cocaine production, or so it said. The government claims that its billion-dollar drug war will help keep cocaine off our streets. But U.S. money must compete with floods of money from another source. "Drug traffickers have flooded the Amazon Territory with money so that farmers will grow coca there," said Carlos Alberto Palacios, a representative of Colombia's Peace Informers' Network. "Coca brings farmers three times what, say, cassava would," said Linda Panetta, director of the School of the Americas Watch/Northeast, an organization that educates the public about human-rights abuses associated with the U.S. military's training of Latin American soldiers. "It's easy money." [continues 598 words]
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) A few years ago, an author writing about death asked ailing AIDS patient Michael Alcalay how he was accepting dying. "I'm not accepting it," Alcalay retorted. Alcalay is alive today thanks in part, he believes, to doses of marijuana that helped him keep his medicines down and appetite up as he fought the disease. On Wednesday, Alcalay will be in the courtroom as lawyers try to persuade members of the U.S. Supreme Court that federal antidrug laws should not prevent marijuana from being given to seriously ill patients for pain relief. [continues 555 words]
