Family Council president Jerry Cox opposes the ballot measure to legalize medical marijuana. "It's a family values issue," he said. So, let's talk medicine, marijuana - and, especially, family values. I began suffering undiagnosed leg pain in childhood. At 17, my doctor's best advice was to take aspirin until my ears started ringing. I married, had two children, and started smoking marijuana when I returned to college in my 20s. To my surprise, the leg pain abated. I continued to smoke for almost 25 years, roughly a joint a day. As I never smoked in secret, I'm betting I've got a perspective on marijuana and family values that Mr. Cox does not. [continues 696 words]
At a particularly dismal moment in Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," a disgusted undercover cop mutters, "It's a nation of rats." Not quite. But the film and the recent flap in the Northeast over t-shirts that demand "Stop Snitchin' " are calling attention to a part of the legal system that critics say has gotten out of control. While it's impossible to get accurate counts due to the inherent secrecy of the practice, moderate estimates place the number of informants working for police agencies in the U.S. in the hundreds of thousands. [continues 1180 words]
Between a Rock and a Hard Place 'Tough-On-Crime' Hits the Bottom Line. Larry Norris's job is to keep some of the toughest, most dangerous criminals in Arkansas locked up. "Skittish" is not a word that applies to the director of prisons. So it was significant last May, when Norris told state legislators that the situation he faces is "scary." After 30 years of policies born out of promises to be "tough on crime," Norris and other state officials are finding themselves in a corner. They are surrounded on all sides by numbers - and the numbers relating to prisons are menacing. [continues 2067 words]
I've Wondered For Years: What Does Hutchinson Know About Arkansas's Biggest Drug Smuggler? And When Did He Know It? Asa Hutchinson and I share a passion for the subject of drugs. As a crusading member of Congress, he talks a lot about them. As a reporter focused on crime, my writing centers on them. Hutchinson wants to intensify this country's war on drugs. I think three decades of failure have proven the war a disaster. Now President George W. Bush has nominated Hutchinson to head the DEA, the biggest drug-fighting squad in the world. But before Hutchinson assumes that post, there are some questions about high-level cocaine trafficking in Arkansas while he was a U.S. attorney here that he should be required to answer. The questions have hung about for years, but so far he has managed to dodge them. [continues 4117 words]
As readers of this column know, I advocate changing our laws regarding the use of marijuana as medicine. I support an effort to bring an initiated act before the voters in November that would allow physicians to prescribe marijuana for patients whom they think it would help. The process has barely begun. The petition campaign only recently began in northwest Arkansas, and it won't begin in central Arkansas for another week. There has hardly been a word of public debate. [continues 729 words]
Insanity is a break from reality. Groundings loosen then snap. Those adrift in madness cannot ever be sure if what they see is real or not. Insanity's like watching TV. Once a sort of fun house, television has become a madhouse. Enter --that is to say, switch it on -- and all assurances are surrendered. With the click of a button we slide down the chute into a contorted, contrived environment, where even the news teams are in on the joke that nothing (not even they) are real. Cynics have warned for decades about the mind-bending power of media. But until recently, these jeremiahs were generally regarded as nuts. It was paranoid to suspect that big business or big government -- though certainly not both together -- were manipulating the masses through media. Even to suggest that a corporate or political message might be tucked into the viewing fare was to betray unhealthy suspicion. To voice such fears put one in the class of folks trying to repel unwanted rays by wearing helmets wrapped in aluminum foil. [continues 649 words]
Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, barely missed a beat. The new report on marijuana overturned almost everything that McCaffrey, the White House, and the Washington establishment have been saying about marijuana. But the nation's drug czar didn't let a little thing like being debunked prompt him to re-examine his position. He is the spokesman for the drug war, and to him, marijuana is the enemy and legalization is defeat. His job is to make sure the enemy is seen as dangerous. [continues 737 words]
Feb. 12, 1999 Last week I suggested that, rather than probing ad nauseum the president's lies about his extra-marital alliance(s), Washington could do us a favor by turning its investigative lights onto a question with some genuine national significance, to wit: Precisely what was the relationship between various branches of the government, particularly the CIA, and this country's super-cocaine kingpins, such as Arkansas's own Barry Seal, during the 1980s? The column did not exactly provoke a stampede to pick up the gauntlet. As I had outlined, there are powerful, bipartisan reasons why the questions about Seal have languished. [continues 732 words]
I consider the trial unfolding in Washington little more than a tawdry spectacle -- bread and circuses, if you will -- distracting us not only from crucial affairs of state, but from a far nastier scandal that could tarnish Democrats and Republicans alike. The bipartisan nature of this ugliness, I suspect, is why no one has made much of a stink of it. To me, what's being avoided while we engage in this silliness is no less than a question of aid for the enemy at a time when we are at war. [continues 731 words]
