Fourteen years after Hawaii legalized the use of medical marijuana, the state still lacks a dispensary system allowing eligible patients to obtain the drug easily and lawfully.

Patients are left to grow pot themselves, or buy it on the black market.

A new report by the Legislative Reference Bureau highlights the challenges patients face in Hawaii, and describes how medical-marijuana programs operate in the other 22 states that have them.

We've said it before, but we'll say it again: Hawaii needs a dispensary system to match the 2000 law.

We hope this latest report will be the springboard to establishing one.

[end]

A young couple recently visited me at my stall in the Hilo Farmers' Market. The man was on disability from service in Afghanistan, with a marijuana medical card from California.

As I sketched their portraits, we chatted. He said he needed some medicine, and was dumbstruck to find that there were no certified dispensaries on the island where they were spending two weeks.

"What kind of thinking is that?" he asked me.

I grew embarrassed because no logical answer was available to me.

This situation is not uncommon in this day and age. One would think the tourism agencies would want to rectify this situation without bureaucratic harassment of such visitors.

Tomas Belsky Hilo

[end]

A Report to the Legislature Details Obstacles to Care Caused by the Lack of Dispensaries

Despite being among the first states to approve the use of medical marijuana, certified patients in Hawaii still face challenges tied to access and transporting the drug in the isles, according to a new report to the state Legislature.

The Legislative Reference Bureau report is to be presented Tuesday at a meeting of the Medical Marijuana Dispensary System Task Force, a working group convened by the Legislature to make recommendations for establishing a dispensary system for marijuana in Hawaii.

[continues 538 words]

I read the Aug. 26 article, "Medical marijuana could help counter painkiller deaths," with great interest, especially the last sentence about how people "may never start opioid medication use if they are able to get pain relief from medical marijuana."

I remember the days of Green Harvest, the federal marijuana eradication program that was highly successful in Hawaii.

People went to jail, lost their homes and switched from smoking pot to snorting and/or shooting up crystal methamphetamine.

We traded mellow, stoned-out hippies for sick, psychotic thieves and murderers who might never have begun using meth if they had retained their access to marijuana.

John Wythe White

Haleiwa

[end]

Contrary to what you may have heard, the armored vehicles that appeared on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., during the unrest that followed the police shooting of Michael Brown did not come from the Pentagon.

"Most of the stuff you are seeing in video coming out of Ferguson is not military," Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Defense Department's press secretary, told reporters last week. "The military is not the only source of tactical gear in this country."

In other words: Don't blame the military for militarizing the police.

[continues 587 words]

In 1996, when he was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Eric Holder urged the D.C. Council to reinstate mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, which it had abolished in 1994.

Two decades later, as an attorney general who has repeatedly criticized "draconian" mandatory minimums and sought to limit their use, he faces resistance from the federal prosecutors he oversees.

Holder alluded to that resistance in a speech to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers on July 31, saying, "Any suggestion that defendant cooperation is somehow dependent on mandatory minimums is plainly inconsistent with the facts and with history."

[continues 571 words]

In 2003, a Nebraska state trooper stopped Emiliano Gonzolez for speeding on Interstate 80 and found $124,700 inside a cooler on the back seat of the rented Ford Taurus he was driving.

Gonzolez said the money was intended to buy a refrigerated truck for a produce business, but the cops figured all that cash must have something to do with illegal drugs.

Although there was not much evidence to support that theory, under federal forfeiture law the government managed to keep Gonzolez's money based on little more than a hunch. A bill introduced last week by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., would make that sort of highway robbery harder to pull off.

[continues 563 words]

I have worked in the addiction field in Hawaii for 35 years and facilitated the Family Program at Hina Mauka Recovery Center in Kaneohe for 12 years.

I know well the impact that addiction has on the family and the suffering that families experience while their addicted family member is focusing on their drug of choice.

So I read with interest last month's article, "Epidemic Coming," by Rob Perez (Star-Advertiser, June 22). Whether an epidemic is coming or is already here, I certainly agree that drug addiction and drug abuse are very serious public health problems.

[continues 472 words]

As thousands of children fleeing violence in Central America seek refuge in the United States, some commentators are blaming American drug users.

"If there weren't a lot of Americans seeking marijuana and heroin and cocaine," says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, "there would not be a drug war."

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady seems to agree.

"This crisis was born of American self-indulgence," she writes.

If so, it was not the self-indulgence of people who consume arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants. It was the selfindulgence of prohibitionists who insist on exporting their disastrous policy to other countries.

[continues 581 words]

Hawaii was a vanguard state in the medical-marijuana movement, but soon dropped behind others in the development of drug dispensaries. That may have been a lucky break, in that Hawaii can now capitalize on the lessons learned in other jurisdictions.

Hawaii is one of 22 states, in addition to Washington, D.C., to launch medical marijuana programs. Nineteen of those states have set up dispensary systems; Connecticut and Delaware are about to open their first dispensaries later this year.

But the time has finally come for Hawaii to take that leap, with the state exploring its entry into a new regulatory responsibility: seeing that a product of reliable quality and fair price gets delivered to those authorized to purchase.

[continues 403 words]

In states where medical and recreational cannabis sales are allowed, disquieting new trends and statistics are proving its unique dangers for those most vulnerable to its effects: children.

One such statistic is a spike in calls to poison control centers. According to the National Poison Data System, calls about accidental ingestion of marijuana in children 9 and younger more than tripled in states that decriminalized marijuana before 2005. In states that enacted legalization from 2005 to 2011, calls increased nearly 11.5 percent per year. Over the same period in states without decriminalization laws, the call rate stayed the same. In the decriminalized states, such calls were also more likely to result in critical-care admissions. Neurological effects were the most common.

[continues 688 words]

Pilot Programs Only Delay Establishment of a Viable System, One Patient Argues

With 13,000 people registered for the state medical marijuana program - - among the first in the nation when formed 14 years ago - the time for pilot projects and studies has long passed, said Karl Malivuk, a registered patient.

"It's time that we have a dispensary system, not a pilot," Malivuk told fellow members of the Medical Marijuana Dispensary Task Force. "A pilot project, to us, is: 'Let's kick the can down the road.'"

[continues 524 words]

Nonfatal Overdose Cases in Hawaii Have Jumped Among Adults and Youths

First, he started smoking pot because his friends did.

Then he turned to prescription pills - mainly powerful painkillers, initially prescribed by his doctor or dentist after he broke a bone or had dental work done.

Jeff Nash liked the buzz so much that he soon began raiding family medicine cabinets or exaggerating his health problems to dupe physicians into prescribing more.

By the time Nash graduated from high school, he was a full-blown addict, taking pills and shooting heroin. Even when he spent time in a Honolulu hospital for an addiction-related problem, Nash several times a day secretly injected heroin, using an intravenous line that was supposed to be for his prescribed medication.

[continues 1264 words]

HILO (AP) - Five Puna residents are suing Hawaii County and the police to get their confiscated marijuana plants back.

Two lawsuits seek the return of dozens of marijuana plants or more than $250,000 in compensation.

The plaintiffs say police seized the plants during a 2012 raid at the Fern Acres subdivision in Mountain View, even though the plaintiffs had valid medical marijuana cards and permission to grow the plants.

One lawsuit filed last month involves 28 plants; another filed last week involves 24. Both ask for the plants to be returned, or for $5,000 per plant.

[continues 131 words]

Hawaii's alarming increase in fatal prescription-drug overdoses reflects a national trend that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has described as an epidemic. The dispensing of powerful narcotic painkillers has skyrocketed over the past decade or so, and misuse of these drugs has likewise grown.

Opioid analgesic painkillers such as fentanyl, oxycodone and hydrocodone have an important place in the management of chronic pain. But as the rising death rate illustrates, some legitimate patients misuse the drugs, which also are abused by recreational users who have no medical reason to be taking them. Factor in the reality that some doctors overprescribe the painkillers and that young people in particular consider prescription drugs less dangerous than illegal ones and you've got the recipe for our current public health crisis - one that demands a multi-faceted approach to solve.

[continues 430 words]

When Alecia Phonesavanh heard her 19-month-old son, Bounkham, screaming, she thought he was simply frightened by the armed men who had burst into the house in the middle of the night.

Then she saw the charred remains of the portable playpen where the toddler had been sleeping, and she knew something horrible had happened.

Bounkham "Bou Bou" Phonesavanh, who is in a medically induced coma at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, may never wake up. But the appalling injuries he suffered during a police raid in Habersham County, Ga., last week should awaken the country to the moral obscenity that is the war on drugs.

[continues 567 words]

The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.

Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January, the giddy culmination of pot Prohibition, I should try a taste of legal, edible pot from a local shop.

What could go wrong with a bite or two? Everything, as it turned out.

[continues 812 words]

A Hawaii lawmaker hopes U.S. Customs won't stop the shipment of hemp seeds from China that will launch a research project in Hawaii after a hold was put on seeds headed to Kentucky this week.

Gov. Neil Abercrombie signed a bill into law last month that authorizes a two-year industrial hemp research project led by the University of Hawaii's College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources.

Lawmakers leery of supporting hemp had their worries put to rest in February when President Barack Obama signed farm legislation that in part permits state agriculture departments and universities to grow hemp for research purposes.

[continues 264 words]

The legalized marijuana debate rages on with the inevitable justification of increased tax revenue. Yet should the government's purpose be to seek profit?

Imagine the pitfalls of government where individual rights are subjugated to the purpose of profit.

One of the few true roles of government is protection from the criminal behavior of others. In Washington state and Colorado, people are overdosing on THC through their pot candies and dying or hallucinating. The ability of THC in higher doses to create hallucinations (a break with reality equaling the legal criteria of temporary insanity) was the reason it was made illegal.

Watch these two experiments and learn from their mistakes before rushing to duplicate them.

Joseph Ronin

McCully

[end]

However you come down on the case of Roger Christie - the Hawaii island "cannabis minister" just sentenced for marijuana distribution - a natural response is to breathe a sigh of relief that this part of the saga at least has come to an end. Although appeals in his case and that of his wife likely will follow, the detention and trial simply took far too long.

To underscore that point: Christie's very nearly already served his five-year sentence.

Also, in the intervening four years since the defendant began detention, the legal stance on marijuana has relaxed in various states. In addition to the two states that have made it wholly legal, there has been an increased acceptance of decriminalization and legal medical use of cannabis.

The protracted court fight over Christie seems almost quaint.

[end]