Cliff Village, a tiny suburb of Joplin, has become the second Missouri city to legalize marijuana for medical use. Residents can pack their pipes with impunity, so long as their pot comes with a doctor's prescription. But with a population in the double-digits and a local sheriff who vows to lock up any pot smoker he can find, the town's 30-year-old mayor, Joe Blundell, concedes that the move is "symbolism, pure and simple." "I'd like to go and testify to legislators about this plant," says Blundell, who is wheelchair-bound, the result of a train accident in 2000. "I'd tell them I'm not a criminal, that I'm in a horrific amount of pain and I'd rather take something natural and holistic rather than something being pushed by Pfizer." [continues 1061 words]
Missouri's Days As The Nation's Meth Lab Capital Are Numbered. So What's Next? By the time he arrived at St. John's Mercy Medical Center's burn unit on February 1, Michael Murphy was blind. Hours earlier the Franklin County man had overheated a sealed tank of anhydrous ammonia at a friend's house when the chemical fertilizer literally blew up in his face. "I noticed it was flaming, on fire," the 24-year-old Murphy recalls. "I went to shut it off and realized that the tank was melting down. That's when I watched it fold." [continues 1505 words]
The Scourge Of Syphilis Re-Emerges, Deadlier Than Before Fresh sheets of plywood now mask the first-floor windows of the Better Donut Drive In. One story up, shards of glass give view to the red brick building's abandoned interior, and weeds sprout freely from its pitted concrete parking lot. The doughnut shop's best days may be well behind it, but like any building, the phantom crumbling at the corner of Grand Boulevard and Cass Street occupies its own little place in history. During the crack cocaine boom of the early 1990s, this north St. Louis shop was ground zero for the city's syphilis epidemic. [continues 667 words]
At The Crossroads Program In Chesterfield, Teen Sobriety Is Supposed To Be Fun. It's Also Expensive -- And Not Everyone's Buying. Frank Szachta has a nervous habit. When he smokes, which is often, he holds the lit cigarette between his thumb and index finger. He takes a drag, then presses the fresh Winston Light through a series of cartwheels, lacing the burning cylinder into an invisible cat's cradle around his fingers. It's graceful, almost unconscious. To a pot-smoking fifteen-year-old, it's undeniably cool. [continues 6467 words]
When A Checkpoint Isn't Really A Checkpoint, The Constitutional Forecast Is Cloudy Due north out of Alton on a sparkling spring Saturday afternoon, Highway 100 all but unlocks the land. Few, if any, roads in the bi-state area can rival this unfettered stretch of riverside asphalt, which whips the motorist past sailboats galore and the island of Brussels at the underrated confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. For a moment there -- fifteen miles' worth of moments, actually -- a driver could be forgiven for thinking he was on Highway 101, negotiating the turns of the Oregon coast next to imposing natural bluffs, unimpeded by such modern suburban hassles as stoplights and gridlock. [continues 1137 words]
In Reefer Madness, New Line Scores Some Killer Weed From good eggs to bad apples: New Line's Reefer Madness is a smokin' show. Reefer Madness Arts Date: Through June 26 Arts Performed By: New Line Theatre Details: Call 314-534-1111. Where: ArtLoft Theatre, 1527 Washington Avenue Written By: Book by Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney, music by Dan Studney, lyrics by Kevin Murphy It's 1936, and there's a growing terror on the streets, worse than jazz, more insidious than communism. [continues 695 words]
They may have been hippies, but Brewer & Shipley always bathed Lock up yer daughters: It's Brewer & Shipley Brewer & Shipley Music Date: Saturday, October 25 An open stretch of desert highway. Two paranoid addicts. A trunk full of narcotics. Over the static of the car radio, "One Toke Over the Line" blares, etching into memory the opening scenes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Its prominence in the 1998 film brought folk duo Brewer & Shipley's 1971 hit single to a new generation of pot smokers nursing Hunter S. Thompson fixations. The song, its drug-friendly lyrics and its inclusion on such subtle compilations as Hempilation 2: Free the Weed branded Brewer & Shipley as raging pro-marijuana-legalization hippies. Being personally condemned by Spiro T. Agnew as "subversives" back in '71 didn't help much either. But hype is just hype. [continues 877 words]
It's a racial thing: The sort of condemnation Randall Roberts writes about in "Meet the Anarchists" [June 25] happens all the time. The motivation is just as political as the one involving Bolozone. Throw in a handful of racism, and you have "Project 87," a special partnership between the St. Louis building division and the police department. Most of the condemnations happen to African-Americans living in less-than-trendy neighborhoods. The usual scenario is: The occupants of a housing unit -- say, one unit in a four-family flat -- are suspected of drug activity. [continues 372 words]
There's a Lot of Misinformation Out There: Here's More Last Wednesday White House anti-drug crusaders set up camp at KETC-TV (Channel 9)'s downtown St. Louis offices as part of a cross-country tour to help reduce teen drug use 25 percent by 2007. The way the feds see it, the media are part of the drug problem. According to Robert W. Denniston, deputy director of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, less than 10 percent of news stories about marijuana mention negative consequences. "So we know there's a lot of misinformation out there," Denniston says. [continues 399 words]
Judge Jim Sullivan Has A Different Way Of Dealing With Crack Whores -- Don't Just Jail Them, Treat Them For Their Addiction The day she was released, Tammy bought groceries and shared a pizza with her new roommates. Then she announced she was going to go out and get cigarettes. Instead, Tammy walked to a gas station and bought a pipe. Not long after, she scored some crack. She never went home. She never showed up for drug treatment. "I ran the streets," Tammy says. "I hustled at Jefferson and Winnebago at night." [continues 5103 words]
Kudos to Ray Hartmann's brilliant opinion piece "The Media Go to Pot" [RFT, May 16]. There is no shorter explanation for the irrational longevity of marijuana prohibition than "bad journalism." Many major media outlets have long since forsaken their social contract to report news both fairly and honestly when it comes to marijuana-related issues. Progressive developments which counter orthodox drug-war ideology are ignored, ridiculed or reported selectively, or with a condescending editorial bias front and center. Puns and cliches like "pipe dream," "high hopes" and "up in smoke" are commonly built into headlines to condition the reader to not take the issue too seriously -- after all, it's only "medical" marijuana. [continues 111 words]
Congratulations on the commentary about the medical-marijuana question ["The Media Go to Pot, " RFT, May 16]. It's time to push Henry Waxman and Barbara Boxer to introduce bills in Congress legalizing all appropriate medications for palliative use. I am close to this issue since so many of my friends receive marijuana from the Los Angeles Cannabis Cooperative and since I am a former friend and business associate of Peter McWilliams, who died in his bathtub while under a federal order not to consume or inhale THC. Kevin Martin Los Angeles [end]
Ray Hartmann "The Media Go to Pot" [RFT, May 16] chastises the media for not reporting the complete story behind the recent Supreme Court decision on medical marijuana. In asking if marijuana can treat the side-effects of bad journalism, Hartmann touches upon the root cause of America's marijuana laws. If health outcomes determined drug laws instead of cultural norms, marijuana would be legal. Alcohol poisoning kills thousands annually. Tobacco is one of the most addictive substances known to man. Marijuana is not physically addictive and has never been shown to cause an overdose death. [continues 207 words]
"It would send the wrong message to the children" is one of the standard responses to arguments in support of medical marijuana. By keeping marijuana a Schedule 1 controlled substance, the federal government sends the wrong message to my 14-year-old daughter ["The Media Go to Pot," RFT, May 16]. Our daughter's Sunday-school teacher, a close family friend, contracted HIV through a blood transfusion in 1982. More than a decade later, AIDS caught up with her. The side effects of the medications she took forced her to stop teaching. She couldn't eat and was being fed through a tube. She wasted away and looked like a skeleton. After visiting her, my daughter had nightmares. [continues 205 words]
How News Outlets Blew The Medical-Marijuana Story If you follow the news casually, you may have heard that the U.S. Supreme Court just said no on Monday to the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. If you're a more serious news aficionado, you read the Post-Dispatch, which reported -- in a front-page wire story headlined "High Court finds no medical exception for marijuana use" -- that the court has issued an 8-0 ruling disallowing a "medical necessity" defense by a California cooperative. You also learned, however, that the seemingly unanimous court didn't address the initiatives and laws of eight states that have legalized medical marijuana. [continues 967 words]
