Editor: I spent many of the happiest summers of my life in Ocean City. As a bystander, I know Ocean City's police officers well, and have observed their responses to scores of "breach of the peace" incidents. Ocean City Police Chief Bernadette DiPino's strident opposition to any degree of decriminalization or legalization of marijuana ("Police Chief rails against pot legalization," in your Jan. 14 issue) should certainly be considered when Ocean City decides what to do about proposed local and state changes to medical and recreational marijuana laws. [continues 169 words]
Gwynne Dyer's column headlinedAmerica's War on Drugs Mindless(The Tribune,Sept. 11 issue) doesn't mention the half of Nixon's documented bigotry and paranoia, the wellsprings of the U. S. A.'s subsequent drug policies. America's war on drugs long pre-dates Nixon's classification of marijuana on the same federal schedule as heroin, and his creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration national police force. (The DEA has enjoyed a funding increase every year since its creation in 1970.) [continues 239 words]
To the Editor: "Wiretapping key to drug enforcement" (7 September) is an odd sort of story. Twenty paragraphs about police wiretaps - and not one mention of the word "warrant." Are readers supposed to automatically assume that Chief Pacheco and Bristol County DA Sutter scrupulously present evidence of criminal activity to judges who issue warrants for police wiretaps? The story quoted and depended entirely on law-enforcement sources. Is there no one in the commonwealth other than police and DAs who has professional knowledge of and expert opinions on wiretaps and warrants? No judges or magistrates willing to discuss these matters? No criminal defense lawyers? No law professors? [continues 168 words]
To the editor: The Gazette's editorial "New Revenue Ideas" (26 March) is the "Dumber" that follows the "Dumb" decision by the Springfield City Council's to raise punitive, anti-Sin fines on adults caught with less than one ounce of marijuana. Springfield has a long, consistent history of dumb and dangerous drug policy decisions. Now The Gazette asks Northampton to follow Springfield's latest foot-shooting idea. Statewide, voters Just Said No to a lifelong criminal record for adult possession of marijuana. Their votes embraced the $100 civil fine, but gave no sign of demanding higher fines, either as revenue boosters or (as the editorial wrote) as "a good way to discourage the public use of the drug." [continues 199 words]
Dear Editor, Much of Taylor Cundy's column "Most Teenagers Don't Use Pot" (5 April) reflects a school drug curriculum of value. Cundy writes, however: "What people that use marijuana don't know is that traces of this drug stay in your body for up to seven days after you actually use it." This factoid doesn't exist in a vacuum, but warns students that they risk failing a school or workplace drug test. It's three weeks too short; THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis, is fat soluble and typically lingers in detectable amounts for up to a month after ingestion. [continues 204 words]
In Texas, teens are doing a new drug. Hallelujah! And the usual suspects are rejoicing, because the Drug War's ancient cycle of terrifying the public will keep the usual suspects employed, busy, prosperous, powerful and in demand again ... until the next new drug comes along and the ancient cycle begins all over again. The drug isn't exactly new; it's heroin, but packaged (according to USA Today and The Dallas Morning News) in a kid-friendly, kid-affordable way. Its street name is "cheese," and according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Dallas police and Dallas public school police, a light dose of it -- from 2 to 8 percent -- is mixed into a snortable powder with crushed over-the-counter Tylenol PM, giving cheese a "speedball" effect: a simultaneous stimulant up buzz and heroin/opiate down. [continues 491 words]
To the Editor: In "Cannabis distributor Les Crane slain" (Nov. 18), you quote Mendocino County Sheriff's Detective Commander D. J. Miller as linking marijuana growing with violence. For 14 years, the production and sale of wine and other alcoholic beverages were accompanied by enormous criminal gang violence. When alcohol was made a crime -- but people were still willing to pay for it -- Prohibition became a government charter to enrich and empower violent criminal gangs like the Mafia. And Americans drank more alcohol than they did when it was legal. [continues 256 words]
To the editor: Mable Cowgill's letter ("Pro-legalization letter writers don't live here" (May 1), certainly misses my reasons for writing newspapers about America's war on drugs. I urge reform of drug laws because they have made my Land of the Free the largest prison system on Earth. The U.S. has more prisoners than Russia or China. According to the U.S. Justice Department, the U.S. had 2,131,180 women, children and men behind bars last year, a 2.3 percent rise over 2003. Our rate of incarceration is 726 per 100,000 Americans, seven to 10 times as many as most other democracies. The rate for England is 142 per 100,000; for France, 91; for Japan, 58. [continues 201 words]
To the Editor: If heroin is the life-and-death crisis Alan Burke describes in the Jan. 10 story headlined, "Fighting for their lives," it is odd - bizarre, in fact - that he mentions only law enforcement officials and institutions as sources and saviors for this public health problem, and seems to take no notice of the community's doctors, nurses, pharmacists, health professionals and their institutions. Burke briefly mentions the unexpected client growth at a Peabody methadone clinic. Massachusetts district attorneys and U.S. attorneys in New England have a long, consistent and hostile history of opposing methadone maintenance, needle exchanges and nonprescription syringe sales, promising for the last decade that law enforcement will reduce or eliminate the region's heroin problem entirely with expanded budgets for police, prosecutors and prisons. The surprise doubling of demand at the Peabody clinic is just one of many increasingly obvious clues that the police/prosecutor/prison heroin cure doesn't work. The fundamental problem that Burke's story misses is that heroin addiction is a public health and medical phenomenon. And he failed to ask any health professionals about it. [continues 244 words]
In "DEA joins our team" (May 11), The News-Press promises that more resident scrutiny by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration in Northwest Missouri will soon cure its growing methamphetamine problem. Highly addictive and easy and cheap to make, methamphetamine - like heroin and cocaine before it - will not slow down or disappear with increased law enforcement and new get-tough drug laws. Like heroin and cocaine, meth will thrive and spread if law enforcement is the only response Missouri knows how to make. [continues 197 words]
Michael Graham's attack on the drug raid at Stratford High School ("The Usual Suspects," Nov. 12) completely ignores the evidence of student drug possession which members of the Goose Creek Police raiding party uncovered. According to one member of the police team, "Woof woof. Bark woof woof bark. Bark." Another police team member has stated that "Ruff ruff. Bark woof bark. Arf bark woof woof." These members of the Goose Creek Police raiding team are prepared to place their paws on the Bible and testify about student drug possession under oath before a grand jury. [continues 142 words]
To the Editor: If the trustees of Northern Gateway Schools believe decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana sends a "most inappropriate" message to Canada's youth (25 June), what are the appropriate messages the trustees wish to send? * That cruelty and harshness are the best ways for government officials, educators, police and prosecutors to treat children who break a foot-shooting trivial law passed in a frenzy of anti-Chinese hysteria whipped up by "Janey Canuck," Emily Murphy's racist attack-dog pseudonym? [continues 195 words]
Editor: Re: "your editorial, Who Makes Canada's Laws? (18 May). The possibility that Canada might decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana is not the crux of Ottawa's problems with Washington this season. The Bush administration is imposing a new doctrine on the world which places severe constraints on national sovereignty and redefines sovereignty explicitly as a function of Washington's wishes and convenience. During World War II, Canada and the United States were intimate partners. The Bush administration now prefers dictating policy to Ottawa with outright coercion and threat, wielding the big stick of the U.S. economic engine and Canada's entwined dependence on access to the U.S. market. [continues 317 words]
Editor: If you want lots of cash to still be there when you need it again, any fool knows there's only one place to store it: In a safe deposit box in a bank, with the bank requiring anyone who opens the box to identify himself and sign a log. ("Cops still can't find seized cash," 15 May.) If the police have been "storing" confiscated cash somewhere and somehow in police headquarters, the conveniently deniable wink-wink message from the top has always been clear: Confiscated cash is a naughty little unofficial slush fund for the personal use of police officers. The slush fund was working just fine, and exactly as intended, until an uncooperative judge who didn't understand the system ordered the police to give some of the cash back. Now comes a year of "We're conducting a thorough investigation" and "I can't imagine how this could have happened" and "The K-9 dog ate our cash." At the end of the entertaining year, no one will be charged with any crime, and no one will lose his job in The Case of the Missing Cash. When Frankfort passed laws to finance police agencies with confiscated cash, everyone knowingly begged for this to happen. These laws also pervert the fundamental "To Protect and Serve" mission of police, and turn police into armed robbers with badges. Police stop investigating rapists, because rapists don't wander around with $5,000 in cash which would be best spent on a police officer's above-ground backyard swimming pool - and they concentrate exclusively on shooting-fish-in-a-barrel Fat Wallet crimes. Nobody needs Columbo or Sherlock Holmes to solve The Case of the Missing Cash. But any reader who wants to take a stab at the solution can find all the miserable evidence in Karen Dillon's award-winning Kansas City Star series, "To Protect and Collect," archived at www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n682/a02.html. Except for the part where the police had to account for their cash, this was no fluke. This is how confiscation was always intended to work. Robert Merkin Northampton MA [end]
Re: Our pot's too potent (April 21). Only a government could spend $5.75 million to grow marijuana, and fail. Eventually the same government will hold hearings and issue a report that will explain how it spent $5.75 million and couldn't grow any marijuana. That report almost certainly will cost taxpayers at least $500,000. To be fair, the contractors have managed to grow some marijuana, but the government undertook the project to fulfil a promise to provide marijuana to the desperately and terminally ill, chief among them cancer chemotherapy and AIDS patients. [continues 86 words]
RE: "RED Deer reefer madness," April 21. Only a government could spend $5,750,000 to grow marijuana and fail. Eventually the same government will hold hearings and issue a report that will explain how it spent $5,750,000 and couldn't grow any marijuana. That report will almost certainly cost taxpayers at least $500,000. To be fair, the contractors have managed to grow some marijuana, but the government undertook the project to fulfil a promise to provide marijuana to the desperately and terminally ill, chief among them cancer and AIDS patients. And this has yet to happen - not one single appetite-stimulating puff for one single wasting patient, no matter how excruciating and life-threatening his or her medical condition. And this will never happen, because this is a promise the government never intended to honour. May I offer my services? I can fail to honour a humanitarian, merciful promise far more cheaply. For a mere $1 million, I will not provide marijuana to desperately ill and suffering Canadians. Robert Merkin, Northampton, Massachusetts (Such the humanitarian.) [end]
Only a government could spend $5,750,000 to grow marijuana and fail. ("Pot may be uprooted," April 21.) It undertook the project to fulfil a promise to provide marijuana to the ill, chief among them cancer chemo and AIDS patients. And this has yet to happen -- not one single appetite-stimulating puff for one single wasting patient, no matter how excruciating and life-threatening his or her medical condition. May I offer my services? I can fail to honour a humanitarian, merciful promise far more cheaply. For a mere $1 million, I will not provide marijuana to desperately ill and suffering Canadians. Robert Merkin (A bargain by comparison.) [end]
"This bud's not for you" (April 21): Only a government could spend $5,750,000 to grow marijuana, and fail. Eventually the same government will hold hearings and issue a report that will explain how it spent $5,750,000 and couldn't grow any marijuana. That report will almost certainly cost taxpayers at least $500,000. To be fair, the contractors have managed to grow some marijuana, but the government undertook the project to fulfil a promise to provide marijuana to the desperately and terminally ill, chief among them cancer and AIDS patients. And this has yet to happen -- not one single appetite-stimulating puff for one single wasting patient, no matter how excruciating and life-threatening his or her medical condition. [continues 77 words]
Only a government could spend $5.75 million to grow marijuana, and fail (Potent pot befuddles Ottawa, April 21). Eventually the same government will hold hearings and issue a report that will explain how it spent $5.75 million and couldn't grow any marijuana. That report will almost certainly cost taxpayers at least $500,000. To be fair, the contractors have managed to grow some marijuana, but the government undertook the project to fulfil a promise to provide marijuana to the desperately and terminally ill, chief among them cancer and AIDS patients. [continues 85 words]
Elizabeth Wehrman's arrest for possessing a hypodermic needle ("Needle Exchanges - Point of Controversy," Daily Times, Feb 8-9) is a critical moment for Pekin, whose citizens and public officials must now decide which of two paths to take: A path proven to lead to more HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, or a path proven to reduce the spread of these diseases. Yale University School of Medicine has provided scientific testing and support for New Haven, Conn.'s clean needle exchange since 1990. Within the first year of testing used needles collected by the exchange, Yale's study had firmly established that: [continues 421 words]
