A Baseless Drug Prohibition Would Stifle a Unique Strain of Medical Research.

If H.F. 2975 (companion S.F. 2773) authored by Rep. Morrie Lanning, R-Moorhead, becomes law, Minnesota will ban the sale of the psychedelic herb Salvia divinorum and criminalize its possession as a misdemeanor offense. Lanning has authored a separate House bill which would make salvia a Schedule I controlled substance.

Research on salvia has been increasingly popular. According to Dr. Bryan Roth at Case Western Reserve University, salvia is "the most potent naturally-occurring hallucinogenic drug." By 2006, studies had suggested that its primary active ingredient, salvinorin A, could lead to treatments for Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia.

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Twenty-eight years after then-First Lady Nancy Reagan began telling students to "Just Say No" to drugs, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America issued a statement addressing a rise in teen alcohol, Ecstasy and marijuana use.

The statement cited a recent study, which showed that the number of high school students who said they've used alcohol in the past month had risen 11 percent. The study also showed that the number of high school students who said they had used Ecstasy and marijuana in the past year had grown 67 percent and 19 percent, respectively.

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Requirement That Citizens Buy Insurance Is Unconstitutional, They Say

Republicans in Minnesota want Attorney General Lori Swanson to file a lawsuit blocking federal health care reforms, citing the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause and 10th Amendment.

Standing in their way, though, might be a pot-smoking medical marijuana advocate from California named Angel Raich.

During a Capitol news conference Wednesday, prominent Republicans said they will introduce a resolution on the Senate floor today asking the Minnesota delegation to vote against the bill and seeking a lawsuit to block it if Congress passes it. In doing so, they raise an issue that has reverberated from tea party rallies to statehouses across the country -- that the federal health care bill is unconstitutional.

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Truth is more effective than criminal law

Re: Alice Englin's Dec. 18 piece: "Survey shows drug abuse among youth is down."

I have digested the results of the 2009 Monitoring the Future study and found two important things not mentioned in the press release.

First, no mention of daily pot smoking, found only by drilling down to Table 4. Seems to me such use by kids indicates problem use and should have been discussed. The good news is that it is very small.

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It was extremely refreshing to read the Dec. 13 letter, "Drug policies make no sense," from former Minnesota lawmaker Mike Jaros. The U.S. needs more elected officials like Jaros. He gets it. It is time for credible drug law reform - and other politicians need to get it, too.

Stan White

Dillon, Colo.

[end]

Feds Dusting Off 40-Year-Old Set of Strict Requirements

As a canoe outfitter at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Blayne Hall has seen his business ravaged by windstorms and challenged by wilderness lawsuits and regulations.

His latest nemesis: the long arm of the U.S. Coast Guard.

Hundreds of Minnesota fishing guides, outfitters and tour operators are facing expensive safety regulations enforced by the U.S. Coast Guard that include, among other things, random drug testing.

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The National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan released the 2009 Monitoring the Future survey on Monday. This survey, which has been distributed annually since 1975 to about 50,000 eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders across the nation, in 2009 showed that while there were slight decreases in the use of cocaine and methamphetamine among youth across the country, marijuana and prescription drug abuse showed no signs of slowing down.

Overall, drug use remained steady, but several drugs showed signs of increasing with attitudes softening for drugs such as marijuana, Ecstasy, inhalants and LSD. For example, the percentage of eighth-graders who view occasional marijuana use as potentially harmful dropped to 44 percent, compared to 48 percent last year.

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I can't believe law-enforcement officers spent time and money going after hemp/marijuana farmers ("Two Hermantown men charged in pot bust," Nov. 6). Federal, state and local drug programs are political like alcohol prohibition last century. Such policies make some rich while everybody pays, whether with taxes or lives. As long as there's demand for any product there'll be supply.

Many statesmen and stateswomen, including George Schultz, President Reagan's secretary of state, favor the legalization and safe dispensation of such chemicals (probably in drug stores), their taxation used by schools and other institutions to educate, prevent and treat those who abuse and use harmful drugs. Right now, people are buying drugs in alleys and causing harm to themselves and society by resorting to stealing and other crimes to support habits. The U.S. prison population has doubled to more than 2 million mostly due to drug offenses. That's a huge cost to all levels of governments.

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Regarding George Will's Dec. 1 column: The drug war is largely a war on marijuana smokers. In 2008, there were 847,863 marijuana arrests in the U.S., almost 90 percent for simple possession. At a time when state and local governments are laying off police, firefighters and teachers, this country continues to spend enormous public resources criminalizing Americans who prefer marijuana to martinis. The end result of this ongoing culture war is not necessarily lower rates of use.

The U.S. has higher rates of marijuana use than the Netherlands, where marijuana is legally available. Decriminalization is a long overdue step in the right direction. Taxing and regulating marijuana would render the $50 billion drug war obsolete. As long as organized crime controls marijuana distribution, consumers will continue to come into contact with sellers of hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. This "gateway" is a direct result of marijuana prohibition.

Robert Sharpe / Arlington, Va.

[end]

The brother of Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan pleaded guilty Tuesday to methamphetamine and marijuana charges.

Paul J. Dolan, 53, a U.S. Postal Service mail carrier, was charged in Ramsey County District Court with possessing methamphetamine and trafficking in marijuana, both fifth-degree felonies, after an undercover camera recorded him using drugs while on his St. Paul route.

The marijuana charge stemmed from a search of his Minneapolis home that uncovered a marijuana growing operation in his basement.

Ramsey County prosecuted both cases due to Tim Dolan's role as police chief.

Paul Gustafson, a county attorney's office spokesman, said that prosecutors struck no deal on jail or prison time. Dolan is to be sentenced Feb. 1.

[end]

Regarding George Will's column "A Look at a Rocky Mountain Medical High": Legal pot would be better than medical pot, better, even, than decriminalized pot, because it would dry up the street market by taking out its humongous profit.

Anyone who has passed Economics 100 knows the law of supply and demand. We saw it at work in the 1920s when we arrested bootleggers but not drinkers. The 1920s was a time of decriminalized alcohol, although we didn't call it that. The street violence ended only when we quit arresting bootleggers.

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DENVER - Inside the green neon sign, which is shaped like a marijuana leaf, is a red cross. The cross serves the fiction that most transactions in the store - which is what it really is - involve medicine.

The U.S. Justice Department recently announced that federal laws against marijuana would not be enforced for possession of marijuana that conforms to states' laws. In 2000, Colorado legalized medical marijuana. Since Justice's decision, the average age of the 400 persons a day seeking "prescriptions" at Colorado's multiplying medical marijuana dispensaries has fallen precipitously. Many new customers are college students.

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Attorney General Eric Holder Is Right to Put This at the Top of His Reform List.

We hope Congress was listening Wednesday when the nation's top prosecutor, Attorney General Eric Holder, told the Senate: "There are few areas of the law that cry out for reform more than federal cocaine sentencing policy."

Pending legislation in both houses of Congress would eliminate the so-called "100-to-1" ratio between crack and powder cocaine. That ratio means that offenders get a five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for a crime involving 5 grams of crack -- but that it takes a hundred times that amount (500 grams) of powder cocaine to trigger the same prison term. Fifty grams of crack -- or 5,000 grams of powder cocaine -- garners a 10-year mandatory minimum.

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After hearing hours of testimony Thursday about how state forfeiture laws are supposed to work, many legislators had vanished by the time two citizens spoke of their problems after police seized their property.

One of them was Terrance Frelix Sr., 34, of Minneapolis. He and a business partner owned some properties and were running behind on a mortgage in 2006, Frelix testified at a hearing. His partner borrowed $4,000 and had just given Frelix the money when a Metro Gang Strike Force officer took them in for questioning.

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Mathew Chirhart's Oct. 21 letter in defense of the war on drugs is uninformed and ill-prepared. The author states, "[The legalization of] marijuana is one thing because the damage inflicted is comparable to alcohol." This is false. Marijuana's inflicted damage is far less than alcohol. One kills people; the other does not.

The author continues, stating "... when prohibition ended, did it end the production of moonshine?" No, but it did drastically reduce its production. Criminal enterprises no longer rely on moonshine production for revenue. When is the last time you heard about law enforcement busting a moonshine still? How about a meth lab?

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Nearly 9,000 people gave their thoughts at the State Fair in annual bipartisan Minnesota House of Representatives opinion poll.

The polls took place at the House fair booth, and not completed by Democrats and Republicans, which means there was a good cross-section of people who responded, said Rep. Bud Nornes (R-Fergus Falls).

The survey is unscientific and was meant to familiarize fair-goers with the issues that were either considered in the previous legislative session or are going to be considered in the upcoming session, according to the poll.

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State Supreme Court Upholds B.E. County Arrest

A Minnesota State Patrol trooper had legal grounds to search the passenger in a car after smelling marijuana and finding a dollar bill that tested positive for cocaine, according to a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling issued last week.

Trooper Chad Mills searched 43-year-old Danny Ortega of Claremont after telling him to get out of a car and wait while Mills' police dog, Rex, searched it. Mills had stopped the car's driver, 47-year-old Lorna Sorg of Dodge Center, in Blue Earth County on Aug. 7, 2004.

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Syringe Exchanges Are About the Most Logical Thing We Could Do to Stop HIV, but Politics Isn't Logical.

The House of Representatives showed the courage of President Obama's convictions on the needle exchange issue.

Candidate Obama vowed repeatedly to end the ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs -- a 21-year-old policy that blocks federal dollars from supporting the most effective, cost-efficient HIV prevention tool ever dreamed up.

President Obama, however, retained the ban in his 2010 budget proposal -- punting the issue to Congress.

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Short Of Being Asked To Undress, Kids In School Have Few Privacy Protections.

Public schools are filled with eager, fresh-faced youngsters, and prisons contain many rough-looking adults with uninviting personalities. But put aside that difference and you find some important similarities between the two places -- government-run facilities where individuals are held for a specific number of years without their consent, at the mercy of their custodians.

For years, the Supreme Court has been doing its best to further blur the distinction by giving public-school officials the same powers as the warden of San Quentin. So it was a mild surprise last week to learn there are some abridgments of freedom and invasions of privacy inflicted on children that the justices will not tolerate.

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County Comes Up With Cash To Keep Treatment Going

Wendy King hit rock bottom last June. She had relapsed on methamphetamine after being clean for two years. Dejected, she tried to take her life.

A threatened Anoka County treatment program, which she credits with saving her life, got a reprieve itself this month when county leaders decided to keep it going.

"To think where I was a year ago, living in a hospital not knowing whether I would live or die," the mother of two said.

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