Removing marijuana's federal schedule 1 status is a campaign issue in the 16th Congressional District race. SARASOTA -- Candidates for the District 16 congressional race are staking out divergent positions on the question of whether marijuana should be removed from Schedule 1 status to afford military veterans another potentially potent option for dealing with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries, something explored recently by the Herald-Tribune and supported by a growing field of veterans and national veterans organizations in the face of an epidemic of military suicides. [continues 893 words]
SARASOTA -- The perky melody behind Hollywood Undead's "Bullet" conflicts sharply with the despair in its refrain: "A stomach full of pills didn't work again/I'll put a bullet in my head and I'm gone, gone gone ... "In the days preceding Alan Younger's death, his widow, Amber, says she could hear it playing all the time on his earbuds. After learning last week of the Trump administration's apparent designs on keeping marijuana chained to its Schedule 1 status, the widow of a veteran she describes as "an awesome father" is now adding her voice to a growing chorus of Americans imploring Congress to take action. [continues 820 words]
SARASOTA - When the Drug Enforcement Administration was formed in 1973, roughly 2,000 Americans were dying from overdoses each week, largely from heroin injections. In 2016 alone, thanks to a deregulated pharmaceutical industry, fatal overdoses -- 80 percent opioid related - -- claimed 63,000 lives. Or, as Peter Bensinger pointed out Thursday morning, opium-derived drugs have exacted a higher death toll in a single year than nearly two decades of fighting in the Vietnam War. Appointed by President Ford in 1976 to become the nation's second DEA director, Bensinger detailed the history of America's relationship with the poppy to a Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning crowd gathered at First United Methodist Church. As the leading cause of death for U.S. residents under 50, the toll from opioids and its synthetic counterparts today would've been unimaginable to Bensinger when he was the nation's top drug cop. [continues 204 words]
PARRISH - Four days after lobbying Tallahassee lawmakers to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes, an activist couple were busted by police for growing pot at their home in Parrish. Manatee County deputies uprooted two full-grown backyard marijuana plants belonging to wheelchair-bound Cathy Jordan, who suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease, and disabled Vietnam veteran Robert Jordan. Although neither was arrested Monday, officers confiscated 21 seedlings that the Jordans insist were intended to stabilize her neurodegenerative disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. [continues 945 words]
SARASOTA - Unlike graying peers who refuse to acknowledge youthful drug use, Rick Doblin celebrates his. He will tell crowds of strangers about the dizzy days of tripping on acid and getting arrested for swimming naked at his alma mater, New College, in the 1970s. He 'fesses up to dropping out his freshman year in pursuit of truth through psychedelics. He will tell them that the cedar-and-granite Sarasota home he built three decades ago -- described by Rolling Stone magazine as a "Frank Lloyd Wright on acid design" -- was conceived to enhance the experience. He endorses the aboriginal bonding traditions of parents sharing psychedelic drugs with their children. [continues 1743 words]
It has been more than 33 years since David Crosby, alongside colleagues Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, commanded an audience of half a million kids at Woodstock during the height of the Vietnam War. Sending pleas for peace upon acoustic ballads and angelic harmonies, CS&N, with a late arrival by Neil Young, became an icon of America's anti-war movement. Today, on the eve of another military adventure in the Middle East, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer finds himself on the barricades once more, ready to confront the realities of war with the possibilities of nonviolence. [continues 806 words]
Dear Gov. Bush: With another one of those awful elections right around the corner, I wish we could just swear you in for an automatic second term without having to go through that demoralizing balloting process again. I mean, everybody knows you're gonna win anyway, and nothing good can come from turning it over to bean-counting nerds. Florida's gonna wind up a laughing stock again on Leno and Letterman, and it'll give all these cackling gasbags a forum for revisiting the Y2K voting disaster. They'll be ranting a blue streak about cronyism, about how ChoicePoint/Database Technologies (DBT) was awarded a $2.3 million, no-competitive-bidding contract to screen voter-registration rolls from a company that had previously performed the task for $5,700. Oh, and they'll go on and on about Jim Crow in cyberspace, about how DBT used race as one of its criteria to scrub 57,700 felons from its voter registration roles, and they'll talk about how most of them weren't felons at all. [continues 676 words]
THE GLOBAL illegal drug industry is an octopus-like cancer that penetrates to the hearts of its victims. We don't understand why people turn to drugs with such disastrous results. If only its customers could be weaned away and new victims discouraged, the vile industry would wither on the vine. The main attacks against this terrible curse have been against drug producers and suppliers. It may be time to shift the emphasis to the customers. There is growing interest in legalizing illegal drugs, and suprising progress in banning tobacco. Yet most governments still use methods that make the cure worse than the disease. [continues 816 words]
Drug use, both legal and illegal, has plagued us through the centuries, defying our attempts to cure the problems it creates. Our failure to solve them, or even to mitigate their tragic consequences, flows from our failure to recognize the true nature of both local and global drug operations. They constitute a malevolent industry, ultra-efficient and yet disarmingly simple in many respects, and devilishly dispersed throughout the world. It should remind us all of international terrorism, for that is what it is. [continues 882 words]
When you've run out of logic, ideas, vision, common sense, brains, wit and innovation, when you've got nothing else to stand on but lazy, exhausted dogma, chances are you'll do what the U.S. Supreme Court did with Dred Scott in 1857. You'll dig in your heels, cross your arms and proclaim something brilliant like, "Well, it's the law!" That's what's going to happen on or about March 18, when the great American land whale known as the Drug Enforcement Administration can officially begin to prosecute businesses that sell edibles made from cannabis sativa, or hemp. [continues 714 words]
