IN 'MEDICAL EXAMINER finds single shot killed officer' (Hampton Roads, Jan. 24), a neighbor of the suspect is quoted as saying 'It's a tragedy; it's two lives wasted, and for what?'

After the death of Detective Jarrod Shivers in a Chesapeake drug raid, it is a most appropriate question to be asked.

The 'narcotics' warrant has since been disclosed to be for marijuana.

More than half of the adult population, including many law enforcement officers, do not support the laws on a substance that is medically much less dangerous than alcohol.

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Portlock residents who saw a deadly police shooting unfold on their "quiet street" are finding it difficult to return to normalcy. The man accused of killing Detective Jarrod Shivers said he had no idea the man he shot was a police officer until it was too late.

Redstart Avenue, a street that dead-ends at a church, still was reeling Friday after a police officer was fatally shot there the night before. The residents say they are in disbelief after realizing that a 28-year-old neighbor is a suspect.

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The Chesapeake policeman was serving a warrant when he was shot to death.

A Chesapeake police officer shot and killed Thursday night is survived by his wife and three children between 2 and 14.

Jarrod Shivers, 34, an eight-year veteran of the Chesapeake Police Department, died after being shot at a house on Redstart Avenue about 8:40 p.m., Chesapeake police said.

Ryan David Frederick, 28, was charged with first-degree murder and use of a firearm in commission of a felony. He was being held in the Chesapeake City Jail.

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Eight-Year Veteran of Chesapeake Department Killed in Line of Duty

CHESAPEAKE -- A Chesapeake narcotics detective was shot to death while attempting to serve a drug warrant Thursday night at a home in the South Norfolk section of Chesapeake, authorities said.

A man living in the house was charged with first-degree murder.

The officer, Jarrod B. Shivers, 34, was fatally shot at about 8:40 p.m. as he and other detectives attempted to enter the house in the 900 block of Redstart Avenue, said police spokeswoman Christina Golden. Shivers was rushed by ambulance with a police escort to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where he died.

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U.VA. Law Students Help Win a Case by Arguing the Value of Ordinary Speech

CHARLOTTESVILLE - Lawyers often are reviled for torturing the English language. Notwithstanding that truth, maybe, heretofore, we should give them a break.

A crack team of University of Virginia law students who are part of the school's fledgling Supreme Court Litigation Clinic took on a case arguing, in essence, for the integrity of ordinary speech. The team won.

The clinic's mission is to find cases to argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. The point is to teach the students by involving them in real-life cases and to "initiate them into the rarefied air of a Supreme Court practice," according to Mark Stancil, a lecturer at the law school who is involved in the clinic.

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JAMES CITY - WJC's voluntary drug testing program might not be as controversial as it originally seemed.

Steve Chantry, director of student services, said that while responses were down slightly this year, the number of students who consented to be in the testing pool increased. He attributes the increase to the fact that the program is a year old now and people have had time to see that it was never designed to get students in trouble.

"We had 4,569 students return forms," he said. "Of those 1,851 said yes."

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Parents Ask The School Board To Institute Mandatory Substance-Abuse Education At T.C. Williams.

Does Alexandria look the other way as teenagers consume alcohol and drugs? Consider the statistics: According to a recent survey of Alexandria schoolchildren, 61 percent of 12th grade students at T.C. Williams High School admitted that they drank alcohol one or more times in the last year -- with 25 percent of respondents acknowledging that they drank five or more drinks in a row in the last two weeks -- and 37 percent of Alexandria high-school seniors said they have used marijuana in the last 12 months.

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Commission Changes Sentencing Rules To Eliminate Disparity Between Crack And Powdered Cocaine.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to apply reduced sentences for crack cocaine offenses to 19,500 people behind bars, a move that could have a dramatic effect on Virginia.

More than 1,400 prisoners sentenced on federal crack cocaine charges in the Eastern District of Virginia over the past 15 years could have their sentences cut under the new rules. That federal district - which spans from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to Hampton Roads - ranks at the very top of 94 federal court districts nationwide in the number of people who could be released early.

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I read that the Rockingham County Jail is overcrowded, and they are planning to expand it in five or six years. Sending people to jail is not supposed to be a money-making proposition. Too many people make their living from holding other people prisoner.

This cruel industry has to be stopped before it grows out of control and swallows up all the free-thinking people of our country - leaving nobody on the outside but tyrannical leaders and terrorized slaves.

What we need to do is stop locking people up for petty stuff, and use the plentiful space we already have to house dangerous prisoners and those in need of rehabilitation.

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One night at a party, Bobby swallowed two Xanax and snorted two more. Then he climbed behind the wheel and hit two mail boxes. Later that night, while wandering around, he fell against a brick wall, severely injuring his eye.

Bobby is one of the many teenagers these days who abuses prescription drugs. He and the other teens in this story spoke on condition that their last names be withheld.

Teenagers use drugs for various reasons, such as to concentrate better, to feel numb or simply to just have fun and party with their friends.

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6,000 May Not Know They're Infected, Studies Say

RICHMOND -- Almost 19,000 people in Virginia are known to be living with HIV or AIDS and an additional 6,000 might not know they are infected, according to new state studies.

Newly diagnosed cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and AIDS decreased from almost 1,600 in 1997 to just less than 1,200 in 2006 in the state, according to the Virginia Department of Health. The number of people with HIV and AIDS has steadily increased in Virginia because people are living longer with improved drugs and more access to health care.

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Paul Armentano asks in his letter on Thursday, Nov. 8, "Why is cannabis being withheld from patients if it has all these positive effects?"

This question is answered with one word: euphoria.

Believe it or not, euphoria is the only side effect in U.S. medicine that is absolutely intolerable. Pain medications are regularly withheld from patients based upon worries that they might "enjoy it."

If one listens to the warnings on any given pharmaceutical that is advertised on morning or evening national news programs, one finds politically tolerable side effects that range from dry eyes or mouth to gastrointestinal distress, including inability to hold bowel movements until one reaches the toilet, and even death. That's right, death. Our old favorite acetaminophen, better known as Tylenol, causes big problems, according to the National Institutes of Health: "Acetaminophen overdose is the leading cause for calls to Poison Control Centers (100,000/year) and accounts for more than 56,000 emergency room visits, 2,600 hospitalizations, and an estimated 458 deaths due to acute liver failure each year."

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Marijuana Commission Major Step In TJ Award Winner's Career

In 1969, Richard J. Bonnie was teaching at UVA's School of Law, from which he had just graduated, when he read about a case in Roanoke that involved a sentence of 20 years in jail for possession of a small amount of marijuana. It was the height of the counterculture wars, and similar events were playing out around the country. White Panther John Sinclair, for instance, was sentenced to a decade in prison that same year for possession of two joints and became an icon when John Lennon named a song after him, demanding, "They gave him 10 for two, what else could the bastards do?"

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Sentencing Proposal Could Alter the Fates of 19,500 Imprisoned Drug Dealers

HARRISONBURG -- A proposal to make lower sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine-dealing convictions retroactive, could reduce the sentences of nearly 20,000 federal inmates, more than 500 of them convicted in U.S. District Courts in the Western District of Virginia.

As the U.S. Sentencing Commission held a public hearing on its proposal in Washington, D.C., this week, officials in the Shenandoah Valley called the plan everything from a vital step toward judicial fairness to a sign that the country is becoming too tolerant of serious drug crime.

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Thanks very much for your article, "Marijuana As First Amendment Right" [Courts & Crime News, November 6, 2007], by J. Tobias Beard.

With an estimated 300 million cannabis consumers around the globe, this is no small issue. And considering the absolute farcical fabrications underlying the much maligned plant's prohibition, the case of Carl Olsen touches on much more than religion.

In consideration of cannabis' place as an important agricultural, medicinal, industrial, spiritual and nutritional commodity around the globe for thousands of years, pot's prohibition is laughable in the face of reality. As a medicine its use is ancient. As a religious sacrament it has for millenia touched many religions in many regions of the globe.

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To the Editor,

As the author of the recent publication, "Emerging Clinical Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids: A Review of the Scientific Literature," I am disappointed that Rachel Vamenta's Nov. 5 commentary makes no reference to the substantial body of emerging science supporting the medical use of cannabis.

While writing this booklet, I reviewed more than 150 clinical and preclinical studies assessing the therapeutic value of cannabis and its active compounds to treat symptoms - and in some cases, moderate disease progressions - in a variety of illnesses, including multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, diabetes and Lou Gehrig's disease. Nearly all of the studies cited in my work were published within the past six years.

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I suggest a simpler law that would get back to basics. Educational institutions should require their students to do their homework before they write editorials.

The points missed in this case include the following:

1) The U.S. federal government already distributes marijuana as a medicine to a number of people. They do that because some of those patients went to court and proved to a legal certainty that marijuana is the only medicine suitable for their needs.

2) Statements about there not being enough research are signs of abject ignorance. Every major government commission report on drug policy in the last 100 years has concluded that the marijuana laws were based on racism, ignorance and nonsense. They all said the laws should have been repealed long ago because they do more harm than good. You can read them at http://druglibrary.org/schaffer under Major Studies of Drugs and Drug Policy.

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Dear Editor,

Regarding the Nov. 5 editorial "Is medical marijuana a big deal?", if health outcomes determined drug laws instead of cultural norms, marijuana would be legal. Unlike alcohol, marijuana has never been shown to cause an overdose death, nor does it share the addictive properties of tobacco. Like any drug, marijuana can be harmful if abused, but jail cells are inappropriate as health interventions and ineffective as deterrents.

The first marijuana laws were enacted in response to Mexican immigration during the early 1900s, despite opposition from the American Medical Association. Dire warnings that marijuana inspires homicidal rages have been counterproductive at best. White Americans did not even begin to smoke pot until a soon-to-be entrenched government bureaucracy began funding reefer madness propaganda.

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To the Editor,

As a retired police officer and student of history, I would ask Ms. Vamenta to do some research on the topic of marijuana prohibition. It has been the unwritten policy of the federal government to allow no research to prove that marijuana is an effective, low side-effect, low-cost medicine. They know from reading the medical journals prior to 1937 and overwhelming anecdotal evidence that God didn't make no junk. When the Texas Legislature in 1919 prohibited the sale of cannabis, they made an exception for both human and animal use. Ms. Vamenta should learn that when cannabis is legal for medical reasons, the pharmaceutical industry will lose between 1 and 5 percent of its $640 billion gross sales. Follow the money, Ms. Vamenta, follow the money.

Officer Howard J. Wooldridge

Education Specialist, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

Washington, D.C.

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One reason to stop caging responsible adult humans for using the relatively safe God-given plant cannabis (kaneh bosm/marijuana) that doesn't get mentioned ("Is medical marijuana a big deal?" Nov. 5, 2007) is because it is biblically correct since Christ God Our Father, The Ecologician, indicates he created all the seed-bearing plants, saying they are all good, on literally the very first page (see Genesis 1:11-12 and 29-30). The only Biblical restriction placed on cannabis is that it is to be accepted with thankfulness (see 1 Timothy 4:1-5).

Truthfully,

Stan White Dillon, Colo.

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