And to Think, Americans Don't Want This Source of Tax Revenue! Highest greetings from the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, where I'm enjoying the heady ambience of this society where they just don't care if you want to get high and where a couple thousand American youths are staggering around this week flashing their judge's badges and sampling the wares of the city's 250 coffee shops. About 10 percent of Amsterdam's coffee shops pony up the entrance fees required to be showcased by High Times in its growing and consuming competition and thus gain the patronage of the American weed tourists during the week of the cup - and indeed all year round. The winning coffee shops get the business when the drug tourists come to town, the winning strains get purchased over the counter, and the winning seeds are prized by the international growing community. [continues 1068 words]
Despite Prop 19 Defeat, We've Still Come a Long Way It was kicks to see my caricature on the cover of last week's Metro Times, and I'd like to thank my editors for the honor as well as the many friends who've called the cover to my attention since the issue appeared. Seeing the Metro Times pot issue and reading the fervent editorial by my esteemed colleague Curt Guyette sort of took some of the sting out of the extremely disappointing defeat of Proposition 19 in California the night before. [continues 1175 words]
But Win or Lose This Time, a Page in History Has Turned -- Drug Policy Reform Is an Issue Who Time Has Come, and Time Is on Our Side. California's Proposition 19, the marijuana legalization "Tax and Regulate" initiative, has been a roller coaster ride for drug policy reformers. In May polls showed Prop 19 in the lead, but not by much and with support under 50%. For the next four months, the numbers did something we didn't expect; opposition to the measure steadily decreased. One pollster interviewed in early October for my organization's newsletter, commented, "If I was in Las Vegas and I was a betting man, I'd bet on [Prop 19] to win, but I'd only bet money I could afford to lose." A number of funders took that bet last month, adding steam to what had been a mostly low-profile campaign. [continues 341 words]
Will the Obama Administration Put Justice Back in the Criminal Justice System? President Obama faces a heap of crises: a major economic recession, crumbling national infrastructure, and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Buried in that heap is another war, one less present in public discourse but no less toxic: the drug war. The concentrated battleground of the drug war has been on domestic soil, with America's so-called interdiction efforts spreading the fight across the world, from poppy-rich Afghanistan to the coca-nurturing Andes to the most brutal battlefield of them all, Mexico, which saw more than 5,600 drug-related murders last year, including several that involved publicly displayed decapitations [continues 3100 words]
By Paul Armentano Police caught Hoffman with pot but promised to drop charges if she agreed to go undercover in a drug bust. She was killed soon afterward. http://drugsense.org/url/Gpp49YxT Inside USA travels to Mexico to look at the country's drug war and to examine the role the U.S. is playing in it. 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyDHNeJxazU [continues 273 words]
Thomas Schweich charges that President Karzai is protecting drug traffickers within his power base, and says the US Defense Department and some NATO allies have also resisted antiopium efforts. A former high-ranking US State Department official has accused Afghanistan's government of undercutting anti-opium efforts in the country for its own political gain, in an article for Sunday's New York Times Magazine that was released early online. In the article, "Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?", former State Department antinarcotics official Thomas Schweich wrote that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been stymying US anti-opium efforts in southern Afghanistan, as many of his political supporters are amassing wealth through the drug trade. [continues 1632 words]
StoptheDrugWar.org's executive director recently did a 25-minute debate on drug legalization on a network that aired across Europe and the Middle East. Video is online at: http://drugsense.org/url/Ev5QyEPJ GOT YOUR NUMBER: NORA IS PROPOSITION 5! The Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act-the most ambitious sentencing and prison reform in U.S. history-just got its proposition number. The measure, sponsored by DPA Network, will appear as Proposition 5 on the California state ballot in November! [continues 410 words]
By Bruce Mirken, AlterNet. Posted July 2, 2008. WHO survey of 17 countries finds that the U.S. has the highest rates of marijuana and cocaine use. http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/90295/ By Laura Carlsen On June 26, after months of intense manoeuvering in Washington, the U.S. Senate passed the final version of the "Merida Initiative" and the President subsequently signed it into law. [continues 377 words]
For alcohol prohibition, our US version, it was about 13 years. Between mafia crime, poisonings from adulterated beverages, and the dropping age at which people were becoming alcoholics, Americans decided that the "Noble Experiment" -- whether it should actually be regarded as noble or not -- was a bad idea. And they ended it. New York State did its part 75 years ago today, ratifying the 21st amendment to repeal the 18th amendment, bringing the Constitution one state closer to being restored. It took another half a year, until December 5th, to get the 36 states on the board that were needed at the time to get the job done. But Americans of the '30s recognized the failure of the prohibition experiment, and they took action by enacting legalization of alcohol. [continues 588 words]
Among the many details laid out by authorities after last week's drug raids around San Diego State University, there was this tidbit: Alleged dealers were selling half-ounces of cocaine for as little as $400. A half-ounce contains about 14 grams, which comes out to about $28 per gram (the size of a Sweet'N Low packet). In the 1980s, a gram of cocaine cost $100 to $125. When inflation is factored in, the price difference is even more eye-popping. If the cost of cocaine went up like everything else, that $100 gram from the 1980s would cost $282 today. [continues 426 words]
High Times Magazine Prohibition has failed to control the use and domestic production of marijuana -- it's time everyone faced this and the rest of the compelling arguments for legalizing it. http://alternet.org/drugreporter/60959/ With luck, Afghanistan could become the Colombia of the Middle East By Jacob Sullum, September 5, 2007 http://www.reason.com/news/show/122295.html Washington, DC: The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is expanding its online message and presence to the popular 3-D virtual world Second Life. [continues 342 words]
According to the federal government, 53-year-old Deborah Palmer (not her real name) doesn't exist. A grandmother and former California corrections officer, Ms. Palmer suffers from chronic spinal pain (the result of a pair of botched back surgeries) and fibromyalgia. Because her body is allergic to opioid medications, she recently began using medical marijuana to obtain relief from her daily suffering. That is until federal and state law enforcement officials raided the California dispensary that provided her medicine. "What am I going to do?" she lamented in one of our recent conversations. "If I have to live in this amount of pain 365 days a year without access to my medicine, then I'm not going to stay on this Earth very long." [continues 1019 words]
TABLE OF CONTENTS: * This Just In http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/2006/ds06.n459.html#sec1 (1) Wanted: Pot Growers (2) Cannabis Therapy 'May Be Harmful' (3) Sessions Seeks To Adjust Sentences For Crack, Powder Cocaine Offenses (4) Former Robeson Deputy Pleads Guilty * Weekly News in Review http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/2006/ds06.n459.html#sec2 Drug Policy (5) OPED: Legalize Drugs (6) OPED: A Ceasefire For The "War On Drugs" (7) OPED: The State Should Target The Real Drug Kingpins (8) OPED: Gateway To Nowhere? [continues 247 words]
Provision Rescinding Financial Packages Criticized for Affecting Only Non-Affluent One graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, the other from Princeton University. Both used drugs including marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Both were caught. But where these students' paths diverge -- the first lost his financial aid package and was suspended, the second got a slap on the wrist and continued his studies uninterrupted -- demonstrates how a little-known 1998 federal law exacts serious consequences for some students but leaves others unscathed. [continues 1039 words]
Making drug offenders ineligible for federal student aid runs counter to rehabilitation efforts. The law should be dropped or at least scaled back. One need not excuse a university student who smokes marijuana to understand why yanking the student out of school usually serves no one's longterm interest. But that is one of Congress' key weapons in the war on drugs. Under a law adopted five years ago, any drug conviction, even misdemeanor marijuana possession, makes a current or prospective university student immediately ineligible for federal financial aid. The result, of course, is that most of those students no longer have the means to pursue a higher education. So they drop out or never attend in the first place. According to a coalition of groups trying to overturn the law, some 160,500 students have lost aid that way. [continues 201 words]
Critics Of A Rule Used To Ban Financial Aid To Students With Drug Convictions Say It Punishes Only Those Who Want To Improve Their Lives. LECANTO - If a college student is convicted of drunken driving or assault, his eligibility for financial aid is not affected. But if he's caught smoking a joint, a little-known provision of the Higher Education Act allows the government to deny financial aid. More than 160,000 students have been refused aid since the provision was enacted in 2000, according to a coalition of groups working to repeal it. [continues 823 words]
NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. -- An 18-year-old woman was in a hospital burn unit after being injured by an explosive device police tossed during a drug raid. Authorities said the woman was not the target of the investigation and described the incident as an unfortunate mishap. Rhiannon Kephart suffered second- and third-degree burns on her chest and stomach when the device, known as a flash-bang, landed in an apartment where she apparently was in bed or just getting up. [continues 273 words]
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) joined members of several nonprofit organizations Thursday at the Omni Parker Hotel to discuss a federal provision that denies college students convicted of drug-related offenses federal financial aid. In 1998, Rep. Mark Souder (R-Indiana) introduced legislation adding the drug-related crime provision to the Higher Education Act, which prevents students convicted of drug-related crimes from receiving federal funds such as loans, grants and even work-study programs. Frank has led a national effort to repeal the legislation, which has denied over 157,000 students federal financial aid. [continues 458 words]
New super-strength marijuana readily available on US streets is prompting the White House to change direction in its war against drugs. Research from the government-sponsored Marijuana Potency Project claims today's cannabis is more than twice as strong as in the mid-Eighties, leading to greater health risks for those smoking it at increasingly younger ages. Now President George Bush, who had already promised a more aggressive campaign against substance abuse, has ordered that resources be allocated to fighting so-called 'soft' drugs instead of concentrating on harder forms, such as heroin and cocaine. [continues 495 words]
Two advocates for the legalization of drugs who have refused to report for jury service in the District were found in contempt of court yesterday and soon could be facing hefty fines. David Borden and David A. Guard, leaders of an advocacy group that runs the Web site StoptheDrugWar.org, say they will not participate in a criminal justice system that makes drugs illegal. Yesterday they found out the consequences at a hearing called by Rufus G. King III, the chief judge of D.C. Superior Court. [continues 438 words]
