Ouachita Parish Sheriff Richard Fewell got word Tuesday of a 42 percent cut to the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program. The program, run by police departments across the nation, sends officers into schools to teach children about the dangers of drug abuse. Out of a $124,000 budget last year, Fewell said, the state of Louisiana provided about $62,000 for the parish DARE program. Although a 42 percent cut - about $26,000 - is a significant hit, Fewell said, the Ouachita Parish Sheriff's Office is not willing to eliminate the program. [continues 318 words]
To hear it from Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, the Canadian Senate recommendation to end marijuana prohibition undermines the fight against harder drugs. When bloated drug war budgets are threatened, misinformation is the first defence. Taxing and regulating marijuana would render the drug war obsolete. As long as marijuana remains illegal and distributed by organized crime, consumers will continue to come into contact with hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. Naturally the career bureaucrats whose jobs depend on never-ending drug war prefer to blame the plant itself for the alleged "gateway" to hard drugs. Robert Sharpe, M.P.A., program officer, Drug Policy Alliance, Washington, D.C. [end]
Myths About Drugs And Welfare The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University employs many distinguished researchers and performs valuable work in drug abuse treatment and policy. Unfortunately, CASA researchers have their work cut out for them in dispelling the myths spread by their own director, former health, education and welfare secretary Joseph A. Califano Jr. Califano claimed in a Sept. 18 op-ed in The Post: "Today the bulk of mothers on welfare -- perhaps most -- are drug and alcohol abusers and addicts, often suffering from serious mental illness and other ailments." This wildly overstated account reinforces false stereotypes about who is on welfare and makes it harder to address problems of drug abuse and psychiatric disorders among women who receive public aid. [continues 485 words]
A delegation of five Russian leaders has been studying youth-focused mental health and substance abuse prevention programs in Oak Ridge, Knoxville, other East Tennessee communities and Nashville as part of the Open World Program sponsored by the U.S. Congress. The program brings Russian leaders to the United States for exposure to American democratic and economic institutions. It is managed by the Center for Russian Leadership Development, an independent agency located at the Library of Congress. The delegates arrived Sept. 25 and will stay through Oct. 3. [continues 1005 words]
Candidates vying to become the next Orleans Parish district attorney slammed Harry Connick's office Tuesday night during a forum, saying it bungles violent cases. They cited a Faubourg St. John killing Friday in which two of the suspects had recently been released from jail because prosecutors failed to charge them in an earlier case. The slaying Friday morning of Christopher Briede, 32, and the subsequent finger pointing between prosecutors and police about why the suspects were on the street, dominated Tuesday's candidate forum, sponsored by the Audubon Riverside Neighborhood Association. [continues 580 words]
Editor: To say that these ads "set the record straight" is ridiculous. Our generation has been bombarded by anti-drug advertising - propaganda that says marijuana, cocaine, and heroin are horrible, evil substances - as long as we've been alive. Most of us have, at least, tried marijuana, and most of us realized that the government was lying to us. It's really no worse than alcohol or cigarettes. The question then becomes, "What else have they been lying to us about?" Are cocaine and heroin really that bad - because the government says it's all the same as pot. And now I wonder, "Was every beer drinker in the 1920s a supporter of organized crime?" By the logic of these advertisements, yes, they were. Shouldn't we take a look at the past and realize that our government, by means of prohibition, is the creator of a $400 billion/year black-market drug trade, and the real supporter of terrorism? [continues 80 words]
Two years ago, the Utah Supreme Court upheld the state's roadblock statute, but said police must focus on highway-safety tasks -- such as identifying drunken drivers -- rather than looking for drugs or other ordinary criminal wrongdoing. But as police have struggled to understand that ruling and test its limits, the roadblock issue was once again before the high court Tuesday. Justices heard arguments in an appeal challenging the use of drug sniffing dogs at a roadblock ostensibly to promote highway safety. [continues 485 words]
No definite date has yet been set for the first meeting of the new school year by Ohio University's Review and Standards Committee. The committee is in the midst of reviewing proposed amendments to OU's Student Code of Conduct, including a controversial stiffening of penalties for student possession of small amounts of marijuana. Contacted Sept. 20, Richard Carpinelli, OU assistant vice president for student affairs, reported that he expected the Review and Standards Committee to convene "sometime in the next several weeks," but had not yet scheduled the meeting. [continues 537 words]
To the editor: Re: 'Police chief's position on pot criticized,' letters from Sept. 18, 2002. If the letters, predominantly from the U.S., are a fair representation of the letters you received, it is apparent the pro-pot lobby is much better organized than the majority of people I talk to in Durham Region. While there are many impairments to rational judgment, both alcohol and pot have the potential as major hallucinogenics and consequently put others and their property directly at risk from those whose judgment is distorted. [continues 206 words]
Ken Kesey pulled him into the bathroom, grabbed a vile of pills from the medicine cabinet, and slapped one into his hand. "Take this," Ed McClanahan recalls Kesey telling him. "We're going to the movies." A little while later, as the two sat in the front row of an opening of "West Side Story," Kesey's pill, packed with mind-altering psilocybin, started taking effect. Decades later, McClanahan remembers not the story, but the vivid colors and the charged musical numbers. [continues 1071 words]
