Hawaii should not wait any longer to join the list of states that have legalized marijuana. There is simply too much at stake for us to allow our Legislature to peck away at this for five or 10 years without taking real action. Hawaii was once an important exporting state. Many of us remember the period before the Green Harvest eradication program and other measures that ruined this business here. Law enforcement turned us into a net importer from California and paved the way for our meth-amphetamine problems. Public opinion has finally caught up to common sense on marijuana issues with political pressure applied to end the enforcement efforts on the Big Island. [continues 451 words]
Roger Christie is accused of running a marijuana distribution business through his church in Hilo. His THC Ministry has long claimed marijuana as a religious sacrament and the use of it protected under the right to freedom of religion. The federal prosecution argues that the THC Ministry is a front for illegal marijuana distribution. In its motion to deny bail, it presented evidence it says supports this allegation. However, this should not be relevant to a bail hearing. Whether the defendant has committed a crime or not is a decision to be made by a jury in a public trial, not by a judge in a bail hearing. Since July 2010, Christie has been denied bail and remains behind bars awaiting trial. [continues 465 words]
Recently all of our local broadcast stations gave an hour to show a scare film about crystal meth use in Hawai'i. The film gave time to leading Republicans, Harry Kim, Ed Kubo and our governor and lieutenant governor to make statements of concern. Yet a 30-minute interview with Ethan Nadlemann, one of the foremost experts on drug addiction reform and harm reduction, ended up as only five seconds on air. June Jones' quotes took up more time. The film relied on personal histories and other anecdotal evidence rather than on scientific research to make most of its points. As a scary propaganda piece, that may be fine, but it doesn't help Hawai'i get any closer to effective solutions. [continues 100 words]
During my recent campaign for governor, I asked audiences what their priorities were on drug policy. The question was: "Which is more important to you; keeping drug addicts from getting their hands on drugs, or keeping them from getting their hands on your property?" It should be clear that if we could limit our drug-related problems to the health issues incident to addiction, the result would be a great improvement in the current situation of high property crime rates, high taxes to pay for arresting and incarcerating addicts and, despite blips up and down in drug use during the past few decades, no real end in sight. [continues 591 words]
Would you like to see Hawai'i's property crime reduced by 90 percent? How would you like to see that along with cuts in spending for law enforcement, a halving of our prison population, improved public health, drugs out of parks and schools, and less chance your kid will get addicted? These things are achievable if we get law enforcement out of drug fighting and turn the problem of addiction over to health authorities, as is being done in Europe. [continues 140 words]
The public needs to just say "no" to the law enforcement approach to controlling drugs. The chilling ideas of city prosecutor Peter Carlisle and U.S. Attorney Ed Kubo bring to mind a North Korean-style police state. Each decade we are subjected to a new drug scare; heroin in the 1970s, cocaine in the '80s and now crystal methamphetamine. Each one brings a wave of public hysteria fueled by lots of misinformation. Each time, the law enforcement community suggests the answer is to give it more money and power. No real progress in dealing with addiction is ever made, but more tax money is spent, crime continues to rise and the people calling for these phony solutions just say we need to do even more of the same. [continues 73 words]
In Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," the slave Jim talks about being rich when he is freed. In slave-owning days, people had a clear understanding of what freedom was. A free man owned his body and the fruits of his own labor. We seem to have lost that distinction. Who owns your body? Apparently, our city prosecutor and Senate president don't think teenagers own their bodies. To them, random drug testing is no more a violation of their rights than searching their school lockers. Children, in this view, are property, free to be searched like a room or a car. They seem to believe that the constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches has no more application to teenagers today than it did for blacks under slavery. [continues 113 words]
Ray Gagner's letter to the editor attacked harm-reduction approaches to drug policy reform as the "peddling of dangerous policies" (Star-Bulletin, Dec. 6). Ask yourself this: What is your priority? Is it more important to keep drug addicts from getting their hands on drugs, or to keep them from getting their hands on your property? As much as 90 percent of the property crime in Hawaii is committed by addicts stealing to obtain the funds to buy illegal drugs. A policy that allowed addicts to register with the state and obtain drugs at low cost would end our property crime problem. It will not cure addiction, but neither has 90 years of criminalizing it. [continues 74 words]
The federal government has spent millions of dollars over the last 30 years in a vain attempt to demonstrate marijuana is a health hazard. No researcher, no matter how flawed the methodology of his proposed experiment or inconclusive his findings, has had trouble getting grant money from the feds to find the dangers of marijuana. Independent science has steadfastly refused to accept this politically motivated nonsense. Yet it is widely quoted by anti-marijuana use advocates. The federal government has also obstructed research into marijuana's medical properties. The reason the Federal Drug Administration hasn't completed research on this drug is political. In the meantime, patients who could be helped have gone without. This, to me, seems to be the crime. Tracy Ryan, Chairperson-Libertarian Party of Hawaii [end]
