Why has there not been more specific information about constitutional rights in The Post's "Stop and Seize" series, including in the Oct. 12 installment? The Fifth Amendment was written to constrain the federal government ("No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation"), and the 14th Amendment was written to constrain the states ("[N]or shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"). If courts have upheld this practice despite the plain language of these two important amendments to the Constitution, something is wrong with the courts. Stephen M. Miller, Rockville [end]
Peter Lewis Helped to Build One of the Nation's Biggest Car Insurers Peter Lewis transformed Progressive Corp. into one of the nation's largest auto insurers before taking up a role later in life as a leading advocate of marijuana reform. Mr. Lewis, who died Saturday at age 80 at his home at Coconut Grove, Fla., helped introduce telephone rate quotes and Internet sales to the car-insurance business. The company boasted that its rates were so low that it would quote its competitors' rates, as well as its own. [continues 356 words]
Owsley Stanley, the grandson of a former Kentucky governor, made and supplied the LSD that fueled acid rock and California's hallucinogenic culture in the 1960s. Mr. Stanley died Sunday at age 76 after an automobile accident in Queensland, Australia, where he had emigrated in the 1980s. An early patron and sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Mr. Stanley was memorialized in the band's song "Alice D. Millionaire," named after a newspaper headline about his arrest for dealing LSD. Mr. Stanley was credited with distributing thousands-some say millions-of doses of high-purity LSD, often for free at concerts and "acid tests" run by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. [continues 564 words]
John P. Morgan, who died February 15 at 68, was among the most outspoken physicians favoring drug legalization, and testified as an expert witness for the defense in hundreds of trials. A self-described "pharmaco-ethnomusicologist," he liked to track down drug references in popular music to illustrate the history of drug use in America for students at the City University of New York's Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education, where Morgan was chairman emeritus of the pharmacology department. "Alcohol songs, like heroin songs, tend to be negative and warning," Morgan told the New Yorker in 2003. "Marijuana songs are almost always funny." [continues 656 words]
