DrugSense Weekly - March 21, 2008 #541

DrugSense Weekly - Domestic News- Policy - March 21, 2008 #541

As the drug czar continues to suggest that the drug war is succeeding, more questions are being raised about his office's ability to provide its own budget numbers with transparency and accuracy.

In the Western U.S., a federal appeals court ruled that cities can drug test employees, but not necessarily all employees (not part-time library workers, for example). In Illinois, a well-respected high school newspaper adviser is suspended for allowing an article perceived by administrators as pro-marijuana. And, in Florida, the legislature is starting to see the need for prison reform, particularly in regards to non-violent drug offenders. The governor, unfortunately, still doesn't get it.

DrugSense Weekly - Law Enforcement and Prisons - March 21, 2008 #541

While efforts to merge the war on drugs with the war on terror have been underway for a while, a report out of Phoenix suggests that strict immigration laws are being conflated with an attack on recreational marijuana users. Also last week, more police corruption, along with a reprimand for an officer who may have tried to do the right thing.

DrugSense Weekly - Cannabis and Hemp- - March 21, 2008 #541

Legislators in New Hampshire sent the wrong message to young people last Tuesday by approving a bill that would reduce the penalty for possessing 7 grams or less of cannabis from a criminal to a civil offense, subject to a $200 fine. Advocates of the bill cited the collateral damage criminal convictions cause, such as the loss of student loans. Opponents of the bill essentially argued that decriminalization would give young people the misimpression that cannabis laws are harmless.

Patients and law enforcement officials took predictable sides in Sacramento County, where supervisors ultimately rejected a call to abide by state law and implement a medicinal cannabis consumer identification card program.

A survey of Canadian physicians found that many are prescribing larger doses of cannabis to registered patients than Health Canada recommends, giving little if any consideration to the risk of overdose.

The Guardian UK published some entertaining excerpts from a new book on organized crime, including a chapter on "BC Bud" and the adventure and affluence to be had smuggling it into the United States.

DrugSense Weekly - International News - March 21, 2008 #541

In the resort town of Goa, the death of a British tourist leads to questioning the authority of drug prohibition in a Times of India piece this week. "If drugs were not banned, would Scarlett Keeling... be alive today? Perhaps... Legalise drugs? Scandalous idea. But is it any more, or less, scandalous than the possibly preventable death of Scarlett, and many more like her? A question, perhaps, whose time has come to be asked."

After the multi-year and multi-billion dollar failed pork-barrel boondoggle of "Plan Colombia" (attempting to budge the U.S. cocaine 'street price' by dousing rainforest with plant poison), the "balloon effect" appears spectacularly once again, this time in the direction of the Brazilian rainforest. Last week reports of "the first known coca plantations" in the Brazilian Amazon surfaced in the media.

As the BZP "party pill" ban comes into effect in New Zealand, authorities fear potential BZP use might balloon into something else, like "Neuro Blast" (said to have a pinch of diphenyl prolinol to perk up parties), or perhaps TFMPP (3-Trifluoromethylphenylpiperazine) - both legal, currently.

In Australia, after a long string of all types of reefer madness in a Geelong Advertiser newspaper piece this week, the editorial ends with the observation those who use cannabis should not be jailed, by concluding, "Jail, after all, is hardly the way to tackle mental health." Good point: authorities never believed the reefer madness in the first place, or else they would have put cannabis users in mental hospitals, not jail.

Stop jailing drug users was the same conclusion the U.K. Drug Policy Commission came to this week, also. Jail isn't "the solution" to "drug crime" says the commission, as drug use is increasing and "heroin use is now more widespread than cannabis," in prison.