DrugSense Weekly - Jan. 23, 2009 #584

DrugSense Weekly - Domestic News- Policy - Jan. 23, 2009 #584

Many institutions got overly excited about drugs and drug policy last week. The U.S. Airforce has joined in salvia divinorum hysteria, banning airmen from using the substance, even though it is still legal in many states and countries. Ongoing heavy-handed government idiocy over drug paraphernalia is explored by Jacob Sullum at Reason. In Montana, state legislators push and pull at a voter approved medical marijuana law. And, in one of his final acts as president, George Bush partially gives in to true believer prohibitionists who saw a pair of border guards convicted of misconduct as victims.

DrugSense Weekly - Law Enforcement and Prisons - Jan. 23, 2009 #584

Will prison reform finally come because of money - or to be more precise - a lack there of? It seems likely as states scramble to cut prison and other judicial costs as a result of budget shortfalls. At the same time, the spoils of the drug war for the other side are displayed at a Mexican museum; and, drugs continue to flow into prisons despite strict measures to stop the activity.

DrugSense Weekly - Cannabis and Hemp- - Jan. 23, 2009 #584

Republican Assemblywoman Mary Pat Angelini of New Jersey pinned a mind-numbingly inane oped in opposition to proposed medicinal cannabis regulations in her state. Her piece contained so many mischaracterizations, distortions, omissions, inaccuracies and threadbare prohibitionist arguments that MAP letter writers were left wondering which points to counter.

Potheads who insist that cannabis is relatively harmless need to put down their bongs and think again. Cannabis leads to loss of parental custody, loss of life and entanglement in a violent criminal underworld.

DrugSense Weekly - International News - Jan. 23, 2009 #584

What happens if Mexico collapses and "the cartels did somehow take over Mexico?", asks Andy Comer in The Monitor newspaper this week. The "federal troops would be likely powerless to stop drug lords from butchering each other," pretty much the situation now. Followed by a ray of sunshine and sense: "Cartel violence [in Mexico] will only subside when America's prohibition of drugs is loosened or ended altogether. People will always want drugs, and dealers will always find ways to supply users."

Likewise from Trinidad and Tobago, sociology professor and University of the West Indies criminology lecturer Onwubiko Agozino has some advice for governments "on how to solve crime". Number one, "Decriminalise marijuana for five years and see if it will make a difference. It will create jobs for young people who sell it. Doctors will be able to prescribe it for Aids and cancer patients. You have a product that could make huge contributions to the economy, and you are saying no?"

Two items from the U.K. this week. In the first, we are informed not by researchers, scientists, or health professionals, but the diagnosis of police in West Yorkshire is the really potent cannabis "on the streets" is damaging the mental health of cannabis users. On the other hand, in the second report a mediaeval (though commonplace) punishment of 'pain or prison' was meted out to medical cannabis user Stuart Wyatt, in Plymouth by Judge Francis Gilbert. Quick to criticize the decision was the Legalise Cannabis Alliance: "How can it be just to send a man to prison, or to torture him by keeping him away from pain-relieving plants when he has caused no trouble, done no harm and posed no threat?"

And finally this week, many prohibitionists will be sock-hopping mad when it was revealed the "1950s dance craze" song, "The Hokey Pokey" (known in the U.K. as "The Hokey Cokey") was -- according to the son of the man who copyrighted the song in 1942 -- a song about cocaine. The Hokey Cokey's "unusual title was to do with drugs taken by the miners in Canada to cheer themselves up in the harsh environment where they were prospecting... The word 'Cokey' means a dope-fiend." Shake it all about, indeed.