Free Republic

Psst! Hey kid! Come over here and jump off this bridge! All the cool kids've done it 'n you're the only one left! It won't hurt, it'll be fun. Anyhow, if ya don't do it, I'm gonna come back 'n bugya, 'n bugya, 'n bugya forever till ya do. With that sort of reasoned discourse in the background, accompanied by taunts of "You smell like an ASHTRAY!", Philadelphia finally jumped on the bandwagon and banned smoking. Well, sorta. They banned it unless you're a bar that agrees not to feed its customers anything healthy, one that's well-off enough to have...

IN 2004, law enforcement officials arrested 771,605 people for marijuana violations, according to federal statistics. Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project was so alarmed he sent out a press release noting that there were more arrests for marijuana charges than all violent crimes combined. The number of arrests for possession alone was 684,319. Said Mirken of the 771,605 statistic: "This is, in fact, an all-time record. This number of arrests is the equivalent of arresting every man, woman and child in San Francisco." Some 40 percent of Americans say they have used marijuana or hashish in their lifetime, and...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - State officials revived California's medical marijuana identification card program Monday, saying state employees weren't violating federal law by issuing pot ID cards. "The state attorney general has reviewed this concern and said that California can issue ID cards to medical marijuana users without state employees facing prosecution for assisting in the commission of a federal crime," state Health Director Sandra Shewry said in a statement. Shewry's office shuttered the pilot program 10 days ago, citing concerns over a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Last month, the court ruled that people who smoke marijuana because their doctors recommend...

Cauchon Says Pot Law Valid Despite Rulings in Three Provinces Against It Ottawa - Justice Minister Martin Cauchon says Canada's pot possession law is still valid, even though judges in three provinces have ruled to the contrary. In two separate rulings, provincial judges in Ontario and P.E.I. have tossed out simple possession charges, prompting Cauchon's department to stay all such charges in those provinces. Another ruling by a Nova Scotia judge Monday will likely lead to a similar stay while the decision is appealed. Still, Cauchon insisted: "The existing legislation is the law of the land and at Justice Canada...

<p>Angering U.S. officials fighting the war on drugs, the Canadian city of Vancouver, British Columbia, is opening North America's first safe-injection sites for heroin users.</p> <p>Backers insist it's better to treat drug addiction as a public-health issue rather than a criminal matter. Emulating European countries such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, where such sites have existed for more than a decade, health workers and politicians say they aim to stop the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C from intravenous drug use and to curb the number of heroin deaths.</p>

SAN DIEGO – The District Attorney's Office spent nearly $270,000 prosecuting David Westerfield, including thousands for DNA analysis and expert witnesses, it was announced today. Westerfield was sentenced to die for the February 2002 killing of 7-year- old Danielle van Dam. The former Sabre Springs resident and neighbor of the victim is now on death row at San Quentin. According to figures the District Attorney's Office released, more than $35,000 was spent on experts for Westerfield's trial, and more than $146,000 on DNA analysis. More than $62,000 was spent on a telephone survey and a jury questionnaire review.

Our mayor, our premier, the opposition, restaurant and casino owners, the non-smokers and the smokers-rights types, they're all locked in a battle to the death over who gets to smoke -- cigarettes that is -- and who doesn't. Glen Murray to date won't let himself be pinned down on a citywide ban, ditto Doer on a provincewide ban. Restaurants that have bars attached continue to allow smoking while bar owners have nightmares at the thought that someday soon their establishments might have to go cold turkey. Meanwhile, booze is legal, cigarette smoking is legal and marijuana is not. There's something...

Accused wife-beating state cop Tim White and his wife led a hard-partying life of coke snorting and three-way sex that sent the respected trooper into a downward spiral of depression and violence, according to court records and affidavits obtained by the Herald. In the aftermath of a harrowing ordeal at their Stoughton home last week during which White allegedly stuck a gun in his wife's mouth, Maura White told police a sordid tale of a nine-year marriage gone awry. She said her husband, a 16-year trooper and former department spokesman, had grown depressed over the past three years and was...

Newsbrief: This Week's Corrupt Cops Story It never ends. This week's winners are Jefferson County (Greater Louisville), KY, Metro Narcotics officers Mark A. Watson and Christie Richards. The daring duo is on trial this week in Louisville on charges of using photocopied judges' signatures to create bogus search warrants, lying on affidavits to obtain search warrants, and pocketing money they were supposed to be paying to informers. Watson faces 472 counts, while Richardson faces 467. The pair are accused of 133 separate incidents of wrongdoing, according to court documents. Watson and Richards were suspended in February 2000 after questions were...

The Green Leaf Party leadership was hosted by the US Embassy on Thursday to enable the embassy political staff to get to know the party's ideas and plans if it is elected to the Knesset. No. 2 on the Green Party list, Canadian born Dan Goldenblatt said he was buoyed by the invitation, since the embassy usually only invites parties that are already in Knesset. Goldenblatt said the meeting focused mainly on the party's cannabis legalization views and its environmental platform. He said the US officials were interested in knowing whether the party supports other drugs besides cannabis. Green Leaf...

— CHICAGO (Reuters) - Teen-agers who smoked marijuana before turning 17 were more likely to use and abuse harder drugs and alcohol as young adults, a study of Australian twins released on Tuesday said. The "gateway" hypothesis -- where the use of "soft" drugs can lead to a desire for "hard" drugs offering a more intense high -- appeared to be born out in the study of 311 sets of fraternal and identical twins. All the twins included one who had begun smoking marijuana before age 17 while the other had not. The study found those who had smoked early...

After fighting the war on drugs for nearly 30 years, Lt. Jack Cole is ready to admit defeat. The retired New Jersey State Police detective -- who spent 12 years as an undercover narcotics officer -- spearheads a movement to legalize all narcotics as a way of ending the bloody, expensive war. "The war on drugs was, is and always will be a dismal failure," said Mr. Cole yesterday to a meeting of the Fairhaven Rotary Club. Mr. Cole is one of the founders of an international nonprofit group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition -- LEAP. That group, which includes...

BENTON - Prosecutors around the country are being urged to take a stand against attempts to legalize or decriminalize controlled substances - in particular, marijuana. “Those who support drug legalization are well funded and highly adept at manipulating the media,” reads a Nov. 1 letter to prosecutors from the president of the National District Attorneys Association, Dan M. Alsobrooks. “And they do not mind deceiving the American public as well.” The letter warns of “incremental victories” by those in favor of legalizing drugs and notes the “key role” local prosecutors play in anti-drug efforts. Included with the letter was an...

Low prices and increased purity have caused heroin use to skyrocket in Massachusetts, with a new study showing the drug is the No. 1 reason for admissions to treatment programs and hospital detox units as well as overdose deaths. "This is a drug epidemic permeating every corner of our commonwealth, and as a society, we need to aggressively fight to end the human suffering," said Dr. Howard Koh, commissioner of the Department of Public Health, which issued the report yesterday. "Heroin deaths are suffocating our society," he said. The DPH report showed heroin is the most common drug for which...

As a member of the baby boomer generation, I, like many of my cohorts, experimented with marijuana in my youth. Many people, like me, even inhaled it and found it quite enjoyable. But these days we are warned that marijuana is "more dangerous" than ever, and that our youth is in grave danger because today's weed is up to 30 times more powerful than weed in the '60s and '70s. We're being told that we must protect the children and that we should join the chorus of voices pounding it into our children's heads that drugs are bad. First, I...

In a little noticed hearing of the House Government Reform Commnittee last week, Indiana Congressman (my homeotwn's Congressman actually) and longtime drug warrior Dan Burton made some stunning comments. In a hearing entitled "America's Heroin Crisis, Colombian Heroin and How We Can Improve Plan Colombia," Burton stopped just a hair short of advocating the decriminalization of drugs. Watch the video here (cut forward to 1 hour, 18 minutes into the hearing). Here's the transcript: Dan Burton: I want to tell you something. I have been in probably a hundred or a hundred and fifty hearings like this at various times...

Illicit drugs are in the news again, with talk of creating safe injection sites in major metropolitan centres, and the potential decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. These discussions cause me a certain amount of personal turmoil. I have written in this space before about my own negative experiences with substance abuse, as well as my belief that all drugs should be decriminalized and regulated. I continue to struggle to reconcile these apparently opposing views on illicit drugs. I'm not a believer of the 'harmless' theory of marijuana use. I'm one of those guys whose...

The parents of a Grade 6 student have pulled their daughter out of a "Substance Use and Abuse" class at a Hamilton school after a teacher gave a step-by-step lesson on how to snort cocaine. Linda Harley, mother of Caitlin, an 11-year-old girl who attended Chedoke Middle School, said the teacher used white chalk to first draw a circle on the blackboard to represent a mirror or piece of glass, a surface from which cocaine is often inhaled. The teacher then drew dots on the circle to represent the white powder and students were shown how the dots are pushed...

A Traverse City judge who admitted smoking marijuana at a Rolling Stones concert is scheduled to begin hearing cases Monday. District Judge Thomas Gilbert has been on voluntary leave since November sixth. He was in a 28 day alcohol rehabilitation program. Gilbert will hear only civil cases such as small claims and landlord-tenant disputes in his first week back. After a two week vacation, he'll begin hearing criminal cases but not those involving drunken driving or marijuana. Gilbert has called the incident at the October 12th concert in Detroit the stupidest thing he's ever done. Both the local bar association...

Eugene, Oregon's, Whiteaker neighborhood sounded like a war zone around dawn on October 17, and residents are fighting mad. It wasn't a terrorist attack, though, just another example of a drug war run amok. Police serving a search warrant for an alleged marijuana grow enlisted an armored personnel carrier and 45 SWAT team officers armed with shotguns and automatic rifles to raid a cluster of houses in Whiteaker. But after throwing flash-bang grenades, kicking in doors, and handcuffing four people -- including one nude woman and one woman dressed only in underpants and a t-shirt -- for hours in a...