Free Republic

Senator Richard J. Durbin (D., Ill.) is 58 years old and a graduate of Georgetown Law School. He has been in federal elected office for more than 20 years. His official duties include appointments on his chamber's Judiciary Committee, the Governmental Affairs Committee, the Committee on Rules and Administration, and the Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as about a dozen subcommittees. His demeanor is serious, sober and focused. So why does Durbin want juries to ignore federal law? Durbin is currently seeking cosponsors for a bill that allows federal juries to be informed when defendants facing medical marijuana charges...

The US crime rate entered its third year of virtual stagnation in 2002 and is dramatically lower than a decade ago, the FBI reported on Wednesday, but the war on drugs continues to scoop up Americans by the millions. According to the FBI's annual uniform crime report, "Crime in the United States 2002," more than 1.5 million people were arrested on drug charges last year, roughly 80% of them for simple possession. Marijuana users made up nearly half of all drug arrests, with some 693,000 pot busts last year, 88% of them for simple possession. The marijuana arrest figure is...

Those who advocate treatment as a more effective approach to drug abuse than prison have a new and unlikely poster child. Rush Limbaugh. Long a supporter of sending drug addicts "up the river," including those hooked on prescription medications, Limbaugh now resides on the wrong side of his own line in the sand. I hope his stint in drug rehab will render him "born again" on this issue. I have no interest in vilifying Rush Limbaugh for being a drug addict. This unhappy condition can befall anyone regardless of income, race, intelligence or ideology. Misconstrued as a failure of character,...

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and certain Wisconsin legislators have launched a new crusade against "drugged driving," with a heavy emphasis on marijuana. This crusade is largely based on scientific misinformation, and it could lead to the enactment of bad laws. ONDCP has several slick television commercials on the subject. One shows dramatic auto accidents and two crash test dummies passing a joint while a serious voice says, "In a recent study, one in three reckless drivers tested positive for marijuana." Note the careful phrasing. The idea is to make viewers think that marijuana caused...

[...] People who work in the Los Angeles criminal justice system are well aware that the central problem with the LAPD is not a shortage of police officers but a misallocation of personnel. Instead of fully policing the most violent, gang-infested parts of the city, a vast number of officers are toiling away in the futile "war on drugs." As a deputy public defender in Los Angeles for the last 15 years, mostly spent in the central criminal courthouse, I have gained firsthand knowledge of the misguided priorities of the LAPD. I've witnessed the vast number of police personnel engaged...

Last of two parts Casualties in the War on Drugs include an increasing number of doctors whose philosophy on the role of painkillers is at odds with law enforcement. Incidental casualties — patients suffering from chronic pain — are mounting as well. A Decatur physician, Sayed Pardazi, lost his license in February for failure to properly document his patients' need for painkillers. A Gadsden doctor, Pascual Herrera Jr., met the same fate last year. Nationwide, the list of doctors charged for prescribing painkillers is a long one. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has investigated 557 doctors this year, and disciplined...

Pain is not, for Paul, distant or abstract. Not pastels, but ragged reds and bottomless blacks. Not a whisper, but a stabbing shriek, the smell of scorching. His pain is centered, overwhelming. It twists tissue in a coiled death-grip, felling him. When, as now, he is without medication to soften the pain, you can look into Paul's eyes and see it. His posture, his words, reveal it. Paul, at this instant, is pain and little else. Pain controls thought and emotion, poise and posture. With law enforcement increasingly second-guessing medical judgments on the need for narcotics, doctors are reluctant to...

Former New York police officer Peter Christ told a crowd of about a dozen UNM community members Monday night that drug prohibition in the United States doesn't work. "Prohibition is the definition of the times we live in today," said Christ, now vice director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, a UNM organization that began last semester, organized the speech at the UNM School of Law. The event was supposed to be a debate, but organizers said they could not find anyone to speak for the other side. According to the student organization's Web site,...

In order for the war on terrorism to be successful, citizens of every country, especially those of the United States, need to do their part. It's the effort by ordinary citizens -- keeping a look out for terrorists and those who help them, staying up-to-date on the risk those people of interest pose and taking action when necessary -- that will be a key to victory and eventually ensure the safety of all citizens of this planet. So, as the self-proclaimed director of the citizen's faction of the U.S. Homeland Security Department (HSD), I request all taxpaying U.S. citizens to...

Ethan Nadelmann, drug policy reform activist and former Princeton professor, spoke to students yesterday about building a political movement to end the war on drugs while also discussing his role as an activist within the movement. Nadelmann said that the government's current drug war is "doing more harm than good," arguing that non-violent drug use should be treated "primarily as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue." He addressed the need for harm-reduction intervention that would treat drug offenders instead of incarcerating them. Nadelmann's movement has called upon ballot initiative legislation to reform drug policy at the state level....

Memo to Rush Limbaugh: Hey, Rush, we're counting on you, pal. Now that you might be feeling the hot breath of drug prosecutors on your neck, perhaps you might speak out for more enlightened treatment of non-violent drug offenders. [...] However this turns out, I cannot help but hope that this experience has a chastening effect on your drug views. Your past political commentaries offer a ray of hope. Online searches of your past views reveal a Limbaugh who seems, uncharacteristically, to have wavered on the drug issue between the libertarian and authoritarian wings of the conservative movement. [...]

As citizens of a free country, most Americans doubtless view the government as supportive of patients' rights and of innovative medical treatments. And this is largely a good view, unless your doctor believes that the best medicine for you is marijuana, in which case the only thing you'll receive from the federal government is jail time and a criminal record. There is, however, hope of change on the horizon. This October, Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) will introduce the Truth in Trials Act in the Senate. For the first time ever, Congress will entertain a bill proposing a federal law to...

The "War on Drugs" has been a catastrophic failure no matter how you measure it, from the lives taken or destroyed in its wake to the criminal and terrorist organizations that have only been enriched by drug prohibition. Nearly a century ago, the United States passed the 18th Amendment, barring the sale of alcoholic products, also known as Prohibition. A mere 13 years later, it was repealed by the 21st Amendment, and the matter of alcohol prohibition was rendered to the historical dustbin, forever to be a curious anomaly in high school history textbooks. Why then has America failed to...

George McMahon is not allowed to visit the field where the federal government grows his marijuana. He has stood outside the double razor-wire fence circling the plot in Mississippi, but he's not allowed inside. "I'm not really sure that I want to see it. The thought of all of that medicine locked up, while so many people are hurting, makes me angry," McMahon writes in his recently released book, "Prescription Pot." McMahon suffers from a debilitating genetic disorder called Nail Patella Syndrome. Since 1990, the government has supplied him with 300 tightly rolled joints each month. Only four other Americans...

YORK — What is it about marijuana farming and York County? This year, more than two-thirds of all marijuana plants seized in South Carolina have been discovered in York County — 8,415 plants worth about $21 million. And the six-week harvest season that extends through early November is just starting. Wilkes County, in the North Carolina mountains — once considered the moonshine liquor capital of the South — has become known in recent years as one of the state’s largest growers of marijuana. But, Wilkes’ total this year — about 4,000 plants — is less than half of York County’s....

<p>SCIO — Howard Wooldridge leaves quite an impression on people.</p> <p>It could be because of his one-eyed horse, his homemade T-shirt or his startling message.</p> <p>More than likely, it is a combination of all three.</p> <p>Wooldridge, a 52-year-old retired police detective, is nearing the end of his expedition.</p>

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Faced with massive smuggling of Ecstasy, a U.S. official said Friday the Dutch government needs to give authorities the power to use wiretaps and infiltrate criminal gangs to crack down on its production. The Dutch government "isn't serious enough" about closing down laboratories that ship tons of synthetic drugs to the United States, said John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Walters, attending a conference in Rome, spoke by telephone with The Associated Press. The Netherlands is seen as the largest source of Ecstasy in the United States and the rest...

Marijuana can be addictive. Marijuana isn’t great for learning or short-term memory. Marijuana’s not the best thing for children—the best things for children are fresh air, sunshine and love! And if you own a bong (or "water pipe," as the head shops insist upon calling them), the chances are good that you smoke way too much dope. Nobody really needs a bong. Can we all stipulate to that? The White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy wants us to stipulate to a little more: that marijuana is far more dangerous than it was when the Boomers smoked it (the...

This past September 6, a local anti tobacco group organized a protest march in Dhaka to demand the enactment of a tobacco control law it says will save millions of lives from smoking-related diseases. March organizers charged that the deluding publicity of the tobacco companies had increased the health risks of millions of smokers in the Third World and predicted that if this publicity was left unchallenged, an epidemic of smoking-related diseases might break out in the country. No one can seriously challenge the assertion that multinational tobacco companies have targeted the Third World countries as markets for their products....

When Congress launched the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign five years ago, it explicitly tied future funding to hard evidence of success. Today, there is anything but that. Teenagers are increasingly using the illicit drugs the campaign has most often railed against, according to a recently released, congressionally mandated study. The Pride Survey found that from 2001 to 2002, for instance, marijuana use was up among all grades studied (sixth through 12th) except for the 10th grade, which showed a 0.1% decline. Marijuana use nearly doubled, from 2.9% to 5.2%, among sixth-graders and rose from 7.2% to 10.2% among eighth-graders....