Free Republic

OTTAWA -- Looser marijuana laws in Canada will lead to even tighter security at the U.S. border, American officials warned yesterday. U.S. drug cops could soon be shifting their attention from the Mexican border north once the Liberal government decriminalizes pot possession, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. President George W. Bush's anti-drug czar John Walters also took aim at yesterday's Commons committee recommendation that possession of 30 grams of pot should result in nothing more than a ticket and no criminal record. "Smoking any amount of marijuana is unhealthy, but the consequences of conviction for...

MIDDLETOWN -- Peter Christ and Cliff Thornton are two men with very different backgrounds: Thornton was a substitute teacher in Hartford’s schools, and Christ is a former police officer in western New York state. But both men have reached the same conclusion -- that the ‘war on drugs’ is a massive failure that only deepens the national crisis of addiction and drug-related crime. After 20 years on opposite sides of a war that has cost over $1 trillion in 30 years, with millions of casualties on both sides, the two men, and many more around the country, are pursuing campaigns...

— WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Countering a basic principle of American anti-drug policies, an independent U.S. study concluded on Monday that marijuana use does not lead teenagers to experiment with hard drugs like heroin or cocaine. The study by the private, nonprofit RAND Drug Policy Research Center rebutted the theory that marijuana acts as a so-called gateway drug to more harmful narcotics, a key argument against legalizing pot in the United States. The researchers did not advocate easing restrictions in marijuana, but questioned the focus on this substance in drug control efforts. Using data from the National Household Survey on Drug...

Medical marijuana and the feds Debra Saunders If the federal government were right that medical marijuana has no medicinal value, why have so many doctors risked their practices by recommending its use for patients with cancer or AIDS? Marcus Conant, the doctor who identified the first cases of Kaposi's sarcoma among San Francisco AIDS patients, can answer that. Imagine you're the doctor for a 40-year-old lady with breast cancer. They put her on chemotherapy, and every time she takes her therapy, she throws up. She can't sleep; she's up sick all night. She has trouble caring for her children. Medical...

Drug Testing Would Dry Up Demand, Colombia Says Colombia's president proposed a new front in the global war on drugs: mass drug testing for Americans and Europeans. Reviving the traditional conflict between drug-producing and drug-consuming nations, President Álvaro Uribe said yesterday the tests would dry up demand for drugs that Colombian insurgents sell to finance their decades-old civil war. "We need more serious commitments from the consumer countries," Uribe said at a conference of Spanish and Latin-American attorneys general. He called on "the people in the United States and Europe to submit to a drug test to help us conquer...

e interrupt our coverage of the war on terrorism to check in with that other permanent conflict against a stateless enemy, the war on drugs. To judge by the glee at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the drug warriors have just accomplished the moral equivalent of routing the Taliban — helping to halt a relentless jihad against the nation's drug laws. Ballot initiatives in Ohio (treatment rather than prison for nonviolent drug offenders), Arizona (the same, plus making marijuana possession the equivalent of a traffic ticket, and providing free pot for medical use) and Nevada (full...

Very Heavy Pot Use Clouds Mental Function: Study 1 hour, 58 minutes ago By Dana Frisch NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who smoked unusually large amounts of marijuana performed worse on tests of mental function than their peers who smoked less pot, even after a 30-day abstinence period, according to a new report. Heavy users performed worse on 69% of the 35 tasks than light users, though their performances were not "clinically abnormal," the researchers found. The 22 participants were admitted to hospital during the course of the study and submitted to random urine tests to ensure they remained...