A disgraceful, unjust chapter in Riverside County law enforcement may be behind us. For the second consecutive year, the Sheriff's Department has not engaged in undercover drug stings in Riverside County schools, a welcomed development given how frivolous and even abusive such efforts have been. From 2010 to 2013, the department placed undercover deputies at multiple high schools in the county. Posing as students, the deputies attempted to buy drugs to set the stage for mass arrests of teenagers, presumably for their own good, or something like that. [continues 315 words]
Silicon Valley Financiers Investing in Marijuana Apps, Services Venture Capitalists Get Behind Efforts to Legalize Recreational Pot Use Cannabis Startups Attracting Top Talent From Technology, Finance Sectors Henderson, Nev. - Isaac Dietrich was smoking marijuana at his best friend's college apartment a few years ago when an entrepreneurial vision burst forth as heady as the most potent strains of Head Cheese or Ghost Train Haze. "We had an epiphany," he said. "Grandma doesn't want to see me taking bong rips on Facebook. So we decided we needed a place where people could post about it." [continues 2383 words]
A Year After Congress Decided to End the War on Medical Pot, Federal Raids Continue in California. WASHINGTON - When Congress in effect lifted the federal ban on medical marijuana just over a year ago, Californians drove the landmark change, which was tucked into a sprawling spending package by a liberal lawmaker from the Monterey Peninsula and his conservative colleague from Orange County. A year later, marijuana legalization advocates are conflicted over how big a victory the congressional vote, which was repeated last month, has turned out to be. [continues 1017 words]
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. - Ryan never imagined he would one day be a snitch. The soft-spoken University of Alabama student was watching a movie with a couple of friends at his off-campus house in Tuscaloosa one evening in late 2012 when a team of plainclothes West Alabama Narcotics Task Force officers knocked on his door. They were there to serve a warrant to search his home, as he had been outed as a drug dealer by a friend and fellow UA student the task force had "turned" and used as a confidential informant. Little did Ryan know, he would soon be turning on his own friends at the university. [continues 1517 words]
Blowing smoke Professor Herb Hill is designing a marijuana breath test to help police detect stoned drivers. Hill, who teaches chemistry at Washington State University, found out how tricky it can be to identify stoned drivers from a colleague in political science. "I said, 'Why don't we have a Breathalyzer for that?' He said none exists," Hill told NPR. "I said, 'We can probably make one.'" NPR reports preliminary testing has proven the basic concept: Hill's prototype can detect THC. But it's far from mass implementation. The device needs to be calibrated against blood tests to figure what it will read when a driver is legally intoxicated. Further adjustments will account for "gender, race, body types and level of use," according to the report. [continues 318 words]
The Novelty and Stigma of Marijuana Continue to Erode After Legalization Like countless commuters in Denver's urban core, Marty Otanez can't help but smell the pot smoke as he rides to work along the Cherry Creek bike path downtown. "A couple years ago it was only under the bridge at Colfax and Speer," Otanez said of the clouds emanating from public tokers. "Now it's pretty much every 100 meters." Increased pot smoke swirling around city streets and parks is one of the most recognizable effects of Amendment 64 - which legalized the recreational use and sale of marijuana in Colorado - particularly since public consumption remains illegal. [continues 930 words]
Two years after recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado, school officials still don't know if more kids are using or bringing the drug to schools. Educators say not much has changed since legalization, and the data tracking drug use, when available, are unlikely to have a big impact. But schools are encouraged by grants - funded by a portion of the state's marijuana tax revenue - that provide more health professionals in schools to support drug education and prevention programs. "Marijuana use has been a big issue for a long time. It's nothing new. Students have been able to find a variety of substances that aren't legal for them for some time now," said John Simmons, executive director of student services for Denver Public Schools. "But we have more in our bag of tricks now." [continues 862 words]
Small Town Will Share in Pot Company's Profits At least two Maryland state universities are jumping at the chance to work with marijuana growers to research the medicinal application and cultivation of cannabis. A tiny Western Maryland town says it would happily accept a 5 percent share of profits from a company that hopes to operate there. As competition to join Maryland's burgeoning medical marijuana industry intensifies, some out-of-state entrepreneurs are forging partnerships with local institutions even before securing a license to operate. [continues 876 words]
The classic 1936 anti-marijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness revolved around very melodramatic events where high school students, lured by pushers to try marijuana, descended into a sensational multitude of drug-induced depravities. In decades hence, this cautionary tale of a drug menace gone mad has been rightfully seen as an extremely exaggerated take on the use of marijuana. Today the pendulum has swung to quite another extreme. Recently a Gas & Grass (combination gas station and marijuana dispensary) has opened in Colorado Springs so customers can get a variety of errands done in the same place for their unprecedented convenience - including the purchase of lottery tickets, beverages and cigarettes. The March 2014 issue of Psychology Today published an article titled, "It's Time to Address the Marijuana Issue: To put it simply, What are we thinking?" In it, the author, Dr. Robert Berezin, writes that "the substance abuse epidemic is so incredibly destructive to the well-being of our society ... it's problematic enough to deal with the hard drugs and prescription pharmaceuticals." He furthers that marijuana is a psychoactive drug, and while not physically addictive, it is powerfully habituating. Dr. Berezin says that he has treated all the addictions and that marijuana usage has gotten a "pass" - a substance whose habitual use negatively affects the brain and can be distorting and destructive to the personality and optimum functioning in life. [continues 429 words]
Experts Want More Data on Effects of Medical Marijuana Even though Maryland is following the lead of 23 other states in setting up a medical marijuana industry, the collective experience of those states has translated to relatively little understanding of how the dozens of active substances within the plant affect health. As a result, Maryland will launch what likely will become a multimillion-dollar industry to make a psychoactive drug more available statewide without the benefit of proven information about the health implications. [continues 1288 words]
A Nonprofit Group Has Ranked Hawaii No. 6 for the State's Rate of Fatal Substance Use We don't have nearly the extreme kind of heroin epidemic that you see on the mainland. ... What we most commonly see kids overdose with in Hawaii is still alcohol poisoning." Colleen Fox Director of adolescent programs, Hina Mauka Hawaii has the sixth-lowest rate among the states of youth dying from drug overdoses, but the figure is trending upward across the country, according to a new report from the Trust for America's Health. [continues 722 words]
President Barack Obama's National Drug Control Strategy in 2010 first proclaimed the major policy goals of the administration's approach to the drug problem and the goals were to be met by 2015. Not only have they not been met, in critical instances, the policies have been going in the wrong direction, rapidly. We learned last week that, in the midst of the opiate overdose crisis, heroin overdose deaths rose an additional 28 percent between 2013 and 2014. That's on top of the 340 percent rise in heroin deaths since 2007, such that beyond the 8,217 deaths of 2013, we now have another 10,574. That is, we now see a 440 percent increase from the Bush years. [continues 948 words]
Third Time This Year Obama Has Commuted Terms Under Initiative President Obama commuted the sentences of 95 drug offenders Friday, more than double the number he granted this summer, in an effort to give relief to drug offenders who were harshly sentenced in the nation's war on drugs. It is the third time this year that Obama has used his unique clemency power to release federal drug offenders, whose harsh sentences have contributed to the phenomenon of mass incarceration. The commutations are a centerpiece of the president's effort to make the most significant changes in the nation's criminal justice system in decades. He and former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. have spoken passionately about the need to fix what they say is a broken system - one they argue has subjected too many nonviolent inmates to decades behind bars, disproportionately hurting minority communities. [continues 1185 words]
BURLINGTON (AP) - As more states allow for the use of medical marijuana, the University of Vermont is offering a course in the science of the drug - and the professors say they are challenged by a lack of research on what has long been a taboo topic. Other institutions have offered classes in marijuana law and policy, but the university's medical school is likely the country's first to offer a full course on medical cannabis, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Other medical schools have touched on the topic. [continues 519 words]
An Arizona State University student is asking an appeals court to overturn the law that makes it illegal for him to have physician-recommended medical marijuana in his dorm room. Andre Maestas, 20, an ASU junior and medical-marijuana cardholder, was arrested in 2014 and charged with a felony for having 0.6 grams of weed in his room on campus, roughly the equivalent of one joint. He is the first to challenge a 2012 statute banning medical marijuana on state university campuses, which the Legislature passed two years after Arizona voters approved a ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana. [continues 1363 words]
The "Just Say No" campaign kept me off drugs. NOT! Still, I appreciate Nancy Reagan for using ignorant scare tactics to at least try to keep kids like me away from the Devil's Lettuce. Drugs are for adults, and having a dialogue about that notion is important. The conversation does not, however, require a sizzling egg to represent your brain on drugs. Drug Abuse Resistance Education campaigns, aka DARE, were all the rage in the 1980s and '90s, sucking up hundreds of millions of tax dollars on TV spots, branded backpacks, stickers, and even cartoons featuring Daren the Lion. At its peak, the program was deployed in 75 percent of American schools, with police officers leading classroom discussions and assemblies that students absolutely loved-not because of the content, but because it got us out of math class. [continues 751 words]
Governor Baker's plan to increase opioid education, which he announced on Nov. 9 with the deans of the state's four medical schools, gets it only half right. It's wonderful to teach future doctors how to prescribe opioids safely to reduce abuse and addiction. But the United States is actually caught in the middle of two colliding epidemics, not just one: the well-publicized problem of opioid abuse, and the under-publicized epidemic of chronic pain, which affects 100 million American adults, according to the Institute of Medicine. [continues 531 words]
Florida State University defensive back Greg Reid was supposed to be a first-round NFL draft pick. University of Florida defensive back J.C. Jackson was supposed to be an elite playmaker in the Southeastern Conference. University of Central Florida running back Will Stanback was supposed to help carry the Knights' offense during what has turned out to be a dismal season. Instead, their links to marijuana altered the trajectory of their promising careers. At least 12 UF players have been linked to marijuana use by law enforcement since the start of former coach Will Muschamp's tenure in 2011, and the number is not considered exceptionally high for major college-football programs. Arrest figures were much higher during former Gators coach Urban Meyer's tenure. When schools announce that football players have been suspended for undisclosed rule violations, many immediately suspect marijuana was involved. [continues 2402 words]
We can't solve a problem without knowing its origin. To solve America's drug problem, we have to know the history of the drug war. The drug war did not start with Richard Nixon. It wasn't a Republican idea, or a traditional idea. The drug war was launched before the First World War by utopian Progressive Democrats. Woodrow Wilson signed the first federal drug law in 1914, the Harrison Act. It was intended as a weapon against opiate-using "Orientals." Some doctors supported it because it granted them a prescription monopoly. At first, the Harrison Act only increased the cost of opiates to users. But soon the doctors fell victim as well, as the Harrison Act was used to imprison pain doctors and even those who ran opiate-addiction treatment clinics. [continues 616 words]
Stricter guidelines for prescribing and dispensing powerful pain medications are needed to curb the nation's deadly opioid epidemic, according to a report released last week from public-health leaders at Johns Hopkins University. The analysis offers broad recommendations for addressing opioid abuse but focuses on the supply chain, including physicians and pharmacists. The report calls for greater monitoring, training and rule-making to prevent misuse of opioids, addiction and overdoses, and said doctors often prescribe pain medications "in quantities and for conditions that are excessive, and in many cases, beyond the evidence base." [continues 349 words]
