Early-Intervention Campaign From FCB, Ogilvy Kicks Off On Super Bowl WASHINGTON The White House's latest anti-drug media effort, which launches during the Super Bowl this Sunday, links drug use with drinking in TV ads for the first time in the campaign's five-year history, sources said. The new work, from New York shops Foote Cone & Belding and Ogilvy & Mather, also promotes the concept of "early intervention" - another first. That marks a shift in focus from the campaign's usual prevention-based messages. Early intervention is a drug-treatment strategy favored by drug czar John Walters. [continues 877 words]
The Old Failures of New and Improved Anti-Drug Education I'm at the February 2001 Teens at the Table conference, a feel-good event sponsored by a coalition of Los Angeles youth organizations and high schools. It's designed to boost self-esteem and teach teenagers how to make smart decisions. In one of the sessions, a group of students is about to learn how easy it is to stay off drugs. It doesn't require anything as lame as red ribbons or "Just Say No" chants. It just takes knowing what constitutes a healthy decision -- one that is all your own -- coupled with a little real-life practice. [continues 4101 words]
Terence Hallinan has lost his bid for re-election to Kamala Harris, who says she will maintain his approach to law enforcement while running a more efficient district attorney's office. Hallinan's humane charging policies have had direct, beneficial impacts on the lives of countless thousands of citizens. Here's one small example, hardly ever publicized... "Welfare fraud" is a crime that usually involves poor people failing to notify the Dept. of Human Services that they got a low-level jobs (so their checks don't get cut off and maybe they'll have enough to buy their kid a bike...) In such cases, Hallinan allowed people to avoid prosecution by making restitution to the state. Which meant they could hold onto their jobs and their public housing. To his critics, such cases represented "failure to prosecute" and the stats were used against him in the media. But in the real world, many of those failures to prosecute translated into lives not ruined, homelessness averted. [continues 1393 words]
Federal, State Pot Laws Need To Jibe Americans wondering if they still live in the land of liberty have only to ponder the reinstatement of a right most probably didn't know was threatened: the right to talk to one's doctor freely and openly, about anything. Even marijuana. Last week, by declining to hear a Bush administration appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that doctors have a constitutional right to advise ill patients about the benefits of marijuana. [continues 380 words]
The entire nation owes radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh a debt of gratitude, because his ordeal has exposed every drug warrior in America as a rank hypocrite. One thing we don't hear from American politicians very often is silence. By refusing to criticize Rush Limbaugh, every drug warrior has just been exposed as a shameless, despicable hypocrite. And that's good news, because the next time they do speak up, there'll be no reason for anyone to listen. The revelation that Limbaugh had become addicted to painkillers - drugs he is accused of procuring illegally from his housekeeper - has caused a media sensation ever since the megastar's shocking, on-air confession on Oct. 10. [continues 362 words]
Why Hasn't President George Bush Uttered A Word Criticizing Limbaugh's Law-Breaking? The entire nation owes radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh a debt of gratitude, because his ordeal has exposed every drug warrior in America as a rank hypocrite. One thing we don't hear from American politicians very often is silencer. By refusing to criticize Rush Limbaugh, every drug warrior has just been exposed as a shameless, despicable hypocrite. And that's good news, because the next time they do speak up, there'll be no reason for anyone to listen. [continues 382 words]
Why Does The Bush Administration Seem So Intent On Denying Medical Marijuana To Adults In Extreme Discomfort? THE WHITE HOUSE Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) -- whose anti-pot road show blew through Boston last week -- wants you to believe that everything about marijuana is bad, bad, bad. That the plant's promising medicinal benefits are simply a "Trojan-horse issue," perpetrated by drug-reform advocates who are taking advantage of sick and dying people to advance a decriminalization agenda. [continues 1534 words]
In a silent rebuke to the Bush administration, the US Supreme Court Tuesday refused to hear the federal government's appeal of a lower court decision blocking the feds from punishing doctors who recommend marijuana to their patients. While drug reform and patient advocates hailed the decision as a victory, the ruling does not make medical marijuana legal, nor does it prevent the federal government from continuing its policy of raids and arrests of medical marijuana providers. It does, however, block the Justice Department from threatening to suspend the prescription privileges of doctors who recommend medical marijuana. In so doing, it removes one tactic from the Justice Department's arsenal of techniques to harass the medical marijuana movement. [continues 755 words]
The War On Drugs Destroys Lives But Does Nothing To Mitigate The Abuse Of Drugs In This Country OUR OBSESSION WITH drugs and our national failure to distinguish among them - equating the effects of pot, for instance, with those of heroin - have corrupted our criminal-justice system. Consider the following: as of 2000, United States prisons held 458,131 people incarcerated for drug offenses alone. That's 100,000 more inmates than the 356,626 people incarcerated throughout the European Union for all offenses combined. [continues 813 words]
I was the person that asked Howard Dean at his Madison rally if he could justify jailing patients who use marijuana for medical purposes. I was not a heckler, as your story characterized me. What I actually said was "Multiple sclerosis patients in England will have prescription marijuana (in the form of a sublingual spray) this year that MS patients here would be arrested for having." When Mr. Dean responded that his position on this issue "is a little complicated" I added "my wife died in June after battling multiple sclerosis for 32 years and marijuana was of great help to her." It was then that he decided to talk about medical marijuana for a couple of minutes. [continues 251 words]
Administrative Law Judge Jonathan Lew has rejected a motion to dismiss the state Medical Board's case against Tod Mikuriya. The Berkeley psychiatrist, who has approved cannabis use by some 7,500 patients in recent years, will have to defend his handling of 17 cases at a hearing that's scheduled to start Sept. 3 in Oakland. According to Mikuriya, all the patients involved have benefited from cannabis use, and none have reported adverse effects. In case you've just joined us, the Medical Board of California is the state agency that issues licenses to physicians -and can revoke or suspend them. Mikuriya, who will turn 70 next month, not only approves cannabis use by patients, he has devoted his whole career to studying its applications. In 1995-96 he was medical advisor to the organizers of the Prop 215 campaign. When it passed into law and Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey warned California doctors not to recommend marijuana, he specifically ridiculed Mikuriya's claims as to its versatility and usefulness in a wide range of conditions. [continues 1102 words]
The war on terror may be too new to declare victory or defeat. But this nation has been fighting a war on drugs for more than a quarter-century, ever since New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller mandated harsh drug sentencing in 1973--and it may be time to announce that this is one war we've lost. More than a million people are serving time in our prisons and jails for nonviolent offenses, most drug-related, at a cost to the public of some $9.4 billion a year. Many billions more are spent by the states and the federal government on drug interdiction, drug-law enforcement and drug prosecutions. Harsh laws that require lengthy minimum sentences for the possession of even small amounts of drugs have created a boom in the incarceration of women, tearing mothers away from their children. Much of the country's costly foreign-policy commitments--especially in Latin America and the Caribbean--are determined by drug-war priorities. And yet drug use has actually soared, with twice as many teenagers reporting illegal drug use in 2000 as in 1992. [continues 3122 words]
The Bush administration has asked the Supreme Court to overturn a US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that bars the federal government from taking prescription licenses from doctors who recommend marijuana to patients for medical reasons. After the passage of California's medical marijuana initiative in 1996, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (the drug czar, then Gen. Barry McCaffrey) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) moved to strip licenses to write prescriptions for drugs from physicians who recommended that their patients use marijuana for medical purposes. [continues 773 words]
Democrats Also on Attack Against Drug Czar, Drug War in General A series of recent votes on Capitol Hill suggest that the medical marijuana issue is causing fissures in what is becoming an increasingly shaky consensus in support of harsh anti-drug measures in Congress. While none of the votes resulted in victories for drug reformers, they appear to signal a growing acceptance of medical marijuana in Congress and the emergence of a partisan divide on drug policy, at least at the national political level. [continues 1542 words]
"We believe we have turned a corner, particularly with the coca crop, in Colombia." - Paul E. Simons, the U.S. State Department's top counternarcotics official, quoted by the Associated Press June 3, 2003 - see http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v03/n831/a13.html For at least 30 years, the United States has repeatedly turned corners in the drug war. Back in 1973, it was President Richard Nixon who metaphorically strolled down the street of drug policy before veering off at an intersection. "We have turned a corner on drug addiction," said Nixon. [continues 496 words]
WASHINGTON -- If kids watch them often enough, ads warning about the dangers of smoking pot or taking Ecstacy can persuade them to stay away from drugs, according to a study released by an advocacy group Thursday. A survey of teens conducted for the Partnership for a Drug Free America found kids who see or hear anti-drug ads at least once a day are less likely to do drugs than youngsters who don't see or hear ads frequently. Teens who got a daily dose of the anti-drug message were nearly 40 percent less likely to try methamphetamine and about 30 percent less likely to use Ecstacy, the study found. When asked about marijuana, kids who said they saw the ads regularly were nearly 15 percent less likely to smoke pot. [continues 298 words]
WHEN DR. ANDREA Barthwell of the White House drug czar's office addressed the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco last month, she threw out an intriguing statistic: 16 million Americans use illegal drugs, 6 million of them need treatment. There are more than 291 million people in this country. The numbers, which come from a national survey, made me wonder whether the drug war is worth the cost. There's the dollar cost, and then there's the social cost of placing 16 million Americans outside the law. [continues 528 words]
The level of alcohol and drug dependency in this country is at crisis levels. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, of the 27 million Americans who now are abusing illegal drugs or alcohol regularly, 16 million need treatment, but only 3 million get it. The future looks equally bleak if we do not take action: Nearly one-fourth of eighth-graders say they have been drunk; and in addition to their alcohol use, 10.8 percent of youth aged 12-17 used illegal drugs last year. [continues 577 words]
Three physicians and about a dozen cannabis-using patients attended the May 8 meeting of the state Medical Board's Enforcement Committee to decry investigations of doctors who have made a subspeciality of monitoring cannabis use. The Board's chief Investigator, David Thornton, sought to reassure the Committee (and the concerned citizens) that his agents were not out to persecute doctors who approve marijuana use. Thronton described one "egregious example" of a physician whose "medical office contained a computer, a printer and a cash register. [continues 2629 words]
Perhaps one has to give some die-hard prohibitionists points for brazenness and for honesty of a sort. Last Thursday, a subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee specifically authorized the "drug czar" to use taxpayer money in political campaigns - as long as it is "to oppose an attempt to legalize the use" of any currently illegal drug. Previously, the "drug czar," formally the head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, was legally barred from using the money appropriated for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign for "partisan political purposes." [continues 357 words]
