50 Parents, Including Five Canadian Mothers, To Address Session On Global Problem Donna May's daughter had been in a downward spiral for months. Once a happy young woman, with dimples and a quick sense of humour, Jac had become addicted to opioids. She first took OxyContin to cope with the pain from a fall down the stairs in her home in Sault Ste. Marie. When the prescription ran out, she turned to fentanyl patches - a highly addictive opioid 20 times stronger than heroin, and readily available on the street. [continues 695 words]
Former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour is among a host of international jurists, politicians, celebrities and sports stars to sign a letter that denounces the "disastrous" war on drugs and urges the United Nations to lead the world toward a more enlightened drug policy. "Humankind cannot afford a 21st century drug policy as ineffective and counter-productive as the last century's," reads the letter, delivered to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in advance of next week's UN special session on drugs. [continues 347 words]
One of the last singles by the late Merle Haggard was a fun little tune he sang with his old crony, Willie Nelson, and younger country star, Jamey Johnson, called "It's All Going to Pot." With obvious glee radiating from their weathered voices, Hag and his pals sang, "It's all going to pot / Whether we like it or not. ..." Yep, it looks like they do smoke marijuana in Muskogee after all. Willie's been a leading advocate for marijuana legalization for decades now, but some who heard that song (released on April 20, 2015 . 4-20, get it, get it?) were surprised to hear Merle singing it. After all, he first rose to national fame in the late '60s when "Okie from Muskogee" captured the hearts of President Richard Nixon's Silent Majority and was hailed as a troubadour of the right. Those who have actually followed his career realize that Haggard's stance on drugs softened not long after that hit and that his politics were all over the place (one of several reasons I loved him so much). [continues 488 words]
"Whiter than a Wonder Bread-and-mayonnaise-sandwich served with a side of whole milk." How white is the green rush? Extremely white. Ridiculously white. Whiter than a Wonder Bread-and-mayonnaise sandwich served with a side of whole milk. Whiter than new teeth. Whiter than the Gods of Egypt movie. Hella white. And I'm not alone in thinking this. Consider Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: "Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big-big money, big businesses selling weed-after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?" Exactly. [continues 538 words]
"Nixon's Drug War Was (and Still is) a Racist Tool to Disrupt and Neutralize Black Communities" was the headline of an article published this week by Melissa Franqui, communications director of the Drug Policy Alliance. She was literally stating a half-truth. Her hook was a comment made in 1994 by John Ehrlichman, a top Nixon aide who had done time for his role in the Watergate cover-up, to a very good journalist named Dan Baum. Baum had used the quote at the time, Dr. Sunil Aggarwal cited it in a scholarly article in 2012 (and I cited it, too), but Ehrlichman's blunt confession remained below the radar until Baum recounted it in the new issue of Harpers: [continues 454 words]
It's time for Colorado to have a frank discussion about marijuana potency. In recent years, Colorado's marijuana has become a fundamentally different and harder drug, with unprecedented levels of THC, marijuana's psychoactive ingredient. Nationally, the potency of marijuana has more than tripled since the mid-1990s, with the average at 12.6 percent THC in 2013, according to the National Drug Control Strategy. But Colorado's post-legalization pot has reached even higher levels. Here, the average potency of marijuana flowers/buds is 17.1 percent THC and the average potency of concentrates is 62.1 percent THC, according to the Marijuana Equivalency in Portion and Dosage report, prepared for the Colorado Department of Revenue. [continues 510 words]
A lawmaker from Stockton wants California to take a radical approach to prevent overdose deaths: Give users a clean place and medical supervision to shoot up. Democratic Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman has introduced a bill that would allow local health departments such as the OC Health Care Agency to set up "supervised consumption services" in their communities, typically places where people bring in drugs they bought on the streets and safely ride out their high while monitored by nurses. "I know when you first hear about it, it's like, 'What? You're condoning drug use.' No, we're acknowledging people are dying on the streets," Eggman said Tuesday at the Assembly's public safety committee hearing in Sacramento. "In the U.S., we have chosen to treat addiction from a criminal perspective. It's high time we start treating it like a public health issue." [continues 533 words]
A divided D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to ban marijuana clubs, where residents and visitors to the nation's capital might have smoked pot without fear of being arrested. The 7-to-6 vote marked council members' second about-face on the issue in four months and hinted at their unsure footing as they navigate fast-shifting public sentiment about marijuana use. The issue has become the next marijuana-policy frontier in the District and other places where voters have already legalized possession. [continues 698 words]
President Obama's recent speech on the opioid overdose epidemic offers a ray of hope that the country's approach to drugs might one day adopt what has been called the first rule of American business: When all else fails, try doing it right. Noting with considerable understatement that "treatment is underfunded," the president proposed $ 1.1 billion for expanded opioid- addiction treatment. This is a good step in the right direction. But it is still $ 50 billion less than the U. S. will spend this year alone on its current, fatally flawed policy of the war on drugs, and only onethird of what the federal government allocates to lock up drug criminals - whose incarceration accounts for half of the entire Bureau of Prisons budget. [continues 939 words]
Supporters of Legalization Risk Arrest for Lighting Up Outside the White House Attention senior class-trip chaperones, cherry blossom lovers, and anyone else who may wander by the White House on Saturday: Brace yourself for a cloud of marijuana smoke - and, possibly, mass arrests. Organizers of the successful ballot measure that legalized pot last year in the District say they have had enough with President Obama's slog toward loosening marijuana laws. To protest, they are planning what they promise will be the first large-scale display of public pot smoking in the nation's capital, with the intention of getting arrested. [continues 933 words]
As two of our forward-thinking state legislators have noted, it's high time we considered legalizing marijuana in Connecticut. State Rep. Roland Lemar and state Rep. Juan Candelaria, both New Haven-based Democrats, are co-sponsoring a bill that would legalize marijuana for recreational use. Although a Quinnipiac University poll last year found that 63 percent of Connecticut voters support legalizing small amounts of marijuana for recreational purposes, the bill's chance of passage is not deemed likely this time around. This is still, after all, the "Land of Steady Habits." [continues 805 words]
In San Francisco, no game of NIMBY bingo is complete without a complaint of "used needles." In Chronicle columns, letters to the editor, and harrowing tales of urban living, evidence of heroin use ends up everywhere: in children's sandboxes, at Muni stops, and anywhere else people walk. For once, this problem could possibly be understated. As this column has pointed out before, it's a small wonder we aren't all swimming in discarded syringes: San Francisco is experiencing a needle boom. [continues 927 words]
Advocates are happy it was named, but not about the delay in naming it or the people on it. New Jersey's health commissioner recently appointed a panel that will decide whether chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other conditions should be added to the list of a dozen ailments that qualify a patient to buy medical marijuana in the state. Patient advocates have been pressing for nearly four years to have the list expanded, saying it is too restrictive and prevents many severely ill patients from obtaining cannabis. [continues 825 words]
Legalizing Recreational Use of Marijuana Is Likely to Be on November's Ballot Californians Will Have a Lot to Think About As They Sort Through Issues Think of California as a cannabis jungle. A year ago, 20 cannabis-related initiatives were proposed for the November 2016 ballot. Slowly but surely, they've died or been abandoned. Now only four appear to be collecting signatures in time for the Nov. 8 election. But California isn't alone. Voters in 20 states are considering some form of legalization through 66 proposals more than three per state. As expected, California has the most. There's even a possibility that more than one could pass. [continues 786 words]
Thousands of Studies Have Proven That Marijuana Should Remain a Narcotic California Medical Association Is Dead Wrong in Giving Its Blessing to Weed Legalization Be Prepared for More Psychosis, Depression, Violence and Suicides There is money in drugs; the cartels proved that. But drug dealers aren't encumbered with the societal costs, which are nine to 10 times greater than any public revenues they generate. That's been our experience with alcohol and tobacco, and that doesn't count human misery. [continues 630 words]
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - Sure, let's just hoist the white flag of surrender in the war against heroin addiction. That's what Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal (D-Manhattan) would effectively do with her bill to legalize "supervised injection facilities" for people to self-administer illegal narcotics under the supervision of medical staff. If it's not the dumbest proposal we've heard to battle drug addiction, it has to rank pretty close to the top of the list. And yet we keep hearing it. [continues 505 words]
State Says Prices Are 37% Higher Than Selected Other States. As Pennsylvania moves closer to adopting a medical marijuana program, New Jersey has released a report on its six-year-old program that says its dispensaries charge the highest price for an ounce of marijuana on average, compared with other states with similar programs. The Department of Health report said the five dispensaries operating statewide charge an average of $489 per ounce, about 37 percent more than the average price in Arizona, New Mexico, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island. Most of these states have a cost-of-living index of 10 percent or less than New Jersey, said the report, released this month. [continues 530 words]
As Pennsylvania moves closer to adopting a medical marijuana program, New Jersey has released a report on its six-year-old program that says its dispensaries charge the highest price for an ounce of marijuana on average, compared with other states with similar programs. The Department of Health report said the five dispensaries operating statewide charge an average of $489 per ounce, about 37 percent more than the average price in Arizona, New Mexico, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island. Most of these states have a cost-of-living index of 10 percent or less than New Jersey, said the report, released this month. [continues 533 words]
Gonzo Nieto and the Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy Aim to Change Global Drug Policy "I experienced my own death," said Gonzo Nieto. It was the summer before he was leaving for university. Taking his parents car and picking up a few friends, they went to the local head shop and bought a bong, a torch flame lighter and a bag of Salvia. Salvia Divinorum, is a plant that when smoked leaves a person in a haze of hallucinations. It's often the choice for people experimenting because until recently, it was been legal to buy from head shops. [continues 857 words]
