Research shows making marijuana more available would lead to more use, and that would cost us dearly

As a board-certified addictionist, I must respond with concern to Rep. Bill McCamley's op-ed piece, "Legalizing pot sales makes economic sense."

McCamley asserts that "prohibition increases use." Not only did Prohibition decrease consumption of alcohol - a decrease that was sustained well after Prohibition was repealed - but it also significantly decreased deaths from cirrhosis of the liver and deaths due to alcohol-related accidents and violence.

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Law Officials to Talk at White House Gathering

SANTA FE - Law enforcement officials here will have the opportunity to teach agencies from around the country about a new program combating opiate use at a White House conference next week.

Mayor Javier Gonzales, District Attorney Angela "Spence" Pacheco and state director of the Drug Policy Alliance Emily Kaltenbach will travel with other local officials to Washington, D.C. on Tuesday to talk about a program that keeps low-grade drug offenders out of the court system.

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State's Experiment Brought Increased Crime, Car Wrecks and Homelessness

I'd like the opportunity to reply to and rebut Rep. Bill McCamley's proposition to legalize marijuana here in New Mexico.

The lessons learned from legalizing alcohol should be a stellar role model as to why this is a bad idea.

During Prohibition, the relationship between organized crime and politicians helped to transition bribes - that were/are illegal - to political contributions that were perfectly legal. We all know how special interests and dollars spent to line their pockets is working out for the politicians today.

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Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham and two other members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee want to know more about why federal narcotics agents seized $16,000 from a 22-year-old African-American man in April when the Amtrak train he was taking to Los Angeles stopped in Albuquerque.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents made the seizure after they had talked to Joseph Rivers about where he was going. He was not charged with a crime, but the money was seized because agents said they believed, based on their conversation with Rivers, that it was somehow linked to narcotics trafficking.

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"Why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth."

- - Will Rogers

It's time to regulate and tax the consumption of marijuana like alcohol. Why? The reasons are compelling, conclusive, and plentiful.

The most obvious? Prohibition increases use. When the United States banned alcohol in 1919 consumption initially went down. However, by the time it was repealed in 1932 more people were drinking more alcohol (a 30-40 percent increase) than they did before prohibition was passed. The same thing is happening with marijuana; as more states tax and regulate, teen use is decreasing at a significant level.

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Colorado Is Making Hundreds of Millions Taxing Pot. N.M. Could, Too

=93Why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth.=94 =AD Will Rogers

It's time to regulate and tax the consumption of marijuana like alcohol. Why? The reasons are compelling, conclusive and plentiful.

The most obvious? Prohibition increases use. When the United States banned alcohol in 1919 consumption initially went down. However, by the time it was repealed in 1932 more people were drinking more alcohol - a 30-40 percent increase - - than they did before prohibition was passed.

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The unveiling of Rio Rancho school district's proposed random drug-testing policy for its eighth-through 12th-grade athletes was met with no opposition and supported by three board members.

Bruce Carver, the district's athletic director, presented the draft policy to the board Monday night for its first reading, which gives board members a chance to ask questions and propose changes. The policy must go through a second reading before the board can take an official vote.

Board president Don Schlichte and members Ramon Montano and Martha Janssen, however, said they were in favor of the policy. Catherine Cullen was absent and Ryan Parra did not express an opinion.

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Banking, Federal Taxation Issues Restrict Marijuana Enterprises From Usual Business Practices

This is a marijuana update.

Legal marijuana sales continue to draw national attention. BloombergBusiness recently estimated that the industry's revenues are nearly $3 billion annually - almost all in cash.

The industry has attracted financing from investment funds. Willie Nelson and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson have entered businesses to support funding and legalization. The New Yorker magazine recently featured the first Marijuana Investors Summit held in Denver and more than 800 people attended the affair to learn about financing marijuana. The underlying theme of the conference, as reported by The New Yorker, was that federal legalization will occur at some time in the future and all those marijuana businesses, retail or medical, will become takeover targets for national companies.

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With marijuana still illegal under federal statutes, a business based on reefer can't take usual deductions

Oliver Wendall Holmes said "taxes are the price we pay for civilization." No one likes paying taxes, but Americans actually do agree that taxes are necessary and we have a wonderful system of government that allows us to choose those who represent us in our social compact of how to spend tax dollars.

All we want is for the tax system to be fair. The problem is there are several notions of what a fair system would look like. As Russell Long, one of the last senators to actually understand the tax system, once said, "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree."

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Regarding Gina Tron's March 8 column from The Washington Post ("Employers don't need to test for pot," Commentary), drug tests are essentially lifestyle tests designed to penalize marijuana consumers. Workplace drug tests may compel marijuana smokers to switch to more dangerous prescription narcotics to avoid testing positive. This is one of the reasons the American Academy of Pediatrics opposes student drug testing.

Marijuana's organic metabolites are fat-soluble and can linger for days. More dangerous synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and prescription narcotics are water-soluble and exit the body quickly. If you think drug users don't know this, think again. Anyone capable of running an Internet search can find out how to thwart a drug test.

The most commonly abused drug and the one most closely associated with violent behavior is alcohol. Legal alcohol kills more people each year than all illegal drugs combined.

Robert Sharpe, MPA Common Sense for Drug Policy Washington, D.C.

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HERE WE GO again. It seems as if every town, large and small, is either enlarging its detention center or building a new one. This will cost lots and lots of money.

For many years, we built prisons at a frantic pace as they make more money. Now the Department of Corrections tells us they are going to focus more on education inside the prisons.

Most people don't know that it costs $30,000 or more to keep one person in prison for a year in New Mexico. I believe the last figure says it costs about $7,000 to educate a child. This seems to show we would really lock more people up than to educate them.

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Search and Seizure Laws Are for U.S. Citizens, Not International Travelers

SANTA FE (AP) - New Mexico's highest court ruled Thursday that the state's protections against search and seizure do not apply at international border checkpoints.

The five-member panel made the distinction in overturning a previous ruling made by an appeals court in a 2012 drug smuggling case. In the opinion, Justice Edward L. Chavez wrote that the state law does not mean greater protections against searches at an international border checkpoint.

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Neighbors Worried About Security

A proposed medical marijuana greenhouse is causing some worry among residents of the Loma Parda subdivision near Mountainair and Abo.

Property owners in the subdivision were notified about the plans by the operator, Trevor Reed.

"He offered to meet with (the neighbors) and was very forthcoming with information," Loma Parda Subdivision resident Susan Oviatt said.

Oviatt was at the Torrance County Commission on May 13 to express her concerns with the proposed operation.

"We have no moral issues with growing a controlled substance, but we are concerned that the development seems to be proceeding as if no neighbors exist and the local zoning rules are not important.

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Thanks to a contract with a Florida-based software company, New Mexico's medical marijuana retailers will be able to scan a photo-ID smartcard from each of the state's 14,000 or so authorized pot patients and see how much state-sanctioned weed they have purchased, and from whom. Patrick Vo, co-CEO of BioTrackTHC, says his firm's work "is going to be a huge protection to the dispensary to make sure they don't unintentionally break regs by over-dispensing to a patient."

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City-County Panel to Discuss Plan Tuesday

ROSWELL (AP) - A proposal to turn a former dairy processing plant near Roswell into a place to grow plants, specifically marijuana, isn't getting high praise from local officials.

A joint city-county commission will meet Tuesday to consider Pecos Valley Pharmaceuticals' request to rezone the facility as a pharmaceutical manufacturing site. The Roswell-Chaves County Extraterritorial Zoning Commission oversees territory within two miles of Roswell's city limits.

Officials have received verbal objections, as well as one in writing, according to a Chaves County Planning and Zoning Department report. Terry Johnson, who runs a septic system company with his family in Roswell, voiced his opposition in a letter. A venture involving marijuana would have "negative economic, social and moral impacts on our community," Johnson said.

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Maybe he should have taken traveler's checks. But it's too late for that now. All the money - $16,000 in cash - that Joseph Rivers said he had saved and relatives had given him to launch his dream in Hollywood is gone, seized during his trip out West not by thieves but by Drug Enforcement Administration agents during a stop at the Amtrak train station in Albuquerque.

An incident some might argue is still theft, just with the government's blessing.

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'Seed-To-Sale' Idea Tracks Plants' Lives

New Mexico has awarded a contract to a Florida-based software company to develop a medical marijuana "seedto-sale" inventory system designed to track each plant through the production cycle and cut the likelihood of fraudulent sales, a company official said.

The system also calls for medical marijuana patients to receive a photo-ID smartcard that contains an integrated circuit, said Patrick Vo, co-CEO of BioTrackTHC, the firm awarded the contract.

Swiping the card also will verify the card's authenticity and show the retailer how much marijuana the patient has purchased that month, even if the patient has visited several retailers, he said. New Mexico has about 14,100 patients licensed to buy medical cannabis.

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Right after last November's general election, in this very column, I made the contention that marijuana was more popular than either gubernatorial candidate - Republican Gov. Susana Martinez and Democrat Gary King - at least in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

I made that claim based on the number of votes that (nonbinding) marijuana-decriminalization initiatives received in Santa Fe and Bernalillo counties. In both counties, the pro-marijuana position got more votes than either of the candidates.

But Martinez and King shouldn't feel bad. As The Washington Post's Wonkblog pointed out last month, recent polls in large swing states show that marijuana is more popular among voters than any of the 2016 candidates for president.

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When Gov. Susana Martinez signed into law an amendment to the state Forfeiture Act that would prohibit the seizure of property unless the owner is convicted of a crime, the dual intent seemed clear: Protect innocent property owners and remove financial incentives for law enforcement.

Not so fast, says the city of Albuquerque, which has a civil forfeiture program that it wants to continue filling up city coffers unabated. Since 2010 the city has collected more than $8.3 million. The city plans to continue seizing civil assets under a city nuisance and abatement ordinance even after the state law takes effect in July. Other New Mexico cities and counties have a similar law in place.

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NM Is No. 2 in the U.S. for Overdoses From Heroin, Opioids

At the age of 53, barely literate and morbidly obese, Crystal Staggs hardly cut the figure of a drug dealer as she drove her white 13-year-old BMW around Albuquerque.

But in June 2012, Staggs, who has a host of medical problems, was cashing in on her access to prescription Oxycodone, selling 245 of the 30-milligram pills for $4,000 to a man she had recently met through a friend.

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