Galas often feature inspiring testimonials from beneficiaries right before guests are asked to open their checkbooks. When a fund-raiser benefits a drug rehabilitation program, dinner sometimes resembles an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Speakers at Caron Treatment Centers' annual gala Wednesday introduced themselves thus: "Hi, I'm so-and-so, and I'm an alcoholic." Cue crowd: "Hi, so-and-so."

The gala at Cipriani 42nd Street raised funds for scholarships to Caron with a special focus on supporting musicians with addiction.

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Pot Arrests Are Highly Expensive for the Taxpayer, Associated Racial Disparities Are Ghastly, and Just to Ice the Cake, Most of These Arrests Are the Result of Illegal Searches

Over the last fifteen years in New York, arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana have exploded.

These arrests are extremely expensive for the taxpayer, the associated racial disparities are ghastly, and just to ice the cake, most of these arrests are the result of illegal searches.

Now, in a rare show of New York bi-partisanship, legislators in Albany are finally seeking to address the issue.

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GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- After decades of new laws to toughen sentencing for criminals, prosecutors have gained greater leverage to extract guilty pleas from defendants and reduce the number of cases that go to trial, often by using the threat of more serious charges with mandatory sentences or other harsher penalties. Some experts say the process has become coercive in many state and federal jurisdictions, forcing defendants to weigh their options based on the relative risks of facing a judge and jury rather than simple matters of guilt or innocence. In effect, prosecutors are giving defendants more reasons to avoid having their day in court.

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On a campus as big as UB, there's bound to be some marijuana use. UB NORML rallies supporters to clear the air on this hazy topic.

Students may not know that sometimes, marijuana is actually being used for medicinal purposes not just recreational. UB NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) is a club here at UB that recognizes the benefits of marijuana and wants to raise awareness about it.

UB NORML is a group of students who support the legalization of marijuana because of the social and economic benefits that it would provide.

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For the time being, New Yorkers can consider last November's defeat of Proposition 19, a California ballot initiative to legalize and regulate the personal use of marijuana, as none of their business. But as this debate spreads outward from California it will, sooner or later, reach New York.

Having started the war on marijuana, the federal government is the enforcer of the status quo - even as opinion polls show the public's desire for change. So, it is up to the states, one-by-one, to replace failed drug war policies with something that makes sense. To see how the future marijuana legalization debate might spread, let's consider the work of professor Everett M. Rogers.

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What is it about Willie Nelson, weed and the law?

It's been a question worth asking since at least 1971, when Mr. Nelson brought together rednecks and hippies at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin with his unique style of country music and his open attitude about marijuana. His eldest daughter, Lana, and his former wife Connie said pot helped tamp down the rage; he had been a mean drunk when alcohol was his drug of choice.

Mr. Nelson, 77, is perhaps America's best-known marijuana smoker. He is co-chairman of the advisory board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, has been a High Times cover boy and famously smoked a joint on the roof of the White House when Jimmy Carter was president. His disciples include the actor Woody Harrelson and the country crooner Ray Price, his former employer -- each known to have enjoyed a puff now and then. He is the inspiration for Toby Keith's hit song "(I'll Never Smoke) Weed With Willie (Again)," which testifies to the quality of Mr. Nelson's stash.

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A hip-hop disc jockey fatally shot on Staten Island early Sunday was out buying marijuana in the moments before he was slain, a law-enforcement official with knowledge of the case said.

That account came from a friend of Corey McGriff who said he had been chatting on a cellphone call with the victim minutes before Mr. McGriff was shot once in the torso a few doors down from Mr. McGriff's home, the official said.

During the conversation, which took place just before 2 a.m., the victim, who was known as DJ Megatron, told his friend he was out trying to buy "weed," the official said.

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To the Editor:

Re "Electric Kool-Aid Marketing Trip" (Op-Ed, March 19):

Michael Walker has written an encomium to Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the "LSD millionaire" who figured out how to manufacture the drug in industrial doses in San Francisco in the mid-1960s.

Without question, Mr. Stanley was a key figure in the Sixties counterculture and played a large role in the music, art and "Summer of Love" ethos associated with LSD. But virtually every obituary of Mr. Stanley has romanticized his legacy. Consider how many bad trips, suicides and ruined lives that legacy was also responsible for.

Cory Franklin

Wilmette, Ill., March 19, 2011

[end]

A New Study Reveals That Since 1996 New York City Has Spent From Half a Billion to Over a Billion Dollars Arresting People for Less Than an Ounce of Marijuana.

In 2010 New York City spent $75 million arresting people for possessing small amounts of marijuana.

Three members of the New York City Council joined advocates and community members on the steps of City Hall today at a press conference organized by the Drug Policy Alliance and the Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform and Alternatives. They announced the release of a new report: "$75 Million A Year - The Cost of New York City's Marijuana Arrests."

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Los Angeles -- NOW that the 1960s are commodified forever as "The Sixties," it is apparently compulsory that their legacy be rendered as purple-hazy hagiography. But that ignores an inconvenient counterintuitive truth: Relatively clear-thinking entrepreneurs created some of the most enduring tropes of the era - not out of whole paisley cloth but from their astute feel for the culture and the marketplace. And no one was better at it than Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

Entrepreneur? Mr. Stanley, who was killed in a car accident last Sunday in Australia at the age of 76, is remembered chiefly as a world-class eccentric - his C.V. lists Air Force electronics specialist and ballet dancer - who after ingesting his first dose of LSD in Berkeley in 1964 taught himself how to make his own. In short order, "Owsley acid" became the gold standard of psychedelics.

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The prescription drug abuse epidemic in New York City is escalating, with the number of prescriptions for oxycodone doubling citywide during the past three years, the city's special narcotics prosecutor testified Tuesday.

In 2010, more than 1 million prescriptions for oxycodone-the generic name for an opiate-based pain reliever commonly prescribed as OxyContin-were filled in the five boroughs, Bridget Brennan, the city's special narcotics prosecutor, told the City Council's Public Safety Committee.

That equates to one prescription for every eight people in New York City, or 13% of the total population.

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A Rutgers student with a history of mental illness and substance abuse is being held on charges he murdered his 22-year-old girlfriend in his parents' home in suburban Cranford.

The last previous murder in the central New Jersey township of approximately 20,000 residents was in January 2006.

[name redacted] was ordered held Monday night on $400,000 bail for allegedly murdering Pamela Schmidt, his girlfriend and a senior at Rutgers University.

[name redacted]'s mother, [name2 redacted], said she called police to their Tudor-style home Sunday at around noon after discovering Ms. Schmidt dead in her son's basement bedroom. Authorities said Ms. Schmidt was apparently beaten to death. Police arrested the son that day.

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Marks Devoted His Life to Change NY's Draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws and Helped Secure Clemency for Prisoners Rotting Away in Prison for Their Roles in Minor Drug Crimes.

There are heroes and then there are heroes.

My good friend Judge Jerry Marks, a former New York Supreme Court Justice, was a hero's hero. On March 9, he died at age 95. Judge Marks had a long and distinguished career as a New York elected official and jurist.

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The Nassau County district attorney says she plans to have scores of drug samples from past felony cases retested, a step that comes days after a judge threw out a driving-while-impaired conviction because of questions surrounding the accuracy of county crime lab.

Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice now is calling for retesting nearly 3,000 felony drug cases between 2008 and 2010 and a technical review of about 1,000 drunk-driving cases handled by the lab since 2006. Last month, Ms. Rice had suggested reviewing 20% of the drunk-driving cases.

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To the Editor:

Improving drug education and monitoring practices for our troops, while critical, is but a first step to prevent the kind of tragedies your article describes.

The Veterans Affairs and Defense Departments must adopt comprehensive overdose prevention policies, including dispensing naloxone - an overdose antidote - directly to service people who are prescribed narcotics and to their families. In this way, we can help save the lives of those who have risked theirs on the battlefield.

Narcotic replacement therapies must also be made available to soldiers and veterans who become dependent on painkillers. Medicines like methadone and buprenorphine are the most effective means of treating opioid dependence, but are underused within the V.A., and outright banned from coverage under military insurance - although they could help thousands of veterans and troops today.

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Authorities arrested 14 alleged gang members who they charged had held their central Harlem community "hostage" by conspiring to turn it into a drug zone using guns, beatings and intimidating fellow members from cooperating with police.

Known as the "137th Street Crew," the gang of mostly teenagers was a collaboration between the "2 Mafia Family" and "Goons on Deck" gangs, according to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. He said the gangs operated on 137th Street between Lenox and Seventh avenues.

"The gang over years created an environment where residents lived in a state of fear, waiting for the next gunshot, or the next drug deal or the next act of violence," Mr. Vance said. He said defendants recruited children under 16 to haul guns, transport drugs and participate in shootings, and used young women to "move firearms to reduce the likelihood of guns being detected by authorities."

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To the Editor:

On border trafficking, kudos to Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Bill Owens for wasting more of our tax dollars on the futile war on drugs - $3 billion in taxpayers' money has been spent in 2011 and we have 11 months to go. At that rate, another $37 billion will be wasted this year on trying to stop the flow of drugs into the United States of America.

Added to that will be the cost of prosecution and incarceration of the "criminals" who get caught. With only five percent of the world's population, the United States of America has 20 percent of the world prison population, 60 percent of which are drug offenders.

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To the Editor:

Re "Inadequate Fight Against Drugs Hampers Russia's Ability to Curb H.I.V." (Memo From Russia, Jan. 17):

Russia could benefit from our experiences in New York City dealing with drug addicts.

Twenty-three years ago, I helped create one of the first H.I.V./AIDS prevention and care programs in the United States for injecting drug users. Rather than getting addicts off drugs, our mission was to reduce new infections and help those already infected to take better care of themselves.

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Marijuana legalization has been raised countless times by politicians, newspapers, hippies and, of course, college newspapers. Again and again it has come up, to the point that it has become somewhat trite - a cliche policy issue that is urgent for no one. But just as a reminder: Marijuana for personal use is still illegal.

Under the Obama administration, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has ceased federal prosecution of licensed medical marijuana clinics, ceding enforcement to state control. At the same time, though, Attorney General Eric Holder has said that legalization of marijuana as a commercial product was "off the table."

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To the Editor:

Russian government reluctance to providing methadone treatment or clean needles is only one of the fatal impediments to effectively addressing H.I.V. in Russia ("Inadequate Fight Against Drugs Hampers Russia's Ability to Curb H.I.V.," Memo From Russia, Jan. 17).

Access to antiretroviral treatment, despite government promises to make it universally available, continues to be denied to injecting drug users, who are the majority of those infected. A recent study in 19 cities found that in half, medical commissions used questions about drug use as criteria for denying treatment.

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