CARPINTERIA, Calif.-On a recent sunny morning in this beach town near Santa Barbara, realtor Gary Goldberg ran into Das Williams on the street and raised a concern: A persistent skunky aroma had required him to knock $18,000 off the sale price of a condo.

"It smelled like marijuana," said Mr. Goldberg, adding that buyers threatened to pull out because of the odor.

Mr. Williams, a Santa Barbara County supervisor who helped craft regulations for large cannabis farms here, assured the realtor that he was doing everything he could to tamp down the smell. The argument over odor is part of an acrimonious debate over how to regulate the region's growing marijuana industry, pitting farmers against some residents.

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"New Warning Against Use of Marijuana for 2 Groups" (news article, Aug. 30) is reminiscent of coverage of pregnant women and cocaine use that reported damage theories that were alarmist.

Critical examination would reveal that the surgeon general's advisory focuses on associations and unspecified "risks." There's an enormous difference between things that pose potential risks, which are virtually everything a woman does, ingests or is exposed to during the course of pregnancy, and actual harm to the pregnant woman and fetus.

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Since childhood, Rachael Petersen had lived with an unexplainable sense of grief that no drug or talk therapy could entirely ease. So in 2017 she volunteered for a small clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University that was testing psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, for chronic depression.

"I was so depressed," Ms. Petersen, 29, said recently. "I felt that the world had abandoned me, that I'd lost the right to exist on this planet. Really, it was like my thoughts were so stuck, I felt isolated."

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The announcement on Wednesday that Johns Hopkins Medicine was starting a new center to study psychedelic drugs for mental disorders was the latest chapter in a decades-long push by health nonprofits and wealthy donors to shake up psychiatry from the outside, bypassing the usual channels.

"Psychiatry is one of the most conservative specialties in medicine," said David Nichols, a medicinal chemist who founded the Heffter Research Institute in 1993 to fund psychedelic research. "We haven't really had new drugs for years, and the drug industry has quit the field because they don't have new targets" in the brain. "The field was basically stagnant, and we needed to try something different."

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DENVER - Once a politically dangerous subject, legal marijuana has become something of a de facto platform plank for the 2020 Democratic candidates: All support either legalizing or decriminalizing its use, and the differences lie in how far the candidates are willing to take it.

Those differences - particularly former Vice President Joe Biden's reluctance to embrace full federal legalization and the lack of enthusiasm that increasingly organized young marijuana activists have for him - may play a role in determining who faces President Donald Trump next fall, experts said.

"People from both parties are just thinking, 'Duh, we should be legalizing this at the federal level,' " said Rachel Gillette, a Denver-based cannabis activist and attorney. "It would be great if they could focus on this. It's time."

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Believing that I could never agree with Nicholas Kristof about anything, I found myself gobsmacked that I agreed, writ large, with his profile of Seattle attempting to end the war on drugs.

I don't agree with his emphasis on race and privilege, but it's about time to completely end the war on drugs - and I say this as a former narcotics prosecutor in Brooklyn during the golden age of crack. Only total legalization will work. But saying drugs should be legal is not saying that drugs are good.

We, as a nation, need to approach this as adults, and stop doing something that hasn't ever worked well but has been doubled down on every decade.

Michael G. Brautigam

Cincinnati

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I want to thank Nicholas Kristof for bringing our attention to the successful way Seattle's Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program is addressing the interplay of drug addiction and the law. I support his call for more "evidence-based public health interventions." At Exponents, we also invest in evidence-based practices that employ recovering individuals and those with the lived experience of addiction.

Recovering addicts, especially those who have benefited from a particular treatment or process, have great value in engaging and helping an active addict. Medication-assisted treatments are effective, but the recovering community is an underutilized asset in our efforts to bring this opiate epidemic under control.

Howard Josepher

New York

The writer is co-founder and chief clinical officer of Exponents, an organization dedicated to improving the quality of life of people affected by drug addiction, incarceration and H.I.V./AIDS.

[end]

I thought that Nicholas Kristof's article was very good in showing the efforts of Seattle's prosecuting attorney, Dan Satterberg, to scale back on drug prosecutions and promote treatment alternatives.

My one objection is his statement that "the war on drugs began in 1971 out of a legitimate alarm about narcotics both in the United States and among U.S. troops in Vietnam." My book "The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs" detailed how the media and politicians exaggerated the scope of drug abuse in Vietnam and created a false moral panic about drugs that drove forward the war on drugs.

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It was 2012, and Ferrell Scott was watching television inside Pennsylvania's Allenwood federal penitentiary when he learned that the sale of marijuana, something he was given a life sentence for just four years earlier, was becoming legal in two states.

Colorado had approved its recreational use, the inmate learned from the broadcast, and so had Washington.

Scott had been struggling with depression since he was incarcerated in March 2008. But he felt a bit of hope as he watched the framework that had put people like him away without parole begin to crumble.

[end]

Portugal's decriminalization of drugs reduced the number of heroin users from 100,000 to 25,000. Its drug mortality rate became the lowest in Western Europe.

What's badly needed is to look at the real reason for criminalizing drugs. The first anti-cocaine laws in the early 1900s were aimed at black men in the South. The first anti-marijuana laws in the early 20th century targeted Mexican migrants and Mexican-Americans.

The "war on drugs" was coined by President Richard Nixon. A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted that it was aimed at Mr. Nixon's two major enemies, the antiwar left and black people: Criminalization meant that "we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

The war on drugs had little or nothing to do with health or safety. It was about political persecution.

Roger Carasso

Santa Fe, N.M.

[end]

In the cloudy world of travel with marijuana, what gets dispensed in Vegas should probably get smoked in Vegas.

Marijuana tourism is booming here, as it has in Colorado, Oregon and elsewhere. But what's allowed and what's legal at airports and hotels can feel like a confounding set of contradictions.

Possessing limited quantities of recreational marijuana is legal in Denver and Las Vegas, but it's illegal at the airports in those cities. Not true in Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle, where possession at the airport is allowed up to certain limits.

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Investment legend has it that the best money in the California gold rush was made selling picks and shovels. Fertilizer and real estate are equivalent bets on the volatile pot boom.

Shareholders in cannabis stocks have lost money lately. Companies that "touch the plant"-those that cultivate and sell pot, such as Cronos Group and Green Thumb Industries-have shed up to 50% of their market value over the past six months, as worries grow about profitability in the sector and the resilience of black-market sellers in legalized states like California. Big corporate investors are among the casualties: Tobacco giant Altria MO -0.58% 's 45% stake in Cronos is now worth 10% less than the $1.8 billion the Marlboro maker paid for it last December.

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Surgeon General Warns Pregnant Women and Teenagers Not to Smoke or Vape Marijuana

Dr. Jerome Adams, the surgeon general, said they may be unaware of the health hazards posed by new, professionally grown marijuana crops.

The United States surgeon general on Thursday issued a public warning that smoking or vaping marijuana is dangerous for pregnant women and their developing babies.

At a news conference with other top administration health officials, the surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams, said he was concerned that pregnant women, teenagers and others were unaware of the health hazards posed by new, professionally grown marijuana crops.

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The medical marijuana "Unity Bill" that sets up a basic legal framework for the implementation of State Question 788 will take effect Thursday.

Nearly three dozen other new laws will also take effect this week.

Here's a look at some of the new laws.

'Unity Bill'

Also known as the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana and Patient Protection Act, House Bill 2612 sets up a framework for regulating Oklahoma's medical marijuana industry.

The lengthy bill that was a compromise between legislators and those in the medical marijuana industry sets guidelines for marijuana testing, tax collections, seed-to-sale product tracking, packaging, employment and more.

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The legalization of marijuana as a medicine in 33 states, 11 of which allow its use as a recreational drug, has made weed a dynamic American industry, among the economy's fastest-growing sources of new jobs. California alone, with $3.1 billion in projected marijuana sales for this year, has a legal market as large as that of any country on the planet.

Entrepreneurs grumble nonetheless. Not since Ronald Reagan ran for president have American newspapers been so full of anecdotes about heroic jobs-creating businessmen stymied by regulation.

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Even as states across the country have legalized marijuana, potentially opening the door to a multibillion dollar industry, the impact of marijuana criminalization is still being felt by people - mostly black and Hispanic - whose records are marked by low-level convictions related to the drug.

But on Wednesday, New York began the process of expunging many of those records, as part of a new state law to reduce penalties associated with marijuana-related crimes, a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo confirmed.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Protection warned Friday against the purchase of electronic cigarette cartridges containing THC or other cannabis or altered e-cigarette products that are sold "off the street."

So far, 215 possible cases of vaping-related lung illness have been reported in 25 states, CDC and the Food and Drug Administration said in a statement, "and additional reports of pulmonary illness are under investigation." The Washington Post reported Thursday that state and federal investigators have 354 cases currently under review.

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SEATTLE -- Five years after Washington launched its pioneering legal marijuana market, officials are proposing an overhaul of the state's industry rules, with plans for boosting minority ownership of pot businesses, paving the way for home deliveries of medical cannabis and letting the smallest growers increase the size of their operations to become more competitive.

Liquor and Cannabis Board Director Rick Garza detailed the proposals -- part of what the board calls "Cannabis 2.0" -- in an interview with The Associated Press. It's an effort to picture what the legal marijuana market will look like over the next five years, after spending the past five years largely regulating by reaction as the difficulties of building an industry from infancy absorbed the agency's attention.

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SEATTLE - On gritty streets where heroin, fentanyl and meth stride like Death Eaters, where for decades both drugs and the war on drugs have wrecked lives, the city of Seattle is pioneering a bold approach to narcotics that should be a model for America.

Anyone caught here with a small amount of drugs - even heroin - isn't typically prosecuted. Instead, that person is steered toward social services to get help.

This model is becoming the consensus preference among public health experts in the U.S. and abroad. Still, it shocks many Americans to see no criminal penalty for using drugs illegally, so it takes courage and vision to adopt this approach: a partial retreat in the war on drugs coupled with a stepped-up campaign against addiction.

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A group of Colorado researchers recently studied how cannabis use affects athletes and found a possible role between the plant and pain management.

The study, "Cannabis use in active athletes: Behaviors related to subjective effects," looked at cannabis use patterns and its effects in a community-based sample of adult athletes. According to the study's authors, there had been no previous academic research done on cannabis use's subjective effects for adult athletes.

"There was not a lot of research on how weed helps," explains Dr. Joanna Zeiger, one of the researchers who conducted the study for Canna Research Group. "Athletes typically don't sleep well and are anxious, so we wanted to see what percentage of them use cannabis, their patterns of use, and what the effects are."

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