Organizers of this year's Democratic National Convention have talked a lot about making it the "greenest" political convention ever.

Yet one particularly popular green substance has been conspicuously absent from their plans and the public discussion: marijuana.

After all, the convention is being hosted in Denver, a city known not only for its commitment to sustainability, but also for being the first municipality in the nation to make possession and private use of marijuana legal for adults. A solid majority of voters approved a ballot initiative doing so in 2005.

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Why this country allows its citizens to consume alcohol, but not marijuana, is a bit of a mystery.

Both substances have mind-altering capabilities. Both substances, if abused, can destroy the lives of the user and anyone who crosses the user's path.

But both substances can be used responsibly and moderately, according to Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat.

And perhaps most importantly, our government spends an inordinate amount of time and money arresting and prosecuting pot users - about 12 million citizens have been arrested on a marijuana-related charge since 1965, according to NORML, an organization that wants marijuana use to be legalized.

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TELLURIDE, COLO. - Like all sometimes-great notions, this one was born in a bar.

It was March, and a group of scientists who'd been lecturing in Telluride decamped from their esoterica and headed out to the New Sheridan to get a drink. There, a talkative chemist named Thomas Cheatham started talking about drugs in this new and novel way -- about the connections between prescription drugs, illegal drugs, natural medicines and the chemicals your Very Own Body produces every day.

Nana Naisbitt, director of the Telluride Science Research Center, was there that night and recalled how the conversation sparked an idea: Bring this Cheatham guy back to Telluride, and get him to talk about the science of drugs.

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A survey taken by Moffat County High School students in the 2007-08 school year reveals that alcohol use among the student population had declined since 2005-06 while tobacco and marijuana use increased during the same period.

MCHS principal Thom Schnellinger said he thinks results of the 2007-08 Healthy Kids Colorado Survey reflect concerns within the local community as well as the behaviors of the student body.

"The issues we're talking about are indeed community issues," he said.

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Nearly anyone these days can recognize the hollowed-out features, skinny limbs and pockmarked skin that characterize someone hooked on methamphetamine, thanks in part to intensive local education campaigns.

It's precisely that education, coupled with a crackdown on meth users and dealers that has helped get pounds of meth off local streets, law enforcement officials report.

Yet, like any supply-and-demand equation, that is causing a decrease in the amount of the locally available drug, lowering its quality and making it more expensive. That shift has tipped the scales in the drug-buying business, now making cocaine relatively less expensive and more likely to be discovered by undercover officers in drug raids, according to spokeswoman Karen Flowers, resident agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Grand Junction.

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"Aspen" and "cocaine" are nearly as synonymous as "Philadelphia" and "cheese steak." But when a 30-year-old local man was accused of selling and using heroin in Aspen last month, people were shocked.

Most American heroin addicts, it turns out, are a lot like Ryan Welgos, the Aspen native who was arrested at the end of a months-long federal undercover operation. They are male, they are white, and they do not live in large cities.

That last characteristic belies the notion that heroin use is an urban phenomenon, or that it doesn't exist in well-to-do places like Aspen. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more than 60 percent of heroin users live in rural areas.

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The iconic mountain biker, who resided in Durango for more than a decade, won 14 national titles and was the world champion downhill racer in 1994. She screamed down slopes on the edge of control, landing in either an ambulance or on the podium.

Her persona - she dangled a dried piranha around her neck and tucked her dead dog's ashes in her bra when she raced - and talent made her mountain biking's highest-paid athlete, earning her well over $2 million.

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Although the overall number of students expelled in District 51 schools decreased for the 2007-08 school year, the number of high school students expelled for drug-related offenses increased by 41 percent.

The number of expelled students dropped from 116 to 95 in 2007-08, with almost every category of expellable offenses - alcohol, tobacco, assault, dangerous weapons, robbery, destruction of school property and others - decreasing except drugs and other controlled substances at the high school level.

Twenty-two high school students were expelled for either distributing controlled substances or possessing them as a second offense in 2006-07. That number jumped to 31 students last school year, according to the district expulsion report.

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Marijuana proponents want to know why federal officials continue to allow people to use alcohol on airplanes, but won't allow pot smoking in the lounges at Denver International Airport.

"Does it make sense to allow adults to use a drug that causes problems on airplanes and not allow them to use one that does not cause problems on airplanes?" asked Mason Tvert, executive director of Safer Alternatives For Enjoyable Recreation.

SAFER held a press conference on Tuesday outside the offices of the Federal Aviation Administration in Denver to propose a solution to the rash of in-flight disturbances on airplanes over the last year.

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'Alcohol-Related Air Rage' Threatens Travelers, He Says

Attention: You are now free to float about the cabin.

Well, not yet, but maybe someday - that is, if Mason Tvert has anything to say about.

Tvert, a crusader for legalizing marijuana, has called for pot-smoking lounges in the nation's airports. His reason for doing goes beyond his cannabis liberation mission: He wants to help make flying safer.

"There's been this growing trend of alcohol-related air rage," he said Tuesday, alluding to episodes of drunken passengers creating in-flight disturbances.

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A Fort Collins couple cited an illegal search and their medical marijuana registration as reasons a judge should dismiss charges against them for marijuana cultivation.

Nicole and Alexander Baatsen said Larimer County Sheriff's Office investigators illegally searched their south Fort Collins home in 2007 when they ignored Nicole Baatsen's comments denying them access to the home.

Sheriff's investigators searched the home Sept. 21 after surveying the home several times, sheriff's investigator Josh Sheldon said in court Wednesday.

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Government officials from Washington, D.C., gathered for a press conference last week in a small, crowded classroom at the ACE Community Challenge Charter School in Denver. In front of a carefully coordinated backdrop of books and computers, they announced that Denver School District 1 would be the first in Colorado to institute a random student drug-testing program.

Television news cameras rolled as deputy drug czarina Bertha Madras of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and Deborah Price, assistant deputy secretary of the Department of Education, issued a $150,000 federal grant to the charter school's principal in the form of an oversized cardboard check.

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David Harsanyi's May 13 column "The government's sorta-kinda-maybe logic" really nailed it.

He clearly laid out all of the important issues regarding drug prohibition: the costly, self-perpetuating bureaucracy that feeds on the war on drugs (and people), the massive incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, paramilitary operations in the name of public safety, holes the size of Colorado in the governments new "report" and the relationship of that report to Walters' recent tour of the country trying to scare school systems into drug testing their students.

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There are some things higher than the laws. -- Clarence Darrow, 1920

The number of Americans arrested for marijuana-related offenses is inching toward 20 million. The first such arrestee, it turns out, was an unemployed overall-clad Colorado farmhand who sold two marijuana cigarettes to an undercover federal agent in a Denver hotel in October 1937. Sentenced to four years in prison, Samuel Caldwell died of stomach cancer in Leavenworth prison before he could complete the term -- also making him, some believe, the first unofficial medical marijuana patient.

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Adults cited for possessing less than an ounce of marijuana in Denver will no longer have to appear in court under a rule adopted by the city attorney.

Now citations may be paid through the mail, Denver Assistant City Attorney Vincent DiCroce announced during the Denver Marijuana Policy Review Panel meeting Wednesday.

Also, the panel voted 5-4 to recommend in its first report to the City Council that the city attorney stop prosecuting the simple adult marijuana-possession cases altogether.

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Panel Right to Vote for Fewer Prosecutions

The vote this week by Denver's Marijuana Policy Review Panel urging the city to stop convicting adults for simple marijuana possession reinforces the message voters have twice sent to local officials. It's a message law enforcement should heed.

The panel voted 5-4 to ask the City Council to recommend an end to prosecution of simple possession cases for adults "absent compelling reasons articulated . . . in open court."

The resolution echoes ballot questions passed in 2005 and 2007 that first legalized - although only in city statute books - adult possession of less than 1 ounce of pot and then instructed the city to make prosecuting simple possession the "lowest priority" for law enforcement. Voters backed both measures - by 53 percent and 57 percent, respectively.

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Only lightly noted on this side of the border, our neighbor Mexico is engulfed in bloody, violent combat with and between death-dealing drug cartels.

In a stunning reversal for President Felipe Calderon's crusade to subdue the drug trade and its perpetrators, Edgar Gomez, the national police chief and lead anti-cartel crusader, was assassinated this month outside his Mexico City home. "This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the risk of ungovernability," Mexico City sociologist Luis Astorga told The Washington Post.

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Re: "Schools say yes to drug testing," May 18 news story.

Some schools have started the random drug testing of extra-curricular students, and other schools are considering following suit. They have the well-being of their athletes in mind, and concerned parents believe that such testing will take the burden off their shoulders. However, they base their eagerness on hunches, anecdotes, "gut feelings," and perhaps just a sense that "something must be done" to reduce recreational drug use.

While random testing feels good - that something is being done - nothing is being done. Once you get away from hunches and anecdotes and look at the straightforward facts, random drug testing makes no difference. And if it makes no difference, it makes no sense.

That the federal government supports such nonsense is reason number (supply your own figure) not to trust their pronouncements about what to do about the "War On Drugs."

Bertram Rothschild

Aurora

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Objections to random student drug testing go far beyond privacy concerns. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Education Association oppose student drug testing because the programs are potentially counterproductive.

Random testing can erode relationships of trust between students and adults at school, damaging an essential component of a safe and rewarding learning environment. Researchers from Oregon Health and Science University found attitudinal changes among students in schools with drug testing programs that indicate new risk factors for future substance use.

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Whether your son plays on his high school's football or chess teams, or your daughter is the school's premier debater or basketball star, they could be required to submit to a random drug test if they want to participate. The kid who just shows up for class every day, though, will never have to worry about being singled out, maybe even if there's reason to suspect he or she is using drugs.

That's the bottom line of a movement that is gaining acceptance and being adopted in an increasing number of school districts in many states. In Colorado, random drug testing for students participating in extracurricular activities is policy in three districts and under serious consideration in at least a dozen more.

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