NEW BRITAIN - Xiomara Gonzalez was "dope sick" by the time she was interviewed by the bail commissioner about her arrest last week on charges she was carrying nearly $16,000 worth of heroin.

City detectives had the 25-year-old Hartford resident in their sights after receiving two tips she was selling drugs in New Britain on a regular basis.

Her arrest, which also led to the seizure of cocaine and a gun, yielded one of the largest quantities of heroin since the police department changed its enforcement tactics in July 2012.

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BRISTOL - Brightly colored packages with names like "Bizarro," "Platinum" and "Juicy Herbs Marshmallow Root" are filled with material labeled incense, but police call it synthetic marijuana.

"Just looking at the package and names of these things, it almost looks like candy," said Police Chief Thomas Grimaldi. "It says on it 'Not For Human Consumption.' For the marketers, and I use that word loosely, that's their way around it."

Grimaldi gave a slide show presentation to the Board of Education recently to alert local educators, parents and students that the controlled substance is being marketed to children.

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I find it a bit alarming that the New Haven Register is so desperate for letters to the editor that they now are publishing letters from around the country supporting legalizing marijuana. I read the musings of people that sound like they are living in the '60s in a Volks van with flowers on it in San Francisco. I watched a number of friends smoke grass like it was the answer to all their problems.

Medical marijuana is a joke, as I know many who have it for back pain. No matter if you believe that grass is no worse than alcohol. No matter if you do not believe that it may lead to harder drugs. The reality is in most instances you inhale a hot mixture of tar and other chemicals into your lungs. Why are the AMA and others silent on the dangers of smoking grass? What lengths are we willing to go to find a new thing to tax?

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Reading Cindy O'Neill's letter I have to assume that she or no one close to her has ever experienced terrible pain from cancer or another illness. I watched my wife suffer the pain of dying from cancer for three years. Yes, they gave her strong pain pills - oxycodone, oxycontin, morphine. The prescriptions read take one every 12 hours, take one every four hours, take one or two every four hours as needed for pain.

Your comment that only people who are addicts would go for it, not "normal" people, is pretty naive. Given enough pain even normal people will try anything. My wife would have tried it and I am sure the thousands of other normal people suffering terrible pain will try it. It might be a better bet than all the pain killers she was given. We talked about it, but where were we going to get it?

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My great-grandparents gifted my Grandpa with a tavern, at Church & Chapel Streets in New Haven, when Gramps graduated from NYU. The year was 1924. The extensive array of liquor covered the walls of the back bar, behind the restaurant, in vintage photographs.

Fats Waller frequently hung out, there - and the marijuana that they smoked was perfectly legal. The tavern closed, with the repeal of prohibition. I like to imagine that we'd still have had our New Haven tavern, if alcohol hadn't been repealed. Yet, just as repeal was the right thing to do, then, abolishing marijuana prohibition is of utmost importance today.

Unlike with alcohol, America was founded using industrial marijuana products such as canvas, hemp paper, soaps, paints, and so on. The prohibition of cannabis, under the mandated pejorative, "marihuana" (FDR, 1937) is utterly more offensive to American history than alcohol prohibition was.

- - Matthew Stover

Philadelphia, Pa.

[end]

I'm writing about your thoughtful editorial: "States should determine own pot laws" (2-5-14).

I'd like to add that the cannabis legalization issue is not whether cannabis is completely safe for everybody, including children and adolescents; it is not. The issue is freedom of choice for adults. Children have died from eating peanuts and peanut butter but we don't cage peanut growers, sellers or consumers.

And the voters of Colorado and Washington state have decided that we should not arrest and jail cannabis growers, sellers or consumers.

Connecticut adults have the freedom of choice of whether or not to consume legal alcohol. Shouldn't they have the same freedom of choice regarding legal cannabis?

Kirk Muse

Mesa, Ariz.

[end]

In response to Cindy O'Neill's belief that marijuana will only benefit addicts:

Cindy you've obviously never watched a loved one die a slow, excruciating death; or known someone who did receive relief from your so-called stronger pills, but was still left with nausea and drastic weight loss from chemo.

It's been proven with medical research that marijuana does help cancer patients, people with nerve damage pain and, yes, those with anxiety, to name a few. You will find it is no longer the nickel bag from the street helping these people. There are now many different strains, each containing different medical properties responding to different illnesses. They have even recently discovered a strain that will alleviate seizures in children with epilepsy and other brain disorders; would you deny them the chance at living a normal life?

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Prohibitionist government and politicians orchestrated cannabis (marijuana) prohibition and citizens don't care how it ends (Editorial: States Should Determine Own Pot Laws, Feb. 5, 2014), as long as it is immediately. It's one of America's worst policy failures in history. The plant never should have been labeled a Schedule I substance alongside heroin while methamphetamine and cocaine are only Schedule II substances.

There are numerous options for government to end this discredited devil law before the end of the day. Citizens know cannabis prohibition is discredited and could end today and have demonstrated they're not waiting on snail pace measures to get the job done.

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Drug-related deaths in Connecticut hit their highest point in nearly 10 years last year, according to statistics from the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

It's a development that is not surprising to law enforcement and treatment providers throughout the state.

"Mood altering has always been a stubborn problem -- stubborn and persistent," said Alan Mathis, chief executive officer of Liberation Programs, a drug treatment program with facilities in Norwalk, Stamford and Bridgeport. "We've never won the war on drugs."

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A new conventional wisdom is on the rise: Drug prohibition, or "the war on drugs," is a costly flop. It not only failed to cut drug use and associated social ills significantly but has also imposed additional social costs - or "catastrophic harm," as my colleague Radley Balko put it - far exceeding the benefits. Those costs include violent crime linked to the black-market drug trade as well as the mass arrest and incarceration of small-time users, a disproportionate number of whom are African American.

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Am I the only person who sees that this marijuana factory is just a means to let addicts legally use drugs? What's next, heroin-on-demand?

You can't tell me that the average non-addict person who has terrible pain from cancer or another illness would ask for marijuana for pain instead of taking a strong pain pill prescribed by their doctor.

Only people who are addicts would go for it, not normal people. A totally stupid idea, especially since cigarettes and their smoke is banned everywhere - but marijuana smoke is a godsend to people in pain?

If you've never smoked it, you're not going to ask for it. Another example on why our country is going down the drain!

- - Cindy O'Neill

Orange

[end]

I'm writing about your thoughtful editorial: "States should determine own pot laws" (2-5-14).

I'd like to add that the cannabis legalization issue is not whether cannabis is completely safe for everybody, including children and adolescents; it is not.

The issue is freedom of choice for adults. Children have died from eating peanuts and peanut butter but we don't cage peanut growers, sellers or consumers.

And the voters of Colorado and Washington state have decided that we should not arrest and jail cannabis growers, sellers or consumers.

Connecticut adults have the freedom of choice of whether or not to consume legal alcohol. Shouldn't they have the same freedom of choice regarding legal cannabis?

- - Kirk Muse Mesa, AZ

[end]

I felt pretty good heading into Black History Month. I ended 2013 on a high note, had settled quite nicely into my new job as metro editor at the Register and with the help of newsroom staff, had put together a good group of stories that represented a crosssection of the black community.

So I was feeling a bit heady on the eve of Black History Month as I sat down to edit a story about a man awarded a site in West Haven to grow "medical marijuana."

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A national anti-marijuana organization announced Monday it would join forces with a state group, and warned legalization efforts are poised to create a public health crisis in the form of the "next Big Tobacco."

Smart Approaches to Marijuana, founded in January 2013 by former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, D-R.I., and Kevin A. Sabet, a former White House policy adviser, announced at a press conference it would work with the Connecticut Association of Prevention Practitioners.

Sabet said the marijuana movement that has led to the drug's legal, recreational use in Colorado and Washington state is being driven by money and is not a "mom and pop" industry. It is "multimillion dollar, multinational conglomerate," he said.

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Warns of 'Next Tobacco Industry'

HARTFORD - A national anti-marijuana organization announced Monday it would join forces with a state group, and warned legalization efforts are poised to create a public health crisis in the form of the "next Big Tobacco."

Smart Approaches to Marijuana, founded in January 2013 by former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, D-R.I., and Kevin A. Sabet, a former White House policy adviser, announced at a press conference it would work with the Connecticut Association of Prevention Practitioners.

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Given the Food and Drug Administration's job to safeguard society, it needs to say something about the marketing of marijuana for "medical" and "recreational" use.

Inhalation of burning marijuana subjects the user to essentially intravenous doses of unknown quantities of mixtures of unknown purity; potent agents with diverse pharmacologic effects. I say intravenous because the materialis drawn into the deepest passages of the lungs, the alveoli, highly vascularized small sacs which allow the easy rapid transfer of oxygen into the blood.

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Twenty states plus the District of Columbia now allow sales of medicinal marijuana, allowing pot prescriptions to treat pretty much any malady, from a headache to a hangnail.

Why should Holder decide which federal statutes to enforce and which to ignore? Colorado and Washington have legalized the drug for recreational use, too. Yet federal law still prohibits the possession, use and sale of marijuana for any reason. This dichotomy explains why some banks are reluctant to accept the large amounts of cash that pot purveyors generate - even if the cash is legal under state law.

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Twenty states plus the District of Columbia now allow sales of medicinal marijuana, allowing pot prescriptions to treat pretty much any malady, from a headache to a hangnail.

Colorado and Washington have legalized the drug for recreational use, too. Yet federal law still prohibits the possession, use and sale of marijuana for any reason. This dichotomy explains why some banks are reluctant to accept the large amounts of cash that pot purveyors generate - even if the cash is legal under state law.

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Portland Owners Putting Emphasis on Research

PORTLAND - An East Hampton witch hazel distiller and a Northford organic farmer will join industry experts from across the country to build one of the first four medical marijuana production facilities in the state.

The state Department of Consumer Protection last week announced that Connecticut Pharmaceutical Solutions, LLC, will receive one of four licenses to become a medical marijuana producer.

Thomas Schultz, the president of CPS and vice president of East Hampton-based American Distilling, said the prospector will set up shop at 47 Main St. in Portland, a piece of private land zoned for manufacturing.

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Towns are grappling with the decision last year to legalize the manufacture and sale of medical marijuana. Change can be difficult for Connecticut's 169 municipalities. It's especially challenging for local planning and zoning commissions to wade into uncharted waters. And nothing is more uncharted than a medical marijuana dispensary.

Towns are grappling with the General Assembly's decision last year to legalize the manufacture and sale of medical marijuana. To say that towns are unprepared to regulate such enterprises is quite an understatement. Since there was never any need to address them, marijuana dispensaries have gone unmentioned in local zoning codes for as long as zoning has been around.

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