My parents taught my brother and me to respect the police. We once lived on the same West Baltimore street where riots broke out after the death of Freddie Gray, whowas injured in police custody on April 12. Gray was unconscious when a police van transporting him for booking arrived at the police station. He died one week later from spinal cord injuries. Gray's death sparked protests in Baltimore and other cities.

After getting a law degree, I returned to Baltimore and became an assistant state's attorney, a black female prosecutor among many white male prosecutors. That's when I began work on the assembly line that is the United States' criminal justice system, in the same office that later charged six officers in Gray's death.

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When Samson Paisely entered the buds of his marijuana plant in the D.C. State Fair's first-ever marijuana competition Saturday, he wanted to pay tribute to a man who legalized another once-illicit substance. So he named the strain of marijuana "Delano," after Franklin Delano Roosevelt - the president who repealed the country's prohibition of alcohol in 1933.

"If we can repeal prohibition, then surely we can smoke [marijuana] in America," said Paisely, 45, who grew the plants in his Adams Morgan home.

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As Their Crops Mature, Growers Cook Up Ways to Profit From Surplus Yield

In upper Northwest Washington, marijuana buds the size of zucchinis hang drying in a room once reserved for yoga. In the Shaw neighborhood, pot grown in a converted closet sits meticulously trimmed, weighed and sealed in jars. Elsewhere, from Georgetown to Capitol Hill to Congress Heights, seven-leafed weeds are flowering in bedrooms, back yards and window boxes.

Welcome to the first crop of legal pot in the nation's capital - where residents may grow and possess marijuana but are still forbidden to sell it.

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Regarding the Aug. 21 editorial "The heroin emergency":

Seriously ill children who are in significant pain should have access to all possibly effective prescription painkillers, and their doctors should have information about dosage, scheduling and toxicities of those painkillers. The recent Food and Drug Administration decision to approve Oxy Contin for children as young as 11 does just that - it gives their doctors better information on how to treat their pain.

Drug abuse prevention is critically important. However, suggesting that seriously ill children for whom Oxy Contin is an appropriate treatment should instead suffer so that potential drug abusers are not harmed is not a fair or reasonable policy solution.

Nancy Goodman, Washington The writer is executive director of Kids v. Cancer.

[end]

Controlling Prescription Opioids Can Help Curb the Epidemic.

NOT EVEN the federal government can solve the nation's growing heroin epidemic on its own, but it could always do more. That's probably the best way to think about the new anti-heroin initiative unveiled by the White House on Monday. A one-year, $2.5 million plan to track the flow of drugs through the Northeastern states and other "high-intensity" regions certainly can't hurt; but the White House isn't pretending that its new initiative will conquer the problem and nor should anyone else.

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Regarding the Aug. 13 front-page article "When life begins in rehab":

Let me get this straight: Ashley Kennedy faces no criminal charges for the agonizing pain she inflicted on her daughter, Makenzee, and when Ms. Kennedy and Makenzee are released from treatment, they will leave together.

It seems that as a community we believe that addicts' criminal acts are not their fault and that their efforts to "get clean" outweigh the long-term interests of a severely injured infant who needs to find protection and stability.

Sarah Willens Kass, Washington

[end]

STONED A Doctor's Case for Medical Marijuana By David Casarett Current. 289 pp. $27.95

'Does medical marijuana 'work'?" That question, posed in an illuminating new book by David Casarett, a hospice physician and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, sounds simple and turns out to be anything but.

The short answer is that it depends on the symptom or problem being treated, on the physiology of the patient using it, on the mode of drug delivery (a joint? a brownie? a vapor pen? a beer?) and on various other factors.

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A Pregnant Heroin Addict Passes on Her Struggle

After a month of painful withdrawal that bunched her body into a tight ball, after tremors and diarrhea and sleeplessness and difficulty eating, Makenzee Kennedy went home to her bed in a drug rehab facility to celebrate a milestone: turning 2 months old. She lives there for now with her mother, 31-year-old Ashley Kennedy, who is 11 years into her on-again, off-again struggle with heroin addiction. If all goes well, Makenzee will never again see the inside of Mount Washington Pediatric Hospital, where she was weaned off drugs through intensive, round-the-clock care. "It's not my first time trying to stop," Ashley Kennedy acknowledged as she bottle-fed Makenzee. "It's my last time now. I don't want to touch another drug after putting my baby through this." In communities across the nation, the collateral damage of the heroin epidemic is rippling through the health-care system. The rate of hepatitis C is skyrocketing, fueled by needle sharing among addicts. Experts worry that an upturn in HIV rates may not be far behind. And the rate of fatal heroin overdoses has quadrupled over the past 10 years. In Baltimore, nearly two-thirds of the 302 overdose deaths last year were caused by heroin. "We have a very serious issue in the U.S. right now in terms of the use of heroin and other opiate agents," said Alan Spitzer, senior vice president at Mednax, which provides maternal and newborn medical services to hospitals.

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Legalization Manifests Itself in Tasting Parties and Shrugged Shoulders

About 30 party guests wearing suits and summer dresses mingled in the candlelit back yard of a small, private home in the Forest Hills neighborhood in Northwest Washington and snacked on hors d'oeuvres to the sound of jazz. Instead of cocktails, they sipped gourmet coffee and tea infused with marijuana.

In the kitchen, servers poured hot and iced drinks for the tasting party. They were showcasing products from House of Jane, a California-based company that sells cannabis-infused beverages. Jane's Brew C-Cups were on display in the living room, stacked on a table alongside similarly branded coasters.

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Don Winslow, novelist and conscientious objector to America's longest "war," was skeptical when he was in Washington on a recent Sunday morning. This was shortly after news broke about the escape, from one of Mexico's "maximum-security" prisons, of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, head of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Guzman reportedly disappeared through a tunnel almost a mile long and built solely for his escape.

Asked about this, Winslow, his fork poised over an omelet, dryly said he thinks Guzman might actually have driven away from the prison's front gate in a Lincoln Town Car. What might seem like cynicism could be Winslow's realism.

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This month, President Obama commuted the long sentences of 46 federal prisoners convicted of drug crimes, and over the next fewdays he laid out his vision for criminal justice reform in speeches to the NAACP and at the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma. Prison reformers hailed these events as important steps forward in the effort to rein in the sprawling U.S. prison system. I don't think they should be so happy. Obama's speeches, unfortunately, explicitly emphasized one of the most problematic myths standing in theway of true penal reform, and the commutations implicitly did the same. In all three instances, Obama suggested that we can scale back incarceration by focusing solely on nonviolent offenders.

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Commuting sentences isn't about the law. It's about mercy, writes reform advocate Dennis Cauchon.

President Obama's historic visit to a federal prison on Thursday shows that his head and his heart are in the right place on criminal justice reform.

As he said a few days earlier, "Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it."

The president overhauled the clemency process in April 2014 to much fanfare. He said that he wanted more worthy applications on his desk and that he was ready to act aggressively to approve them. But it's hard to square that rhetoric, andthe compassion Obama demonstrated by meeting with prisoners this past week, with Monday's miserly announcement that he'd granted clemency to 46 people.

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The High Taking Over Streets Is So Variable, It's Hard to Stop or Treat

The man in the Mickey Mouse shirt was clinging to a light pole on H Street NE when police showed up, and then he dropped his pants. Another man near Eastern Market was laughing so hard that paramedics had trouble keeping him on a stretcher. A third, whom police found prancing through Capitol Hill, started kicking and screaming when eight police and fire officials tried to restrain him.

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Regarding the July 12 editorial "Weeding out synthetic drugs" :

The use of so-called synthetic marijuana is an unintended side effect of the war on natural marijuana. Consumers are turning to potentially toxic drugs, made in China and sold as research chemicals before being repackaged as incense for retail sale in the United States. A punitive criminal justice system incentivizes use. These chemicals cannot be detected by standard drug tests. Some people use synthetic drugs to escape detection.

Cracking down on retail sales will drive users to the Internet, where dangerous synthetic highs are readily available. A better solution is to legalize retail marijuana sales and stop drug testing for marijuana.

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The President Visits a Federal Prison and Makes a Strong Case for Sentencing Reform.

PRESIDENT OBAMA went somewhere Thursday that, according to the White House, no other sitting president ever has: a federal prison.

His point was that no advanced society should be comfortable with the way this country punishes crime.

The nation locks up too many people for too long, and it too often treats them poorly behind bars. In part because of Mr. Obama-but also because of a strong left-right alliance that includes the Koch brothers, the American Civil Liberties Union and others in between- change could come very soon. If, that is, Congress acts.

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The difficulty in testing synthetic drugs is slowing the prosecution of suspects accused of possessing or selling the chemically engineered substances, even as authorities blame them for a spike in violence and overdoses, according to District officials.

Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney's office have been unable to charge a number of people recently arrested, and many of them have had to be released while officials await test results, city and federal officials said. Police said they hope to charge them once testing is completed.

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The Pot Head's Argument for Health Benefits Goes Up in Smoke

Celebrating the medical benefits, if any, of marijuana has been an effective ruse to win social acceptance for getting high. This was thoroughly predictable, and now it's clear that the organized pot heads have been blowing smoke at us.

This is the preliminary conclusion of a new wideranging study of the effects of medical pot. The rush toward legalization, like most whoring after new things, is likely doing considerably more harm than miniscule good.

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The District's mayor has signed into law harsh new penalties for stores found selling synthetic marijuana in order to prevent an epidemic from taking hold in nation's capital the way crack cocaine once held D.C. streets hostage.

The law grants Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier immediate authority to shutter businesses found selling synthetic marijuana for up to 96 hours and gives the mayor authority to fine businesses $10,000.

"We don't want to go back to the crack cocaine days of what happens when people are addicted to dangerous drugs," said Chief Lanier after D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser signed the bill into law Friday.

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A New D.C. Law Gives Police the Means to Combat Dangerous Substances.

NEARLY A dozen people were rushed to the hospital after a mass drug overdose at a D.C. homeless shelter last month. A woman was accused of abandoning a 10-month-old baby on a busy D.C. street. A seemingly crazed 18-year-old allegedly stabbed to death a man on a Metro train July 4. Authorities say the common denominator in these incidents was the use of synthetic drugs. Emergency legislation to deal with the rising use of the dangerous substances comes none too soon.

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A Medical Extract Offers Relief for Epileptic Children

Imagine the following scenario: You have a son or daughter who suffers from epilepsy. Seizures wrack your child's body every day. Some days, he or she endures a dozen or more seizures. The condition prevents your child from going to school, from eating normally, from having friends. It also exacts a toll on you and your family. You cannot leave your child alone for any extended period of time, and certain activities, such as sports games, road trips or visits to the movie theater, are off limits.

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