The Herald is right to be alarmed by the many teens using marijuana, but the cause is the prohibition on the drug, not the movement to legalize it (" Generation up in smoke?" Dec. 27). The same federal survey also found that teen use of alcohol and tobacco - two legal and age-regulated substances - is sharply falling.

That teens have an easier time getting their hands on illegal marijuana than legal and regulated drugs shows that prohibition is ineffective in keeping our kids safe. Only by ending prohibition can we take marijuana (and its profits) away from street dealers and begin to control its use and distribution.

- - Karen Hawkes, Rowley The writer is a retired state trooper active with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

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It is not that marijuana use by teens has risen significantly, but that their tobacco use has greatly declined ("Generation up in smoke," Dec. 27). Is it possible the decrease in tobacco use shows us that the most effective anti-drug use campaigns are those that rely on enforcing regulations on a legal product, and not prohibition?

Keith Saunders

Scituate

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Smoking pot is now more common among 10th graders in the U.S. than smoking cigarettes, and according to the latest federal government survey one out of every 15 high school students smokes marijuana on an almost daily basis. A quarter of the eighth, 10th and 12th graders surveyed reported using marijuana in the last year.

Think this uptick has anything to do with our government's increasingly lenient policies governing marijuana use?

Well, of course it does! "The upward trend in teens' abuse of marijuana corresponded to downward trends in their perception of risk," according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which released the survey results.

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Giving clean needles to IV drug addicts saves lives =96 and money. That's why the federal government should be spending your tax dollars to keep drug users -=96 and the people who have sex with them -- from getting AIDS and hepatitis.

But Republicans in Congress have decided that despite a veritable mountain of scientific evidence showing that needle-exchange work, they are not going to pay for this sort of program any more.

They just yanked it out of the end-of-year spending package.

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13 Students Faced Discipline for Marijuana

NEWBURYPORT -- Newburyport High School is following a statewide trend that's seeing drug use on the rise at secondary schools, officials say.

Superintendent Marc Kerble said that since September, officials have conducted 13 student expulsion hearings primarily related to the use or possession of marijuana.

"This should be a concern of not only the School Committee, but a concern of the community," Kerble said at a meeting last night.

Kerble did not have figures readily available on how many hearings resulted in actual expulsion from school, but he spoke of the personal side of the statistic.

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RE "THE government's marijuana problem: Federal bureaucracy makes it hard for states to administer a proven pain-relief medicine" by Juliette Kayyem (Op-ed, Dec. 12): While there have been studies showing that marijuana can shrink cancerous tumors, medical marijuana is essentially a palliative drug. If a doctor recommends marijuana to a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy, and it helps the patient feel better, then it's working.

In the end, medical marijuana is a quality-of-life decision that is best left to patients and their doctors.

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JULIETTE KAYYEM'S Dec. 12 column on medicinal marijuana ("The government's marijuana problem," Op-ed) misses the boat. Reclassifying marijuana would not allow doctors to prescribe the drug, nor make it OK for pharmacists to dispense it. The US Food and Drug Administration requires drugs to go through a rigorous safety and efficacy approval process before allowing them to be prescribed.

Moreover, marijuana-derived medications, such as Marinol and Cesamet, have been reclassified, and are available by prescription. Recently, the FDA ruled that raw marijuana does not meet its general standards. The drug failed an eight-factor scientific analysis that examined hundreds of studies on the plant's health effects. The National Academies of Sciences' Institute of Medicine determined "there is little future in smoked marijuana as a medically approved medication."

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FALL RIVER - Following national trends, more city youths are experimenting with marijuana use, according to a survey of middle and high school students.

The survey of high school students found that the percentage reporting marijuana use within the past 30 days increased by 9 percentage points from a 2008 level of 22 percent. Among individual grade levels, the largest increase was among those in the junior class, with an increase from 24.1 percent in 2008 to 40.2 percent this year.

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FALL RIVER - Armed with the results of surveys related to health and risk behaviors conducted at the city's high and middle schools, the BOLD Coalition is considering the next steps to make Fall River a healthier place.

With the surveys showing increased use of marijuana, among other concerns, Staff Director Craig Gaspard said BOLD is planning to create a series of public service announcements aimed at prescription drug abuse. Gaspard said he hopes to have the advertisements run on local radio and public access television stations. Outreach could be expanded to other stations if grant funding can be secured.

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Taunton -- A police drug search conducted Friday morning at Coyle and Cassidy High School failed to turn up any contraband, according to one relieved school official.

"We usually do it once in the spring and once in the fall," said school principal Bob Gay, adding that "It's part of the culture of the school to ensure parents we're providing a safe environment for their kids."

Gay said around a dozen law enforcement officers made up of Taunton police and members of sheriff's departments from Bristol and Plymouth counties took part in the search.

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Mr. Evans' "In this prohibition saga, Obama plays Herbert Hoover" contains one factual error. The Jones Act became law in 1929 when Coolidge signed it two days before leaving office.

It also contains one error of omission, he limits his advocacy to freeing each state "to enact, implement and enforce their own medical marijuana laws." Why stop there? Barney Frank with Ron Paul as the first co-sponsor proposes the equivalent of the 21st Amendment for cannabis in HR 2306 the "Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2011" As I write, 19 other members of the House are co-sponsors. Michael Capuano is the only other member of the Massachusetts delegation among them.

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It was a curious coincidence last month that, as PBS was broadcasting the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary called "Prohibition" -- describing the Hoover Justice Department's last-gasp crackdown on alcoholic beverages in the late 1920s -- prosecutors in the Obama Justice Department were announcing a crackdown on medical marijuana in California, threatening to confiscate the property of people "involved in drug trafficking activity," which is fed-speak for providing pot for sick people.

After nearly a decade under the Volstead Act, the utter futility of enforcing public abstinence from alcohol was evident to all but prohibition's stakeholders -- chiefly, police, prosecutors and bootleggers. Despite the draconian penalties imposed by the 1926 Jones Act, which turned Volstead violations into felonies, booze remained generally available. Similarly, despite the draconian penalties of the Nixon-era Controlled Substances Act, and nearly a million arrests annually, marijuana has proven itself ineradicable, and, indeed, has become a part of our culture. The warnings from U.S. Attorneys in California come on the heels of similar threats from their counterparts in Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado and other states whose medical marijuana laws authorize secure, large-scale cultivation facilities.

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Thank you for giving voice to the now growing majority of us who support most of what was written by Dr. John Frantz ("Marijuana should be quasi-legal," Oct. 27). What the good doctor refers to as a "new category," however, is a category that already exists and it is called "regulation" - a more fitting term than "legalization."

We regulate all kinds of ingestible substances to widely varying degrees, and marijuana should be no different. Restrictions on advertising, as the doctor uses for his example of "new," have been in place on tobacco for many years.

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We need to change the illegal status of marijuana.

Today, a record 50 percent of Americans believe marijuana should be legalized, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Marijuana is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, a fact emphasized by our Surgeon General 50 years ago. There has yet to be reported a fatal case of acute marijuana overdose. Perhaps the worst thing you can say about pot is that it may bring on symptoms of schizophrenia before they would have appeared otherwise.

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Two members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation and four members of the Massachusetts legislature endorse ending marijuana prohibition. The rest of our congressional delegation has yet to catch up with Barney Frank and Michael Capuano, and 196 members of the state legislature have yet to catch up with Ellen Story of Amherst, Ruth Balser of Newton, Lori Ehrlich of Marblehead and Anne Gobi of Spencer.

These representatives understand, as did a majority in a recent Gallup Poll, that a regulated market is better than a black market.

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Diane Bolton's effort ("Letter: Legal marijuana means plenty more problems," Oct. 6) to portray cannabis (marijuana) as a detriment to children misses reality. Cannabis prohibition, not cannabis the plant, is the monster. Insisting cannabis is addictive will never make it more addictive than coffee.

If Bolton honestly wishes to save the children, re-legalize the God-given plant cannabis. Magnify the example, examine how cannabis prohibition, extermination and persecution effects children in Mexico. The same way the original prohibition with alcohol affected children is the way the sequel effects children, except the sequel is on a world scale.

It's clearly time to protect our children and stop feeding the monster. Those who support cannabis prohibition are directly and indirectly responsible for the destruction it causes to children.

Stan White

Dillon, Colo.

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Today's infants and children are the beneficiaries of the drug and sex revolution. In many cases their young lives are spent in hell's kitchen. They can't perform well in school because they can't pay attention or calm down.

The potheads of the old guard don't know what they don't know. If they had to review the in-depth studies of the harm of smoking "weed" or tobacco, they couldn't pay attention long enough to absorb the basic facts if they wanted to. They simply want to legalize "pot" so they can continue their addiction by smoking it, not getting arrested and looking like heroes doing it ("Barney Frank looks to remove another taboo," Sept. 13).

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We would like to acknowledge our appreciation to U.S. Rep. Barney Frank for taking the time to visit and talk with a group of concerned citizens at Gallery X in New Bedford on his efforts to legalize marijuana.

This proposal, co-sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, would federally legalize marijuana (cannabis) and let states make up their own laws on regulation, cultivation and distribution. Whether you agree or disagree, we should appreciate Rep. Frank for the courage of taking this proposition on and fighting for what he believes is just.

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Maryland and Massachusetts, two states. What do they have in common?

An issue that I am addressing is that a representative from each state is pushing to make two current illegal actions legal: Gov. O'Malley of Maryland wants to allow illegals to go to college in this state on in-state tuition at taxpayers' expense; Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts wants to legalize marijuana. What do both of these actions have in common? Garnering votes for these two incumbents.

Responding to O'Malley, if illegal people want to pay in-state tuition, then the reasonable next step is to become a legal citizen in this country and live in the state. Immigrants have successfully done that for years and years. Why do we as legal voting and tax paying citizens have to give in to illegals because the sheer numbers of them make it easier to cave in to their demands?

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Thousands of pro-marijuana Bostonians attended the 22nd annual Freedom Rally, commonly known as "Hempfest," on the Boston Common Saturday afternoon to listen to live music and protest for federal legalization of marijuana.

Since cannabis was decriminalized in Massachusetts in 2008, making it illegal to arrest anyone carrying up to one ounce of marijuana, Hempfest has served both as a celebration and a rally against federal prohibition of the plant.

This year, the Common hosted 21 musical acts and booths of organizations such as the Mass. Cannabis Reform Coalition, Mass. Libertarians and Water Pipes by Vortex.

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