A Baltimore man charged with the attempted murder of a police officer who was trying to make an undercover drug purchase Friday night was arrested in December 2007 by the same officer, court records show.

According to online court records, Baltimore police Officer Dante Arthur was the complainant when Sean A. Cox was charged with trespass and possession of marijuana Dec. 27, 2007.

Cox, whose address is listed in the 6100 block of Alta Ave., pleaded guilty to the possession charge in Baltimore District Court and was fined $75 in March 2008. The trespass charge was dropped.

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Joining the Frederick Police Department's fight against illegal drugs is just a few keystrokes away.

The drug enforcement unit has established an e-mail address for taking residents' tips on drug activity -- even photos or videos, said Sgt. Dwight Sommers, the unit's supervisor.

Police aren't looking to identify tipsters, Sommers said. They don't plan to drag them into court.

"Not to worry. That's not how this works," he said. "We simply want to elicit information from the community that will give us a start - a location, a tag number. We'll take it from there."

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Eight-year City Police Department Veteran In Critical But Stable Condition

Police have charged three city men with attempted murder in the shooting Friday of an undercover officer outside a troubled housing complex in the Seton Hill neighborhood of Baltimore.

Officer Dante Arthur, an eight-year veteran of the city Police Department, remained in critical but stable condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center yesterday after the first of what Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III said would likely be several reconstructive surgeries. Arthur, who was shot twice in the face Friday night after attempting to make an undercover drug purchase in the 400 block of Orchard St., is expected to make a full recovery.

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As a retired police detective, I am only too aware of the ways Ronald Fraser's observations ring true ("Getting paid with raids," Commentary, Dec. 10). Civil asset forfeiture has corrupted my profession.

Hundreds of cases of this kind of corruption come to light every year, and they are generated by our dysfunctional and immoral drug war.

It should be pointed out that prosecutors' offices also often profit from such forfeitures. Everyone wants this "free" money.

Will it take a depression to force us to abandon the modern form of prohibition that is the war on drugs?

Howard J. Wooldridge

Frederick

The writer is an education specialist for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

[end]

Police Estimate It's At Least A $400,000-Per-Week Business

Public housing communities are quiet, peaceful and even friendly by day, but change noticeably an hour after sundown.

At night, late-model cars, pickup trucks and SUVs, such as a glistening black Cadillac Escalade with dark windows and lots of chrome, roll onto avenues such as Clay Street.

Young men run alongside these vehicles in a ritual that makes no sense to outsiders.

The runners, knowledgeable sources said, are most likely low-level drug dealers, and the drivers are their suppliers. The runner will toss a roll of money onto the car seat or in the back of the pickup, and the driver will go elsewhere to count the loot. If the roll is short, the accounting may be painful.

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A prospective Baltimore firefighter was arrested at the department's training academy Monday, one of nine people indicted on charges of conspiracy to distribute heroin, as part of a sweeping drug investigation that netted several federal indictments in September.

Fire officials confirmed that Brandon Ferebee, 20, was taken into custody at the fire academy, where he was slated to graduate next month. He was among a group of people indicted Dec. 3, a follow-up to a wiretap investigation that broke up a large-scale heroin operation on Baltimore's east side and led to the seizure of drugs, guns and thousands of dollars.

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Commission President Janice LaRue Said Nearly All Projects Budgeted At $25,000 Would Require The Testing Anyway, As Those Generally Have Some Portion Of State Funding.

KEYSER, W.Va. -- Matching its own policies to those of the state, the Mineral County Commission approved requiring contractors who are awarded bids totaling $25,000 or more do random drug testing of construction employees.

"In the construction industry, there is 15 percent usage of illegal substances," Larry Young of the Alliance of Construction Trades said at Tuesday's commission meeting. "We are just asking the county commissioners to adopt the guidelines put in place by the state."

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As Maryland law enforcement agencies rake in millions seized in drug cases, is justice being served?

On the streets, where illegal drugs are still easy to get at affordable prices, Maryland police chiefs are losing the decades-long drug war. But many departments have come to depend on drug raids to increase their operating budgets. While the drug trade still enriches the bad guys, police chiefs now also get a piece of the action.

Many states, wary of overzealous police departments, require that the proceeds from seized assets be used for education or other non-police purposes. But the 1984 federal Comprehensive Crime Control Act, a turning point in America's war on drugs, is a way to get around these state laws. It allows state and local police departments, working with U.S. agents, to "federalize" money and property seized during local drug raids. The federal government gets at least 20 percent of the seized assets, giving back up to 80 percent - now exempt from state law - to state and local police agencies.

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Distinguished research psychiatrist studied LSD therapy.

Dr. Albert A. Kurland, a distinguished research psychiatrist, a former director of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at Spring Grove State Hospital and an advocate of LSD therapy, died Sunday of cardiac failure at North Oaks retirement community. He was 94.

Dr. Kurland, the son of Eastern European immigrants, was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He later was sent to live with relatives in Baltimore, where he graduated from City College in 1932.

He was a 1940 graduate of the University of Maryland Medical School and completed an internship at the old Sinai Hospital in East Baltimore.

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During Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, there was a dramatic addition to gangsters' income: proceeds from the sale of alcohol. They weren't particularly good at making alcoholic drinks, but they were the ones who were willing to break the law, so consumers didn't have a choice. The prohibition of cannabis and other popular recreational drugs has had a similar effect, especially since increases in enforcement, such as those taken by President Nixon in the early '70s. In his Nov. 25 guest column, Benjamin Kubic expressed concern about the money that was funneled to criminal organizations, including those with terrorist agendas, by prohibition of certain drugs. We at Students for Sensible Drug Policy share Kubic's concern for our country's security.

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Drug policies modeled after alcohol prohibition have given rise to a youth-oriented black market for drugs ("Legalizing drugs: The money argument," Dec. 2).

Illegal drug dealers don't ID young drug purchasers for age, but they do recruit minors immune to adult sentences into the drug trade.

Throwing more money into the war on drugs is no solution.

Attempts to limit the supply of illegal drugs while demand remains constant only increase the profitability of drug trafficking. And in the case of addictive drugs like heroin, a spike in street prices leads desperate addicts to increase their criminal activity to feed desperate habits.

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Legalizing narcotics could end an expensive and ineffective war on drugs and pump billions of dollars into the ailing economy, according to a report released this week.

The narcotics business has reached new levels of violence while draining public budgets since the debut of a rhetorical "war on drugs" almost four decades ago, according to the report by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a national organization of police, prosecutors, judges, FBI agents and corrections officials.

"We've got to wake up here and really do something about this," said Maj. Neill Franklin, a former Maryland State Police narcotics officer and Baltimore police trainer who contributed to the report.

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Friday marks 75 years since repeal of the Volstead Act, which made the manufacture, distribution and consumption of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States. As the anniversary of the end of Prohibition approaches, modern advocates of a similar repeal are calling again for the decriminalization of heroin, cocaine and marijuana - and this time they've come packing a money argument by a Harvard economist.

I like money arguments. They are usually a lot more effective than emotional ones or those that exploit stubborn prejudices with the intent of maintaining the status quo.

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I have seen many arguments for racial equality in almost all aspects of society, but last Tuesday's column by Students for Sensible Drug Policy's Irina Alexander was the first argument I have ever seen for racial equality in imprisonment. Ms. Alexander argues that the only possible reason that a disproportionate number of blacks are in jail for drug-related crime is either police corruption or racial profiling. She misses the obvious third possibility: Blacks could actually commit a disproportionate number of drug-related crimes. A disproportionate number of white executives have been arrested for fraud; would Ms. Alexander argue that the FBI should pick up some Asians to balance out that inequality?

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RE: "5 more students arrested in brawl," Nov. 13

Thanks for exposing the recent fights in Crisfield High School. It is a tragic condition that has occurred throughout the past third of a century in many schools throughout the United States.

The article cited a group of fight participants as the "420 Gang." For those not aware, "420" is a code term for marijuana use. This confirms once again the involvement of drugs in school violence. This is consistent with an official school report of drug involvement in school riots at my own children's high school in Fairfax County Virginia 34 years ago. In reaction to similar school violence in other schools at that time, parents from throughout the nation united in the Parents Movement, under the leadership of Nancy Reagan, to promote drug prevention among schoolchildren. This movement continues its prevention activities today, with a major focus on student drug testing -- for treatment not punishment.

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You'd have to be high to think banning the sale of individual cigars would stop young people from smoking marijuana - or at the very least, you'd have to be very out of touch. And yet, last week Prince George's County became what seems to be the first municipality in the country to ban the sale of individual cigars. County councilmembers said the measure will target the common practice of emptying cheap cigars of tobacco to smoke marijuana. We fear the law will do little more than spur an uptick in the purchasing of wrapping papers and paraphernalia.

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Campus Students for Sensible Drug Policy activists said they feel reinvigorated in their fight for campus and national drug policy reform after this weekend's largely successful conference, where members from more than 100 sister chapters across the country, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia gathered to share tips and success stories.

Drug policy activists said they will discuss and improve the campus chapter's battles to implement a Good Samaritan Policy and equalize punishments for marijuana and alcohol violations.

"We're trying a couple different strategies, one of which would involve a coalition of student groups, [Student Government Association] members and members of different boards like the student conduct committee [of the University Senate]," said chapter president Amanda Simmons. "When we do push this through, we want to have all these people on board."

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With all the doom-and-gloom predictions about the economy, I think it is finally time to reconsider legalizing drugs.

Taxing the legal drug trade could be a tremendous source of income for the cities and the entire country. And an added benefit would be a reduction in crime.

What are we waiting for?

Anne Heaton

Baltimore

[end]

The Prince George's County Council adopted one of the nation's most sweeping restrictions on the sale of cigars yesterday, an effort to curb a growing trend among urban youths of using hollowed-out cigars to smoke marijuana.

The council voted 8 to 1 to ban the sale of single cigars, requiring stores to sell them in packages of at least five. The new law will also make it easier to charge someone possessing a cigar with a drug paraphernalia offense.

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The other day, one of my friends asked me the commonly pondered question, "Wait, so why is marijuana illegal?" Let's not joke around - the majority of today's population has come to realizethat marijuana is at least not as bad as the Reefer Madness era tried to convince us it is. I think many of us would agree that police resources should be focused on serious crime. So what exactly is the real reason for prohibition? The answer is disconcerting.

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