Missouri Rep. Stanley Cox, R-Sedalia, recently gave an interview about the proposed revisions to the Missouri criminal code. During this interview, he talked at length about a section of the bill that he saw fit to remove, a section that was intended to revise certain drug offense laws. While I don't necessarily disagree with his stated reason for removing it (the idea being that "controversial" law reform should not be buried in 800-page bills, but instead debated on its own), I think his personal views on the subject have led him to prematurely dismiss these reforms.

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SPRINGFIELD, Mo. - U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, a potential presidential contender in 2016, told a gathering of Missouri Republicans on Saturday that America's drug laws have gone "overboard" in severity and unfair application, and that it's time to scale back penalties.

"The war on drugs has had a disproportionate effect on people of color," Paul said. "I'm not for legalizing any of this stuff, (but) let's try to make sure it's fair. We've gone overboard on some of this stuff."

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Regarding the letter "View cannabis legalization as a moral issue" (Feb. 14):

I personally do not find anything of value from the legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes. Marijuana use is associated with working memory impairment. Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois did MRI brain scans of young adults who had smoked pot daily in their teens but then abstained for at least two years. The scans showed changes in the areas responsible for working memory, which appeared to shrink and collapse inward compared with the brains of subjects who had not used marijuana. The marijuana users also did worse on memory tests, and the abnormalities in their brain scans were similar to those of people with schizophrenia, the authors concluded.

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In "Back to the future: A wager on weed" (Jan. 29), James E. Fisher correctly urges readers to consider the moral implications of marijuana legalization, but I think his article gives an incomplete picture of the moral considerations at play.

Under cannabis prohibition, around 20,000 people are arrested for possession of cannabis every year in Missouri. These individuals often receive criminal records that impede their ability to go to college, rent an apartment and get a job. I find that to be immoral.

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Back in the '60s when I was a young police officer, one of our duties was to take sick prisoners out of the holdover to the hospital for treatment for withdrawals.

En route to St. Louis City Hospital No. 1, I would ask the prisoner how they got started on heroin, and the stock answer was they started on reefer (marijuana).

America, wake up. This is a dangerous drug and leads to harsher drug use.

Wilbern Grove Oakville

[end]

Regarding President Obama's comments to The New Yorker magazine on the legalization of marijuana, we would like to respond to his characterization of marijuana use, as expressed to his daughters. With all due respect to Mr. Obama's choice of words, a "bad idea" is wearing navy socks with black pants; a "waste of time" is watching a full season of Seinfeld reruns for the sixth time instead of studying for a chemistry final; and "not very healthy" is choosing french fries over mixed vegetables. While Mr. Obama is entitled to share his personal opinions, we feel a responsibility to share scientific facts.

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Missouri voters, not legislature, should make decision on marijuana legalization Dan Viets, chairman of Show-Me Cannabis Regulation, is doing the correct thing taking the issue of re-legalizing the plant cannabis (marijuana) to the voters rather than the legislature.

The Missouri legislature is likely a prohibitionist majority and it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch. Colorado re-legalized cannabis over a year ago and the sky hasn't fallen in.

A sane reason to continue caging responsible adults for using what God says is good on the first page of the Bible doesn't exist.

Stan White is a resident of Dillon, Colo.

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Jeff Mizanskey has sat behind bars for twenty years. His only hope of getting out is clemency from the governor.

On a dark rural highway, a week before Christmas in 1993, two Hispanic males barreled east through Missouri in a 1978 Mercury Cougar. Stashed in the trunk was nearly 100 pounds of marijuana.

"Since I've been here in prison, I've met lots of people in for murder, rape, robberies, all kinds of violent crimes. I've seen a lot of them go home on parole. Don't I ever get a chance?"

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Columbia - A local attorney has created a new proposal for marijuana legalization in Missouri that would take the issue directly to voters, asking them to approve an amendment to the state Constitution and bypassing the state legislature.

Attorney Dan Viets, chairman of Show-Me Cannabis Regulation, has submitted an initiative petition to the Missouri secretary of state's office seeking an amendment to legalize the plant.

"The legislature would repeal it if it were just a statute change," he said.

The proposal seeks to legalize marijuana for those 21 and older while taxing marijuana sales to help fund law enforcement, retirement plans for firefighters and police, education, mental health services, drug treatment, and enforcement of new marijuana regulations.

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CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (AP) - Missouri's park system has bought a Shannon County campground from the federal government that had been forfeited after its former owner was convicted on a drug charge.

Missouri State Parks bought the more than 300acre property known as Camp Zoe at auction for $640,000 plus closing costs. The online auction began last month and ended Friday, said the park system's director, Bill Bryan.

The property had belonged to James Tebeau, who pleaded guilty in June 2012 to one federal count of maintaining drug-involved property. For years, Tebeau had hosted concerts at Camp Zoe, including some that drew about 5,000 fans. The campground was raided during a Halloween 2010 concert that prosecutors said featured up to 200 dealers selling marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine, LSD and other drugs.

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After reading "Going to pot/Experts debate pros, cons of legalizing marijuana" (News-Press, Nov. 10), it seems clear Buchanan County Prosecuting Attorney Dwight Scroggins is picking and choosing "facts" to support his opinions.

The claim that cannabis causes violence has been around since the Reefer Madness days of the 1920s and '30s, but it has been soundly discredited for over 40 years. Studies sometimes show a correlation, but not causation.

When the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1970, it also created a commission to study marijuana use in the United States. The commission released its findings in 1972, concluding, "the empirical evidence gathered to date lends no support to the hypothesis that marihuana heightens aggressive tendencies in the user or that its effects significantly increase the likelihood of inciting the user to violence or crime."

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In August, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed the Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Pilot Program Act, making Illinois the 20th state to legalize marijuana for medical use. Illinois has one of the toughest laws governing this new program. In January, this program will go live after nearly a decade of doctors' and patients' perseverance to bring this law into existence. To be included in the program you will need to have an order from a licensed Illinois doctor, an extensive background check and the qualifying patient or designated caregiver will be issued and possess a valid ID card from the Department of Public Health.

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While reading Howard Weissman's editorial "Legalizing marijuana means children will be targeted" (Nov. 8), I was pleased to see that the National Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse now agrees that adult cannabis use should not be treated as a criminal matter and that Mr. Weissman acknowledges that no one wants to see more kids using cannabis. However, I strongly dispute Weissman's claim that cannabis prohibition more effectively keeps the substance away from teens than would the legal, regulated model we employ for alcohol and tobacco. In fact, prohibition fails at preventing teens in particular from using marijuana.

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COLUMBIA - About 70 people showed up to Stewart Hall at MU on Thursday to hear two prominent drug law reform advocates recount reasons to legalize drugs, such as marijuana, and how to run a successful campaign in favor of the issue.

Maj. Neill Franklin is a 33-year veteran of the Maryland State Police and the Baltimore Police Department. In the 1980s, he worked as an undercover narcotics officer in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where most of the arrests he made were for non-violent drug crimes, usually related to marijuana, he said.

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Thank you for Howard Weissman's commentary "Legalizing marijuana means children will be targeted" (Nov. 8). Points that he made are strongly supported by a new book written by addiction medicine specialists Dr. Scott Teitelbaum and Michael Nias, "Weed: Family Guide to Marijuana Myths and Facts."

The authors emphasize that due to crop engineering, marijuana is a much stronger drug than it was in decades past. The chemical that makes users feel high, THC, is 5 to 7 times higher than it was in the 1970s.

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Citing the recent Gallup poll which announced that 58 percent of people support marijuana legalization, the Post-Dispatch editorial board suggested now is the time for Missouri to jump on the pro-legalization bandwagon. Between the potential new jobs and sources of revenue, legalizing marijuana seemed like a viable solution to some of Missouri's problems.

While a majority of Americans appear to favor legalizing the use of marijuana, far fewer people are enthused about legalizing its sale. Indifferent acceptance of adults using marijuana is a long way from endorsing the creation of a new Big Tobacco-like industry producing, promoting and selling marijuana to our kids - an inevitable consequence of legalization.

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Kenneth McManus asks how decriminalizing marijuana will help us better educate our children (Letters, Nov. 2). It won't and no one is claiming it will; that's not the issue.

The issue is that we have made things immeasurably worse by jailing otherwise productive, law-abiding citizens, overcrowding our jails and wasting billions of dollars on law enforcement that could be put to much better use. In addition, the sale and taxation of marijuana will raise hundreds of millions of dollars. This money could go a long way to addressing some of the other needs of our society. Hey, I'll bet we could allocate some of that money to education!

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Renee Heney uses predictable scare tactics to defend her opposition to marijuana legalization ("Legalizing marijuana jeopardizes the health of our children," Oct. 31). We can all agree that teens should not smoke pot, or be using any mind-altering substances, as those are important developmental years. Yet, data continue to show that general education and regulation, not outright criminalization of legal, age-restricted substances, effectively decrease youth access and use.

In fact, teen consumption of tobacco and alcohol, two legal, age-restricted products, have reached historically low levels, according to the Monitoring the Future Survey, conducted by the University of Michigan. This was achieved through a concerted effort by the government, industry businesses and educational institutions to restrict advertising, promote responsible behavior and keep students informed on the effects and potential harms these products may have on their growing bodies. What's more, recent studies have shown that in states with an established regulatory regime for certain individuals to gain legal access to marijuana, adolescent use rates have either stayed the same, or even gone down.

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When the history of the legalization of marijuana is written, October 2013 will go down as a key month.

Three moments this month, seemingly unrelated, might have hastened the day when Colorado and Washington will be the norm, not the outliers, in a country reliving the end of Prohibition for the second time.

This month, on his farm in southeastern Colorado's Baca County, Ryan Loflin harvested a 55-acre hemp crop, believed to be the first legal hemp crop harvested in the U.S. in more than five decades. When Colorado voters legalized marijuana, it opened the door on cultivating hemp crops, which were an agricultural staple in many states - including Missouri - in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

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In response to the editorial on legalizing marijuana ("The end of Prohibition, Part II," Oct. 29), I have this to say: If the majority of citizens - Missouri and otherwise - are in favor of marijuana legalization, they are misinformed. Equipped with knowledge, most people would not support an issue that jeopardizes the health and well-being of our country's youth.

There are risks associated with marijuana use among adolescents and young adults - whose brains are still developing - and to gloss over these realities, and make it appear as though "everyone" believes marijuana is harmless and should be legalized, is inexcusable.

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