To the Editor:

"Fearful of Alienating Afghans, U.S. Turns Blind Eye to Opium" (front page, March 21) highlights the dilemma: should Afghan farmers grow poppies or should poppy fields be eradicated, jeopardizing livelihoods but eliminating the opium that destroys lives?

The United States faced a similar dilemma in the 1970s when Turkey was the principal source of imported heroin via laboratories in Marseille - -- the "French connection." Turkey limited cultivation and built a factory to convert opium poppy heads into "poppy straw," convertible into the legal medicines morphine and codeine. The Turkish government outlawed growing of opium poppies in all but seven provinces that were traditional growing areas.

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To the Editor:

I find it intriguing that United States military commanders in Afghanistan are now rejecting opium eradication efforts. Surely even those who are implacably opposed to drug legalization cannot escape the implication that, when such pragmatic leaders take the stance that the "war" on drugs is counterproductive, perhaps it is time to reconsider the effects this endless "war" is having closer to home.

If we ended drug prohibition and instead regulated opium, we could cut out a major source of funding for terrorist organizations and drug cartels while winning over the rural populations in Afghanistan. This is equally true of other illegal drugs, which finance vicious gangs, crime syndicates and cartels in the United States and abroad.

Jonathan Kolber

Denver

[end]

To the Editor:

The United States is turning a blind eye to illegal Afghan poppy production to avoid alienating farmers by destroying their main cash crop. This policy is immoral, unethical and militarily counterproductive.

Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium and a key supplier to international crime and drug syndicates. This drug is also the main financial support for Taliban insurgents and a main cause of government corruption, and destroys numerous lives worldwide.

The solution: provide alternative staple crops and livelihoods for the Afghans. Initially the United States government could purchase and destroy the poppy crop. It could then provide cash payments for interim family support until alternative crops can be planted, plus seeds, plants, fertilizers, drip irrigation tubing and other equipment and technical assistance, provided that poppy planting will cease.

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To the Editor:

Rather than turn a blind eye, the United States government should simply purchase the region's entire poppy crop directly from its farmers. We could then sell this raw material to legitimate pharmaceutical companies worldwide for the manufacture of morphine and related opiates, destroying any excess still in our possession.

Direct purchase of the region's poppy crops by the United States would prevent drug-related profits from flowing to the Taliban, all but eliminate local corruption surrounding the drug trade and allow local farmers to make a living doing what they are good at -- growing poppies.

We, in turn, would establish an American presence that actually benefits the people of the region.

John Karol

Orford, N.H.

[end]

Port Dickinson Resident Attends Unveiling Of Binghamton Billboard

BINGHAMTON -- Rhonda Holmes admitted to some nervousness as she stood in front of the billboard in a parking lot at Front and Clinton streets.

The 42-year-old Port Dickinson woman said she is breaking the law by using marijuana to ease the effects of multiple sclerosis, which she has battled for seven years.

That's something she wants to help change.

Holmes was at the unveiling of a billboard put up by NY Patients First, a medical marijuana patient advocacy group.

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What was once only a dream shared by potheads throughout America may soon become somewhat of a reality. States across the country are debating policy changes concerning the legality of medical marijuana.

This year alone, 14 states will consider legalizing marijuana for medical purposes or reducing the penalties for possessing small amounts for personal use or both. On top of that, 14 states have already relaxed their marijuana laws.

I am opposed to the legalization of marijuana. While many state that the legalization of medical marijuana will help bring us out of the economic recession, I think there are alternative routes.

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But Assembly Leader Doubts Budget Will Include Measure

ALBANY ? The Senate is making a renewed push to legalize medical marijuana in New York, hoping to make it the 16th state to legalize the drug for patients with serious, debilitating or life-threatening illnesses.

The Assembly passed a medical-marijuana bill twice in recent years, but the Senate did not. Legislation that would legalize its use passed a key Senate committee Tuesday, and the same bill is making its way through the Assembly committee process.

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Editor:

Twin bills (A. 9016 and S. 4041-B) are currently waiting in the New York State Legislature for the allotment of safe access to medical marijuana through state-registered and regulated entities. Legalized medical marijuana will not only provide comfort to patients with life-threatening illnesses with minimal side effects, it has the potential to raise our State's tax revenues with little opposition.

Marijuana reduces pain related to specific medical conditions (such as Fibromyalgia and HIV/AIDS). In fact, a study published in Neurology (2007) showed that 52 percent of patients with HIV-associated sensory neuropathy who smoked marijuana had a greater than 30 percent reduction in chronic pain. Additionally, marijuana is gauged to be as or even less addictive than caffeine with significantly fewer side effects than most chemically manufactured prescription drugs.

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Congress is trying to undo some of the damage it inflicted more than two decades ago with its frenzied mandating of longer prison sentences for abusers of crack cocaine than for those who abuse the powder version.

The result has been disproportionately harsher punishment for crack offenders in black neigborhoods.

The law is built on a scientifically indefensible 100-to-1 ratio, which means the same prison term (a minimum of five years) for 5 ounces of crack as for 500 ounces of the powder kind.

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Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano and Nassau County Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey were joined by Long Island Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence's (LICADD) Executive Director Jeffrey Reynolds at a press conference where they announced the implementation of the "Too Good for Drugs Program," which was created in 1978 by the Mendez Foundation.

"Too Good for Drugs" (TGFD) is a school-based prevention program for kindergarten through 12th grade. It builds on students' resiliency by teaching them how to be socially competent and autonomous problem solvers. TGFD K-8 has a separate, developmentally appropriate curriculum for each grade level, which includes emotional competency skills, social and resistance skills, goal-setting and decision-making skills.

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If medical marijuana becomes legal, it will be a disappointment to many. The proposed law would not require any doctor to prescribe medical marijuana, just as New York doesn't require education in pain care or enforce the prohibition against cruel and degrading treatment.

So as state Sen. Kemp Hannon has indicated, it is likely marijuana would be used for conditions for which it has no or little benefit and not be used for conditions where it is of benefit.

The law would leave too much to the discretion of physicians, given that New York is rated among the six worst states in the nation for pain management by the Pain and Policy Studies Group. Unlike 26 other states, New York has no state pain management initiative and it has never done a statewide study of pain, though many other states have.

It is naive to believe that legalization of medical marijuana will do much in New York to help people with cancer, arthritis and other illnesses.

David Becker

Bronx

[end]

The federal law that mandates harsher prison terms for people arrested with crack cocaine than for those caught with cocaine powder is scientifically and morally indefensible. Bills to end the disparity are pending in both the House and Senate. Democrats who worry about being pegged as "soft on crime" will have to find their backbones and push the legislation through.

Congress passed the law during the crack hysteria of the 1980s when it was widely and wrongly believed that crack - cocaine cooked in baking soda - was more addictive and led to more drug violence than the chemically identical powdered form. These myths were soon disproved. But by then, Congress had locked the courts into a policy under which minority drug addicts arrested with small amounts of crack were being sent to prison for far longer terms than white drug users caught with a satchel full of powder.

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A Brooklyn jury found three police officers not guilty on Monday of abusing a suspect in the Prospect Park subway station during a 2008 arrest, in a case that recalled some of the city's most notorious police brutality episodes but never generated as much public outcry or departmental change.

Acquitting all three men on all counts, the jurors rejected Michael Mineo's claims that Officer Richard Kern had attacked him and repeatedly rammed a baton between his buttocks, thereby making the charges against the two other officers -- that they had helped cover up the abuse -- irrelevant.

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A juror who told others on the panel that a police officer accused of sexually abusing Michael Mineo had been previously accused of brutality was dismissed Friday morning, more than a day after the jury had started deliberating.

Justice Alan D. Marrus replaced the juror, a young woman, with an alternate, a traffic enforcement agent. Then he called the reconstituted panel into the courtroom and told jurors that the officer, Richard Kern, had never been charged with any previous crime and that they would have to start their deliberations anew.

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A Brooklyn judge halted deliberations Thursday in a police brutality trial after one of the jurors told the others that Officer Richard Kern, the main defendant, had previously been accused of misconduct -- allegations that were not introduced during the trial and that the judge described as "misinformation."

The judge, Justice Alan D. Marrus of State Supreme Court, acted after jurors sent him a note about 4:40 p.m., as he prepared to dismiss them for the day.

"One of the jurors just told the jury that Officer Kern had been prosecuted or convicted of police brutality two times prior to this trial," the note said. "Many of the jury is very uncomfortable with this and don't know how to proceed."

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The prosecutor grabbed a baton, the symbol of the police brutality case that has unfolded over the past month in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, to show how quickly Michael Mineo could have been sodomized, as he said he was in the Prospect Park subway station on Oct. 15, 2008.

Four times, the prosecutor, Charles Guria, jabbed the baton into a folding table in front of the jury box, and for a few seconds the sound of steel hitting the wood filled the courtroom. "It doesn't take very long," Mr. Guria said, responding to a defense lawyer's suggestion that Mr. Mineo's arrest, for smoking marijuana outside the station, happened too quickly for the abuse to have occurred.

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Howard Lotsof was 19, addicted to heroin and searching for a new high in 1962 when he swallowed a bitter-tasting white powder taken from an exotic West African shrub.

“The next thing I knew,” he told The New York Times in 1994, “I was straight.”

The substance was ibogaine, an extract of Tabernanthe iboga, a perennial rain-forest plant found primarily in Gabon. In the Bwiti religion it is used in puberty initiation rites, inducing a powerful altered state for at least 48 hours during which young people are said to come into contact with a universal ancestor.

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Lawyers defending three police officers accused in a brutality case sought on Tuesday to blunt damage done by a fellow officer who had testified that he saw Officer Richard Kern jab a baton between the buttocks of Michael Mineo, a 24-year-old body piercer who had been smoking marijuana outside a Brooklyn subway station.

Mr. Kern's lawyer, John D. Patten, said that prosecutors might as well have supplied the words used by the key prosecution witness, Officer Kevin Maloney. "It's not Maloney testifying," Mr. Patten said during closing arguments in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn as he turned and pointed at Charles Guria, the lead prosecutor. "It's this gentleman here testifying."

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Citing insufficient evidence, federal authorities said Tuesday that they would not bring a civil rights case against the New York City police officers involved in the killing of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old black man who was shot by the police outside a strip club in Queens on his wedding day.

The decision by the Justice Department came after prosecutors and federal agents reviewed the case, in which five police officers fired 50 shots into the Nissan Altima that Mr. Bell was driving. The car struck a detective in the leg and hit a police van just before the officers began firing their weapons.

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The nation's criminal justice system is in need of an overhaul. This is particularly true of its incarceration policies. Too many people are being put behind bars who do not need to be there, at great cost to the states, and not enough attention is being paid to helping released prisoners re-enter society.

The Senate Judiciary Committee recently voted to create a blue-ribbon commission to study the justice system and offer reforms. The bill's main sponsor was Jim Webb, a Democrat of Virginia who is one of the Senate's more thoughtful voices on crime and punishment.

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