The Democrat-Herald's editorial displays some backwards thinking (Legalization wouldn't end narcotics wars, April 3, 2010). Murder rates decreased for 10 years after ending the original prohibition with alcohol and there's reason to believe ending the sequel will have the same results.

The logic of blaming "deadly violence down south" on citizens who use "controlled substances" is interesting since the reason violence exists is due to the reality that those very substances are in fact not regulated and controlled.

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I'm writing about your not-so-thoughtful editorial: "Legalization wouldn't end narcotics wars" (April 3, 2010). Ending alcohol prohibition got rid of the alcohol cartels.

When is the last time the Albany Democrat-Herald had a story about alcohol merchants settling scores with their competitors with gun battles in the streets?

Probably 1933, the year we ended the disaster known as alcohol prohibition.

Kirk Muse, Mesa, Ariz.

[end]

It is customary to blame the Mexican drug violence on American addicts and casual users. The assumption is that if Americans would either legalize drugs or quit being stupid enough to use them, the big money would be gone from the Mexican trade, and the criminals would have no more reason to fight or to kill each other and innocent bystanders. That assumption and that rosy scenario is almost certainly wrong.

The Mexican drug syndicates are not just people in business who have no choice but to resort to violence in order to protect their interests. They are in that business and they torture and kill people, and sometimes cut off their heads, because they are criminals of the worst kind.

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Protect the population while relying on better human intelligence: Where have we heard this before?

Some 16,000 people have been killed over the last four years in violence among factions in Mexican drug cartels, but the murders this month of two U.S. citizens in the border town of Juarez helped spur the governments of Mexico and the United States to rethink the ways they combat the problem.

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano met with their counterparts Tuesday in Mexico City, they said they had agreed to reshape the Merida Initiative launched by President George W. Bush to combat drug violence. They decided to focus less on technology and infrastructure -- such as border walls and helicopters -- and more on supporting communities plagued with violence, disrupting trafficking and increasing economic opportunities.

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Family Says Book 'Not Appropriate' For Elementary School Students

Laura Nevel grew concerned when her 10-year-old daughter asked her about a white powdery drug.

Echeo, a fifth-grader at Auburn Elementary School, explained that they were reading the book "The Dead Man in Indian Creek" out loud in class.

A passage in the book described a white powdery substance, and "everyone yelled out: 'It's cocaine,'" Echeo said. Not knowing what it was, she asked her mother about it.

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It's happened again. Another set of well-meaning parents wants to ban a book because they think it's inappropriate for all elementary-school students, not just their own.

Laura and Aaron Nevel of Salem object to the content of the award-winning book, "The Dead Man in Indian Creek," which their daughter Echeo Nevel, 10, was reading in her fifth-grade class at Auburn Elementary School. The couple has filed a formal complaint with the Salem-Keizer School District asking that copies of the book by Mary Downing Hahn be banned from all district elementary school classrooms and libraries.

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A Canadian mother says her Canadian son should be with her, not in the Oregon foster care system

Lisa Kirkman said she will do anything to get her 11-year-old son back.

"I'll dance with a chicken on my head if I have to," the Calgary, Alberta, resident said.

That's probably not what Lane County Juvenile Court Judge Kip Leonard, or anyone else involved in this strange and complicated international child custody case, has in mind, however.

Nonetheless, Kirkman, 34, is making increasingly public and dramatic efforts to retrieve her son, Noah, a Canadian citizen who has been living in Lane County foster homes for the past 1 1/2 years under supervision of the state Department of Human Services.

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Decisions regarding foster care children in Oregon are made by judges in juvenile court, with input from state Department of Human Services caseworkers, DHS spokesman Gene Evans said. DHS is working with the Lane County Juvenile Court, the Canadian government and the U.S. State Department on Noah Kirkman's case, Evans said.

One problem with such cases is that there is no specific international treaty for repatriation -- the return of a person to one's homeland -- of children, said Gloria Anderson, DHS's diversity and international affairs manager. Instead, two other international treaties are consulted, the Hague Adoption Convention and the Uniform Child Abduction Prevention Act, or UCAPA, Anderson said.

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The war between marijuana criminals and law enforcement continues, providing one debating point after another in favor of rationalizing our laws.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Oregon reports on a recent case in which a 57-year-old man from Gresham was indicted and arrested to await trial. He is charged not just with running a marijuana farm on his property in the woods, but also with trying to run over a Forest Service officer to avoid arrest.

The guy allegedly was trying to get away from two Forest Service officers trying to arrest him and aimed his pickup at one of them. They opened fire and hit the suspect in one leg before he surrendered.

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Students Unable To Use Medical Marijuana On Campus

The university is unable to accommodate medical marijuana usage on campus, regardless of a student's possession of appropriate medical marijuana authorization.

A concerned Portland State student said he is frustrated by the fact that he is prohibited by the PSU policy to medicate on campus and feels he has been encouraged to use medical marijuana on campus with discretion. Due to the stigma he feels on campus, he wished to be identified only as David, an undergraduate student in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Administrators say the policy is not specific to PSU-it is simply congruent with state law.

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ASHLAND -- The man who opened the nation's first "pot club" for medical marijuana users will come to town Tuesday to speak in favor of legalizing marijuana.

Dennis Peron, known as the "father of medical marijuana," supports across-the-board legalization of marijuana. In a telephone interview, he said enforcing existing laws costs the criminal justice system a fortune.

Peron is scheduled to speak from 6 to 7:30 p.m., Tuesday in the Meese Auditorium in the Visual Arts Building at Southern Oregon University, 1250 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland. The free presentation is sponsored by Ashland Alternative Health, a clinic that helps people obtain medical marijuana cards.

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While Debate Over Medical Marijuana Continues, Jackson County Sees And Increase In Cardholders

Next to the federal courthouse in downtown Medford, medical marijuana patients pass in and out of a nondescript building where cannabis is smoked, grown and exchanged between patients.

In the lobby, something that looks like driftwood sits on a desk. It's the stump from a massive marijuana plant that produced 16 pounds of dried bud in a growing climate that many growers say rivals Northern California.

It's no accident that Southern Oregon NORML moved into these offices, where its volunteers have windows that overlook the courthouse parking lot used by judges and sheriff's deputies unloading prisoners for trials.

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Christine McGarvin moved to Medford three years ago from Texas, then found herself traveling to Portland to a clinic that helped her navigate the state process to get medical marijuana for Hepatitis C, fibromyalgia and a disability from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now, the 50-year-old, who holds a master's degree in science and social work, is writing a book on the history of medical marijuana in Oregon, serves on an 11-member advisory board for the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program and is part of Oregon Green Free, a resource service for medical marijuana.

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Creating an ordinance to deal with objectionable odors from legal marijuana gardens may be a pipe dream because of potential conflicts with state and federal laws, Jackson County officials say.

County Commissioner C.W. Smith said an analysis by county staff indicated too many legal problems could arise in creating local regulations to deal with smells or traffic generated by medical marijuana growing operations.

"There does not seem to be an appropriate legal approach to address the issue at the county level," he said.

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The justices will decide whether local medical marijuana patient should have been denied a concealed handgun permit by Jackson County's sheriff

Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters faces a showdown at the Oregon Supreme Court on March 3 with a local medical marijuana patient who was denied a concealed handgun permit.

The patient, Cynthia Willis, has allies in her fight for the permit, including Attorney General John Kroger and the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon.

Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters notes the U.S. Gun Control Act of 1968 specifically forbids anyone who uses or is addicted to a control substance from having a firearm. Cynthia Willis' allies in her effort to get a concealed weapons permit from Jackson County include Oregon Attorney General John Kroger and the ACLU.

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Schoen Says Legal Medical Pot Is Fine, but Illegal Activity Is 'Destroying Fabric' Of Community

Medford police Chief Randy Schoen took some heat last week from medical marijuana proponents across the state when he criticized certain aspects of the program in the department's newsletter.

Schoen said he misspoke in one portion of the newsletter, in which he suggested marijuana growth within the city is "destroying the safety, the fabric and the livability of our neighborhoods."

"What I meant to say was that growing marijuana criminally is affecting livability in Medford," Schoen said.

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High school officials working to create guidelines for dealing with teens who use marijuana legally

A handful of students at Ashland High School hold medical marijuana cards, presenting a challenge to school administrators who must now deal with pot as both an illegal drug and a legal medicine.

School officials are working to create guidelines for teens with medical marijuana cards.

"This is all just kind of starting to happen," Principal Jeff Schlecht said. "It does place us in an awkward position."

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It's been about 40 years since the United States government declared a war on drugs during the Nixon administration. Published reports put the cost of the campaign since then at more than a trillion dollars, much of it spent on enforcing the laws against marijuana.

Just a couple of weeks ago the Oregon State Police reported on an operation that seized $750,000 worth of marijuana in Southern Oregon, resulted in three arrests, and involved the work of several local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Minnesota.

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Law enforcement officials in Albany and Linn County say there's been a decline in seizures of large marijuana operations during 2009, but they are growing increasingly concerned about abuse of the medical marijuana card system.

The Democrat-Herald talked with Det. Capt. Paul Timm of the Linn County Sheriff's Office and Capt. Eric Carter of the Albany police about trends in drug enforcement.

Timm said his agency's "top four" drug concerns are marijuana, meth, heroin and prescription drugs.

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GOLD BEACH -- Curry County's programs to guide youths away from crime and use of drugs and alcohol are working, County Juvenile Department Director Kenneth W. Dukek says as he notes the low numbers of young offenders who come back in the system and the success rate of the Juvenile Drug Court.

With the support of the Curry County Circuit Court judges, our department has been administrating a juvenile drug court program funded with a federal ... grant for the past two years," Dukek said. "We are pleased to announce that the recidivism rate is 2 percent based on 55 total youth in the program, and only one youth has re-offended in the past year."

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