Legal marijuana is spreading like a weed across the land, but it has yet to take root in the place where people might benefit most from inhaling: the U.S. Capitol.

The Maryland General Assembly finished work Monday on a marijuana decriminalization bill, joining two dozen other states and the district in some form of legalization. Colorado and Washington allow recreational pot, while most others have legalized only medical marijuana, but the combined campaign has redefined the meaning of a grass-roots movement.

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State House Panel Seeks To Curb The Trend

AUSTIN, Texas - Beyond the always illegal drugs that come through back alley deals on street corners, Texas has another drug problem: illicitly used prescription medication.

A state House committee in Austin met Monday to hear testimony on an issue House Speaker Rep. Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, laid out for lawmakers to address before the next legislative session.

The House Public Health Committee is looking to "recommend strategies to curb emerging substance abuse trends among children, pregnant women, and adults, as well as to reduce health care costs and mortality," according to the speaker's interim charge.

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Two high-ranking police lieutenants who were relieved of duty last year for alleged sexual harassment of female employees under their command have quietly retired with full benefits from the Houston Police Department.

Both officers previously had been disciplined for serious violations that could have resulted in their dismissals but were allowed to keep their jobs, HPD personnel records show.

Lt. Carl Gaines, 50, whose retirement in January still allows him to get his $87,675 yearly paycheck, admitted to harassing a number of women, both officers and civilians, at his post at the city dispatch center. One civilian employee was subjected to various physical contacts, and Gaines made a lewd gesture to a female police officer, city records show.

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DALLAS (AP) - Some states, including Texas, are reporting a rise in heroin use as many addicts shift from more costly and harder-to-get prescription opiates to this cheaper alternative. A look at what's happening in Texas:

Heroin overdose deaths have more than tripled in Texas during the last 15 years.

Drug smugglers use Texas' 1,200-mile border with Mexico to transport heroin that ends up in cities and rural towns all over the state.

While use of so-called "cheese heroin" - a mix of heroin and over-the-counter pills such as Tylenol PM - that was popular in the last decade has faded, cities across Texas are seeing higher uses of Mexican "black tar" heroin. It's a gummy substance that users dilute and inject, but can also smoke or snort.

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Re: "Don't let Colorado's pot experiment draw in kids" by Steve Blow, Thursday Metro column.

While I agree with Mr. Blow and his other commentators that keeping marijuana and other drugs away from teenagers is critically important, I strongly disagree with the idea implicit in his column that legalization works against this goal.

The nature of a black market, like that for drugs, is that nobody is turned away. Anyone who wishes to buy is constrained only by the morals of his chosen dealer. There is nothing now that keeps Texas teens, and indeed younger children, from buying pot or any other drug their dealer is selling. A legal market, on the other hand, allows for regulation at the source and makes it much harder for children to take part. We've already learned this with cigarettes and alcohol. Ask your teenage children which is easiest for them to get: pot, beer or cigarettes?

I don't know how the experiments going on in Colorado and Washington will work out, but if properly operated they will reduce black market sales, and concomitant access by teens.

Paul Miller, Lewisville

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Colorado has legalized marijuana, and I'm glad. We need to try some new approaches to drug policy in this country, and if Colorado is willing to be the guinea pig, we should be grateful.

But here at home, we need to be careful that Colorado's experiment doesn't blur one very important fact.

Here, there and everywhere, teens should not be smoking marijuana.

Tina Clemmons is a prevention specialist for the Dallas Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse. She has been hearing more and more parents dismiss concerns about their teens' drug use.

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Momentum Builds for Lone Star Legalization of Marijuana

For more than a decade, Austin Democratic state Rep. Elliott Naishtat has brought to his Capitol colleagues a modest proposal: Create an affirmative defense to prosecution on pot possession charges for seriously ill Texans.

For seven sessions now - that's every other year since 2001 - he's either authored or sponsored a measure that would give bona fide patients - those suffering, for example, from AIDS, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, cancer - the ability to have a judge decide if a criminal charge for pot possession should be dismissed.

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I am one of few people alive today who lived through the days of Prohibition in the 1920s when the sale and consumption of alcohol was illegal.

With Prohibition in force, murderous Sicilian Mafia gangs controlled the illegal alcoholic beverage trade. When that law was repealed, Mafia kingpins like Al Capone disappeared from the American scene.

Now the so-called Mexican Mafia controls the marijuana trade, and their crimes against innocent civilians and children make the Sicilian Mafia look like a benevolent organization.

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Re: "Legalization will create monster," by Gary Schornick, and "Compare liquor, pot prohibitions," by Kent Kelley, Saturday Letters.

Schornick's letter is one of the most irrational circular arguments against legalization I've ever heard. His argument is that legalizing weed will simply cause the black market to push other illegal drugs in its place.

Schornick's reasoning is actually one of the strongest arguments one could possibly posit for the decriminalization of all drugs, not just marijuana.

When Prohibition was overturned in 1933, they didn't just legalize gin or just vodka, they legalized ALL alcoholic beverages.

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I read with much amusement all the articles and letters recently about legalizing marijuana and how legalizing pot will somehow end the drug war. If you believe that, you must be smoking way too much of the stuff.

People much smarter than you and me recognize the drug war as a chess match. If we legalize marijuana, then the cartels will simply start dumping cheap meth and black-tar heroin on the market and an entirely new generation of users will be created. You've solved one problem and created a whole new monster, another unintended consequence of feel-good policy.

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Kinky Friedman, Democratic primary candidate for Texas Agricultural Commissioner, visited Texas A&M on Monday to discuss his main campaign platform -- the end of marijuana and hemp prohibition in Texas -- with members of Texas Aggie Democrats.

At the student organization's meeting last night, Friedman expounded on the positive effects he hoped to bring to Texas through the legalization of marijuana and hemp and explained how he believes his policies would fortify Texas agriculture against drought, end the war on drugs and change cancer medicine.

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Re: Feb. 9 article, "Experts contemplate end of smoking."

I enjoyed the irony of the headline juxtaposed with a picture of a young woman puffing on her marijuana in Colorado. It made me think. Will "Big Tobacco" be supplanted by "Big Marijuana"? Will we see hashish cigarettes for sale at convenience stores? Will the packs carry the warning: "The President of the United States has determined that smoking dope is no worse for you than drinking alcohol?" Will it be OK for Bill Clinton to inhale now? Will there be THC patches to help those who want to quit, or e-buds with THC for those who want their fix without exposing others to secondhand high? The product and marketing opportunities seem endless!

Jonathan Dahm

Austin

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I remember reading in an older article that Mark Davis warned if cannabis were legalized, the streets would be filled with drug-addled zombies. I called it the Bob Dylan retort - to paraphrase, "everybody might get stoned" - and it looks like he still believes that fallacy.

I'll concede that there would be more people sampling cannabis if it were legal, but I seriously doubt it would be more than a small percentage.

Mr. Davis also asserts that "the freedom to get high is nowhere in the Constitution, but this is: the right to aggregately pass laws to allow or disallow whatever we wish toward the goal of a better nation." Are you saying, Mr. Davis, that you espouse the progressive interpretation of the Constitution, that just because it says "promote the general welfare," "regulate commerce" or "necessary and proper," that the government has permission to make any laws it wants?

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Mark Davis' latest column, summed up: "I am a libertarian when it suits me, and not when it doesn't." In a piece stunningly devoid of logic, Davis regurgitates 1930s-style Reefer Madness "thinking" in arguing against marijuana legalization.

Now, I am not advocating for people to spark up, nor would I want my kids doing so. However, those at the "table of rational thought" (a phrase Davis invokes on his radio show) realize both that (1) people are going to use it anyway, and (2) according to polls, pot is easier for underage students to get than is alcohol.

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Mark Davis would get agreement from the world's experts on the fact that marijuana is not harmless. Combining 15 different scales, the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs ranked it the 8th most dangerous drug in The Lancet in 2010. They also ranked alcohol as the most dangerous drug by a wide margin over second-place heroin.

I have studied volumes of often obscure drug data from our government closely for 20 years. Most of the claims by Davis are not supported by the facts. It's difficult to imagine any significant increase in use when extensive surveys by Monitoring the Future, funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1975, report that 79 percent of those now aged 50 have tried marijuana and that marijuana has been "universally available" to teens for 40 years.

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Re: "Libertarians, you've lost me on weed - Name one societal benefit of legalizing marijuana, Mark Davis challenges. You can't." Wednesday Viewpoints.

At last, after more than a decade of columns from Mr. Davis (no relation), he has finally come down on the same side of an issue as me. No, not the one in his column's title, the isolationist policy of libertarians he mentions as the only two issues keeping him from whole-heartedly embracing their philosophy.

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EL PASO - It was not long after Gov. Rick Perry's remarks that states should enact their own marijuana laws that social media sites began wondering if the theory of relativity was a sham or whether Pink Floyd's estranged founder would finally rejoin the band.

"Don't be surprised when gravity partially reverses itself so people can fly and doctors finally find a cure for death," Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group seeking change in American drug policies, posted on Facebook in response to Mr. Perry's comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Mr. Perry spoke on a panel on incarceration, where he reiterated his support for Texas' drug courts, which were created in 2001 and are an alternative to prison for drug-related convictions.

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I try to be tolerant of other people's ignorance. I really do. However, when I read this Mark Davis column, it seriously taxes my goodwill.

How anybody, much less a person who writes for a living, can offer the argument that there's not a single social benefit to legalizing drugs, especially weed, leaves me struggling for words to articulate my level of disbelief.

Mr. Davis, do you honestly lack the intellectual capacity to understand that the criminalization cure is 100 times worse than the ill? Intrinsic contraband comes with a thousand negative liabilities to all of society, including the possibility drugs might be planted on innocent people.

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Police informant Lawrence Chapa begged for his life as he scurried into the sleeper section of his 18-wheeler. He tried to hide from the two gunmen who had opened the driver's side and passenger doors and were shouting at him to get out.

Moments later, the 53-year-old was killed in a hail of gunfire, shot at least eight times by two different guns.

"He panicked, started talking about his family and said he didn't want anything to happen," one of the alleged gunmen calmly testified Thursday. "He was petrified."

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Thank you to The Eagle for the Sunday editorial pointing out the dangerous folly of sending paramilitary units to do such routine police work as serving arrest warrants for non-violent charges.

Thousands of SWAT raids are carried out every year. When innocent people are shot or killed by mistake the practice is scrutinized briefly. Few in-depth studies of the long term effects have been made.

At the very least, routine use of SWAT raids cause the police to look at the general public as the enemy, not people they should protect and serve -- and the public to look on police as unhelpful and frightening.

If Washington County Sheriff Sgt. Investigator Adam Sowders' tragic death serves a purpose, it will be to cause other sheriff's departments to reassess the way they do their jobs.

Dallas

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