There is currently a provision within the Higher Education Act that is under fire by both the ACLU and the SSDP: the Students for Sensible Drug Policy. This provision blocks any person who has been convicted of a drug offense to be eligible for financial aid. Thus far, this provision had blocked more than 200,000 prospective college students from receiving financial aid since it was enacted in 2000. More than 250 organizations have called for the full repeal of the law, citing various reasons, but most of all, that it is unconstitutional. [continues 719 words]
It is most certainly disturbing to read with abhorrence about violence and death along the U.S.-Mexico border. After all, that is "their" problem and we must wall it out. The fact however is that this narcoterrorism, and the voracious drug habits in the United States, are synonymous. The demand brings the supply to those who grow or manufacture, package, ship, warehouse, transport, sell, and buy it, which brings the violence and human destruction right to our easy chairs. Yet addicts, casual users, proponents of the legalization of drugs, and many bystanders seem indifferent to the bloodbaths that follow the deliveries to consumers and users. [continues 660 words]
Controversy Simmers Over Whether Non-Indians Can Understand and Respect Native Spirituality When news spread that Arvol Looking Horse would be visiting Utah, many who practice American Indian spirituality were thrilled. Some also felt a chill. Looking Horse, after all, has come to represent the growing sentiment among many American Indians that non-Indians do not belong in the center of sacred ceremonial practice. A Lakota spiritual leader, Looking Horse - with the support of dozens of Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders - issued a proclamation in 2003 calling for an end to exploitation of ceremonies. [continues 1049 words]
I'm writing about Bruce Mirken's outstanding letter, "Prohibition Doesn't Work" [Feb. 2, City Weekly]. I'd like to add that if tough-on-drugs policies worked, the quixotic goal of a drug-free America would have been reached a long time ago. And, if tolerant drug policies created more drug use, the Netherlands would have much higher drug usage rates than the United States. They do not. In fact, the Dutch use marijuana and other recreational drugs at much lower rates than Americans do. See the Website: DrugWarFacts.org/TheNethe.htm. And, if tolerant drug policies caused more overall crime, especially violent crime, the Dutch would have much higher crime rates than the United States. [continues 105 words]
I want to applaud Ben Fulton for his well-put and very insightful honest words ["Mangled Sentence," Note From the Editor, Jan. 26, City Weekly]. The justice system really has it totally backwards when it comes to drug sentencing. My husband is serving a 24-year sentence for drug conspiracy--there was never any evidence, nothing found while he was under surveillance for over a year, nothing except the word of others who were caught doing things and got years cut off their sentences in exchange for implicating him. [continues 92 words]
The bizarrely long prison sentence given to Weldon Angelos ["Mangled Sentence," Note From the Editor, Jan. 26, City Weekly] might make some sense if there were the slightest evidence that the federal war on marijuana was having its intended effect. There isn't. Despite a record 771,605 marijuana arrests in 2004--roughly equal to arresting every man, woman and child in the state of Wyoming, plus every man, woman and child in Salt Lake City and Provo combined--the latest U.S. Justice Department "Drug Threat Assessment" reports no evidence of decreased marijuana availability anywhere in the country. But doesn't prohibition keep marijuana away from kids? Well, no. According to the 2005 Monitoring the Future survey, released in December and funded by the U.S. government, 85.6 percent of high school seniors report that marijuana is "easy to get." Despite many millions of marijuana arrests, that figure is virtually unchanged from the first "Monitoring the Future" survey in 1975. It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. If so, marijuana prohibition is a prime example. It's time to junk our failed experiment with prohibition and replace it with a common-sense system of regulation and control. Bruce Mirken, Marijuana Policy Project, San Francisco, Calif. [end]
Tribes Would Need Federal Recognition SALT LAKE CITY - A proposal before the Utah Legislature would limit the use of peyote to federally recognized Indian tribes during traditional religious ceremonies. Peyote is illegal for general use, but federal law allows for limited use in American Indian religious ceremonies. The Utah bill is intended to prevent people from escaping prosecution by claiming Indian heritage and religious use of peyote without being able to prove it. The bill follows state and federal court cases against Linda and James Mooney, founders of the Oklevueha EarthWalks Native American Church of Utah. In 2000, the couple were charged with drug distribution for providing peyote to members of their church and its visitors. [continues 132 words]
How should Utah respond to the growing use of methamphetamine? ("Methamphetamines: Insidious drug requires a different approach," Our View, Jan. 11). During the crack epidemic of the '80s, New York City chose the zero tolerance approach, opting to arrest and prosecute as many offenders as possible. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry was smoking crack, and America's capital had the highest per-capita murder rate in the country. Yet crack use declined in both cities simultaneously. Simply put, the younger generation saw firsthand what crack was doing to their older brothers and sisters and decided for themselves that it was bad news. This is not to say nothing can be done about methamphetamine. Access to drug treatment is critical for the current generation of meth users. Diverting resources away from prisons and into cost-effective treatment would save both tax dollars and lives. The following U.S. Department of Justice research brief confirms my claims regarding the spontaneous decline of crack cocaine: http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles1 /nij/187490.txt Robert Sharpe Policy Analyst, Common Sense for Drug Policy Washington, D.C. [end]
I heartily agree with Robert Sharpe's Jan. 20 letter calling for treatment and not prison for drug addicts. The contradiction with this philosophy is that only a percentage of addicts are sent to prison. They do get there eventually when they 1) break your car window and hijack your stereo for money to buy methamphetamine, 2) rob a retail store to sustain their habit, 3) invade your home for the same reason, 4) steal identities to make money for drugs, or 5) commit assaults and violent acts when obtaining or distributing drugs. The drug addict does not exist in a vacuum. A mixture of treatment and punishment seems to be in order. Mike Buchanan Salt Lake City [end]
The First Step When facing up to substance abuse, the first step is not only to admit that you have a problem, but that your old ways of dealing with it won't work any better tomorrow than they did yesterday. Gov. Jon Huntsman's announced approach to the problem of methamphetamine abuse in Utah admits that the state has a problem with this harshly addictive chemical. More importantly, it admits that the traditional approach to drug abuse - jail - doesn't work. [continues 335 words]
Focused On Treatment: Governor Announces The Startup Of The 34-Person 'Equal-Partner' Think Tank Citing methamphetamine's costs to society, from bulging prisons to children abandoned to foster care by drug-addicted parents, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. on Monday announced the creation of a task force charged with putting an end to the "scourge." Members of the 34-person task force met for the first time Monday, but don't plan to meet again until after the 2006 legislative session, which ends in March. The committee has set no deadline for issuing recommendations. Huntsman's anti-meth initiative is one of several launched over the years. [continues 461 words]
Last year was the year of the very public, very deadly drug overdose. Somehow, the trend didn't turn up on anyone's top news story list of 2005. But everyone seemed to talk, wring their hands and cry about it. Perhaps it's because of the 67 people in Utah who died of accidental drug overdoses in the first nine months of 2005, 16 of them were younger than 20. They were high school and college students. One worked in a carwash. [continues 581 words]
Friends Who Don't Report Victims Of Drugs May Face Penalties A Salt Lake lawmaker, responding to a rash of drug overdose deaths this year where panicked friends didn't call 911 and watched the victims die, plans to introduce legislation that would make it a crime to not help someone they know is in trouble. Rep. Carol Spackman Moss, D-Salt Lake City, will sponsor the bill that would make it a class B misdemeanor to not render aid. "Law enforcement feels like their hands are just tied. Parents are like, 'Isn't there any consequence for these kids that abandon their friends?' " she said. "If you're going to do drugs with your friends, and somebody gets into a bad situation, you can't just abandon them or you're going to be liable." [continues 745 words]
Utah Teens Less Involved But Are Not Uninvolved Typically in the past year, one of every four Utah high school students was offered illegal drugs at school. One of every nine was in a physical fight there. And one of every 13 was threatened with a weapon at school. And typically in just the past 30 days, one of every 18 carried a weapon to school. One of every 26 used alcohol at school. And one of every 27 used marijuana at school. That widespread use of drugs, alcohol and violence in Utah high schools is reported in a new study by the National Center for Educational Statistics, based on surveys of students in grades nine through 12 in Utah and across the nation in 2003. The good news for Utah is that such problems are below the national average in every category. [continues 764 words]
Two weeks ago I wrote about the challenges Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson faces in the last half of his second term due mostly to his passion for causes that often are controversial in Utah and his confrontational style that has earned him enemies on the City Council, in the Legislature, the surrounding counties and his own Democratic Party. The following Wednesday, Anderson was the guest host of Doug Wright's program on KSL Radio. Wright was in Washington, D.C., at the time discussing with Republican operatives the possibility of running against Congressman Jim Matheson next year. [continues 704 words]
The intense rush from a methamphetamine high can last up to 12 hours, but when users fall from the high, stomach cramps, anxiety, convulsions and insomnia are there to catch them. In reality, there must be something to using methamphetamines or people wouldn't do it. Most addicts don't fit the mental picture of a runaway teenager sitting in an alley, said Luciano Colonna, The Harm Reduction Program executive director on Monday to 50 Weber State University students. The drug is so inexpensive and easy to create, it has become the drug of choice for blue-collar workers, soccer moms and homosexuals, Colonna said. In the year 2000, 3,448 addicts preferred methamphetamines -- a total that reached 5,486 in 2004. [continues 490 words]
Utah Students' Alcohol Consumption Also Up Incidents of school violence across the country are down by about half from a decade ago, but have held steady since 2000, and Utah mirrors the trends. However, student alcohol consumption and on-campus marijuana use have been rising in the state since 2000, according to a government report released Sunday. The study, conducted by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, looked at 2003 data from across the nation to assess violence and drug use in schools. [continues 745 words]
Treatment Is Key: Some Doctors Say That Postnatal Neglect Is The Bigger Issue During the mid-1980s, so-called crack babies became an icon of the havoc wreaked by cocaine and a catalyst for new laws targeting pregnant women. Hospitals began testing pregnant women for the drug and states started jailing addicted mothers and taking custody of their children. The media warned of the creation of an underclass of exposed infants born with devastating birth defects and permanent brain damage. Twenty years of medical research have shown the prenatal effects of cocaine to be far less severe than the "crack baby" legend suggests. But the myth has resurfaced with the spread of methamphetamine and led to new labels: "meth babies" and "ice babies." [continues 1099 words]
Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson has received an award from a national group that promotes alternatives to the "war on drugs." The Drug Policy Alliance gave Anderson the Richard J. Dennis Drugpeace Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Drug Policy Reform - which is given to individuals who "most epitomize loyal opposition to drug war extremism," according to the Drug Policy's Web site. The site noted Anderson's decision to pull funding for D.A.R.E., and the city's training of police in harm reduction and the city's efforts to educate sex workers about how to protect themselves. More recently, the mayor created a campaign urging drug users to call 911 when their friends overdose. [continues 113 words]
Weldon Angelos' supporters say he is a casualty in the war on drugs, an offender who deserves time behind bars but not a virtual life sentence for carrying a firearm while dealing pot in Utah. Prosecutors, though, insist the former music producer's mandatory 55-year term is appropriate. They paint Angelos as major dealer who hooked up with a violent street gang, carried a gun while conducting his illicit business and made his living peddling large quantities of drugs. "Addressing the epidemic social problem of armed drug distribution with increased punishment and deterrence is consistent with contemporary standards of decency," U.S. Attorney for Utah Paul Warner and assistant U.S. attorney Robert Lund write in a court brief. [continues 726 words]
Inside Utah
