Virginia lawmakers have shown scant inclination to legalize marijuana, but it might not matter. Law enforcement seems to be doing it for them.

In the past two years, arrests and charges for marijuana crimes have dropped 14 percent - and "it ain't because less people are smoking marijuana," one defense lawyer tells the Daily Press. In Newport News, charges have dropped 60 percent - perhaps in part because prosecutors there decided a few years ago not to prosecute misdemeanor possession by adults.

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RICHMOND - About 38,000 times each year, driving privileges are stripped from Virginians - not for traffic offenses, but instead for drug offenses.

Dubbed a relic of the war on drugs, Virginia law automatically suspends the licenses of anyone convicted of even minor drug offenses, reports a new Prison Policy Initiative study.

The study contends the law is counterproductive and unnecessarily burdens low-income offenders by limiting their ability to get or keep a job to pay court fines and costs or child support.

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Richmond police Capt. Michael Zohab is building an army for the war on drugs. But his fight, as supervisor of the city's narcotics unit, is not against the people using them.

Instead, the 28- year police veteran is laying the groundwork for the department to join a growing number of law enforcement agencies across the country whose precincts have become unlikely sanctuaries for those who want help getting off drugs. Rather than putting substance abusers in handcuffs, Zohab wants to give them a hand up in the fight of their lives. And he needs all the help he can get.

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You might not like President Obama's political philosophy or leadership style, but you have to admit that he is one cool president.

If you're unconvinced, consider his speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 30. His poise and charm were on full display, and his comedic timing was impeccable.

Still, his best joke made me cringe a little: He said that his popularity rating had been rising. In fact, he said, "The last time I was this high, I was trying to decide on my major."

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Toll Tied to 40% Spike in Heroin Overdoses

Michael Carter felt a brief flash of relief before searing grief consumed him.

His son's life had ended, but so, too, had the nights spent wondering when police would show up at his Hanover County home to tell him Graham had fatally overdosed.

A year later, Carter is left with the pain, and a question: How many more sons and daughters will die as state and federal officials pledge progress on stemming the tide of epidemic heroin and prescription pill abuse?

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Reading Bart Hinkle's Commentary column, "Coming out of the drug-war haze," got me fired up about the war on drugs.

There is a widespread misconception that all drugs are bad when in reality there are good drugs and bad drugs. The problem arises when propaganda is spread labeling less harmful drugs such as common psychedelics ( marijuana, LSD, Psilocybin) as brain-melting substances that induce schizophrenia and reefer madness. In actuality such drugs only act as a catalyst in bringing to surface underlying mental conditions.

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Brian Coddington, 29, relapsed two weeks into another second chance last month. Chesterfield Sheriff Karl Leonard rejects criticism of the jail's drug programas being soft on crime.

He was out on bond and in a recovery program, awaiting a court date in Chesterfield County on charges stemming from his heroin addiction.

This time, for once, he knew exactly what to do. So on March 23 his mother drove him to the Chesterfield jail on Mimms Road, where he met his bail bondsman and turned himself over to the custody of Sheriff Karl Leonard.

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President Obama's recent speech on the opioid overdose epidemic offers a ray of hope that the country's approach to drugs might one day adopt what has been called the first rule of American business: When all else fails, try doing it right.

Noting with considerable understatement that "treatment is underfunded," the president proposed $ 1.1 billion for expanded opioid- addiction treatment. This is a good step in the right direction. But it is still $ 50 billion less than the U. S. will spend this year alone on its current, fatally flawed policy of the war on drugs, and only onethird of what the federal government allocates to lock up drug criminals - whose incarceration accounts for half of the entire Bureau of Prisons budget.

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In your editorial about the passing of a bill to allow 151proof grain alcohol, you mentioned that moonshine and marijuana are off-limits because the state can't make money off them. That shows how behind the times the General Assembly is.

Legislators should jump all over legalizing marijuana in a hurry. It will come sooner or later, so make it sooner. Colorado became the first state to make more off taxes on marijuana than alcohol.

The history of the gambling industry shows that you need to be in there first and fast. Casino gambling in Atlantic City was big and profitable for everyone. Some of the first Indian reservations that had casinos did very well. Then other states and tribes got in the gaming business and revenues dropped. Look at what a shell the boardwalk at Atlantic City is today.

Things move faster nowadays, so the good old boys at the Capitol need to step up the pace and legalize marijuana quickly - they can then slow down and mellow out after doing so.

HENRICO.

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Richmond- A bill meant to pave the way for producing therapeutic marijuana oils in Virginia cleared its last legislative hurdle on Tuesday.

The Senate voted 39 to 0 in favor of the bill, with Sen. Bryce E. Reeves (R-Spotsylvania) not voting. Parents with severely epileptic children, who have struggled to obtain the oils used to treat the condition, broke into tears as they watched the vote from the Senate gallery.

Last year, the General Assembly passed a law intended to make it easier for people with severe forms of epilepsy to use two oils derived from marijuana, which lack the plant's intoxicating prop carved erties but help alleviate debilitating seizures. The bill provided a way for epileptics or their legal guardians to avoid prosecution for possession of cannabidiol oil (also known as CBD) and THC-A oil.

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Cases Rose 76% Over 11-Year Study

Blacks Accused Three Times More Than Whites

While the trend in much of the United States is moving toward decriminalization or legalization of marijuana, Virginia is heading in the opposite direction: With sharply rising arrest totals for the possession of pot and a disproportionate number of black people arrested in the Commonwealth, according to a new study based on state data reported to the FBI.

Although marijuana arrests dropped 6.5 percent nationwide between 2003 and 2014, possession arrests in Virginia increased by 76 percent during that period, according to research by the Drug Policy Alliance in New York. And arrests of black people in Virginia for marijuana increased by 106 percent from 2003 to 2013, accounting for 47 percent of the state's arrests even though Virginia's population is only 20 percent black. The statistics were compiled by Jon Gettman, a public policy professor at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Va., and follow his national marijuana arrest analysis for the American Civil Liberties Union in 2013. That study showed that nationwide, black people were 3.7 times more likely to be arrested than whites for marijuana and that 88 percent of the country's arrests were for marijuana possession.

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The war on drugs just went from utter failure to absolute absurdity. I went into the pharmacy to pick up a couple of

prescriptions and thought I'd pick up some cold pills as I had started the sniffles after being in the cold rain. I have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, so any help I can get is a blessing.

The pharmacist had started with the ID check and signature rigmarole that one has to undergo to buy a perfectly legal over-the-counter medicine when the computer told her I couldn't buy any yet. As it had been months since I had bought my last 20 (spring allergies), I questioned it, and the other pharmacist said that "Methcheck" had been down all day so nobody could buy any.

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While it's hard to pinpoint accurately, estimates place the current number of Americans in Alcoholics Anonymous at more than 1.2 million. AA members meet often; today alone there will be more than 50 AA meetings within a 50-mile radius of downtown Richmond. Attend just about any of them and you likely will hear personal testimonies about the shocking degree of human misery alcohol can inflict.

If you prefer data to anecdotes, consider this: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that from 2006 to 2010, "excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths ... shortening the lives of those who died by an average of 30 years. Further, excessive drinking was responsible for 1 in 10 deaths among working-age adults aged 20-64 years. The economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption in 2010 were estimated at $249 billion."

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It seems that no presidential debate this year would be complete without denunciations of the drug laws, which, it is alleged, result in long prison terms for thousands of people, disproportionately African Americans, who are guilty only of low-level offenses, thus fueling "mass incarceration."

At the last Republican debate, on Sept. 16, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina charged that "two-thirds of the people in our prisons are there for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related."

Apropos of former Florida governor Jeb Bush's admitted youthful marijuana use, Sen. Rand Paul (Kentucky) observed that "there is at least one prominent example on the stage of someone who says they smoked pot in high school, and yet the people going to jail for this are poor people, often African Americans and often Hispanics, and yet the rich kids who use drugs aren't."

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I understand the concern about the artificial marijuana called "spice," detailed in The Daily Progress story "Police concern about 'spice' rises" (Aug. 31, print edition; Aug. 30, online).

The reason people use fake marijuana is because the real stuff is illegal or because they might be trying to get through a drug test for their employment or the criminal justice system. If it were not for these situations, there would be no such thing as "spice."

The reason doctors don't know what they are dealing with is that the law plays catch-up with these substances. By the time the latest thing becomes illegal, something new and potentially more dangerous has taken its place.

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The Virginia State Police just released their 2014 Crime in Virginia report. Despite opinion polls showing that a majority of Virginians wants to see marijuana legal for personal use, Virginia continues to prioritize marijuana criminalization. There were 22,948 arrests for marijuana in 2014. Eight percent of all Virginia arrests are for marijuana offenses. Never mind the cost of arresting almost 23,000 Virginians for marijuana. Think about the opportunity costs and the impact on public safety. Police time spent arresting non-violent marijuana consumers is police time not spent going after murderers, rapists and child molesters.

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"We had a war on drugs," says Virginia Beach Police Chief James Cervera. "We've lost miserably. That's the best I can tell you."

Cervera is a member of a state task force set up by Gov. Terry McAuliffe to examine the problem of prescription drug and heroin abuse. His comments echo those of Rick Clark Jr., the police chief in Galax, who calls the drug war a "dismal failure. ... I don't think we can throw money at it. Obviously we have not arrested our way out of it." Like others on the panel, they contend society needs a new approach to the drug scourge.

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Galax Police Chief Rick Clark Jr. has been in law enforcement for about 40 years, long enough to make observations about effective crimefighting policies.

Locking up drug addicts is one policy that has not worked out so well, said Clark, who is serving on the Governor's Task Force on Prescription Drug and Heroin Abuse that met Tuesday in Richmond.

Clark said he is seeing children and grandchildren of people he arrested years ago in his Southwest Virginia city get arrested and prosecuted for the same sort of drug offenses their parents did.

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Censorship Case Involving VA. School Paper Illustrates Changes

It's called "dabbing," and it involves smoking a distilled version of marijuana's active ingredient off of a nail, delivering a potent high.

When Fauquier High School senior Sara Rose Martin heard that her peers were experimenting with the technique, she decided to pen a story about it for the student newspaper, the Falconer, of which she is co-editor in chief.

"I was just interested in exactly what it was and exactly what the effects of it were," she said. "I wanted my peers to know what they were doing."

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The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, once considered one of the most conservative in the country, has moved to the left in recent years. But if you think that means it is showing a greater regard for individual rights and civil liberties, think again. According to a ruling the court handed down on March 13, the appropriate range of punishments for possessing a small amount of marijuana includes summary execution.

In 2005 (the wheels of justice can grind exceedingly slowly) the police in Cambridge, Md., acted on a tip and found a small amount of marijuana residue in a trash can. At 4:30 a.m. on May 6, a SWAT team executed a search warrant on the apartment of Andrew Cornish. A jury would later find the commandos failed to knock and announce themselves properly. As they rushed through the apartment, Cornish came out of the bedroom with a sheathed knife in his hand. The police say he advanced on them. One of the officers shot Cornish twice in the head, killing him.

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