The last time a marijuana decriminalization bill was introduced in the Virginia General Assembly the year was 2011 and the patron was Del. Harvey Morgan, R-Gloucester, a former assistant clinical professor of pharmacy at Virginia Commonwealth University's medical school. The bill never made it out of committee. The Virginia General Assembly will again consider a marijuana decriminalization bill in the 2015 session, this one sponsored by Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria).

The fact that marijuana decriminalization in Virginia has been championed by a conservative Republican from Southern Virginia and liberal Democrat from Northern Virginia is telling. Marijuana law reform is a bipartisan issue supported by a majority of Americans.

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When a grand jury refused last week to bring an indictment in the death of Eric Garner, the New Yorker who died from a policeman's chokehold, the outrage across the political spectrum was nearly universal. Left and right, libertarian and collectivist: Everybody was, for once, in agreement. For a moment or two. Then fissures began appearing. One of them concerned the role New York's cigarette taxes played - or didn't - in Garner's death.

You can make a good argument, as several commentators did, that the city's outlandishly high taxes contributed to Garner's death. Those taxes have created a huge black market in cigarettes, and the cops were busting Garner for selling "loosies," or individual cigarettes, on the street. Not long ago, New York enhanced the penalty for selling loosies, and "an order to crack down on the illegal sale of 75-cent cigarettes in Staten Island came directly from police headquarters, setting off a chain of events that ended in Eric Garner's death," the Daily News reported.

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"Although marijuana is not a harmless drug, the weight of evidence demonstrates that its occasional or experimental use does not pose a significant hazard to individual health."

"Its use ... has few demonstrated social costs - such as drug-related crimes, highway fatalities or health crisis - and current research suggests that its occasional use does not present as great a health hazard as the abuse or use of many other commonly available substances."

Talking points in Colorado and Washington, both of which decriminalized pot by referendum in 2012? Pronouncements in 21 other states and Washington, D.C., that have legalized marijuana in some form? A news release by two Northern Virginia lawmakers pushing for decriminalization in 2015?

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A bill that would decriminalize the possession of an ounce or less of marijuana has been introduced by state Sen. Adam P. Ebbin, D-Alexandria, for the coming General Assembly session.

The effort comes on the heels of legalization in two other states. Ebbin said there have been unsuccessful bills introduced in the Virginia House of Delegates in the past, but that this is the first he is aware of coming from the Senate.

"It would decriminalize simple possession of an ounce or less, but not decriminalize it to the extent done recently in Colorado and Washington state," he said.

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Regarding the Oct. 5 editorial ("Stopping the drug flow will save our lives," The Daily Progress):

Stopping the flow of illegal drugs is easier said than done. Successful efforts to stop the flow of drugs are a very real threat to public safety. Attempts to limit the supply of illegal drugs while demand remains constant only increase the profitability of drug trafficking. For addictive drugs like heroin, a spike in street prices leads desperate addicts to increase criminal activity to feed desperate habits. The drug war doesn't fight crime; it fuels crime.

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Gov. Terry McAuliffe has announced a 10-step plan to expand health care to more than 200,000 Virginians. Step nine is to take bold actions to reduce deaths from prescription drug and heroin abuse. Last year, more Virginians died of overdose deaths than were killed in car accidents. The prescription drug problem has reached a crisis in Virginia, where some county death rates are the highest in the entire nation. McAuliffe intends to reduce the number of drug-related deaths in Virginia and will create a task force to combat prescription drug and heroin abuse.

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Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has announced a 10-step plan to expand health care to Virginians. Step nine is to take bold actions to reduce deaths from prescription drug and heroin abuse.

Last year, more Virginians died of overdose deaths than were killed in car accidents. The prescription drug problem has reached a crisis in Virginia, where some county death rates are the highest in the entire nation.

McAuliffe intends to reduce the number of drug-related deaths in Virginia and will create a task force to combat prescription drug and heroin abuse.

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The Times- Dispatch's premise in a recent editorial that "we can't run tests until we reclassify marijuana" is inaccurate. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse ( NIDA), as of Jan. 31, there were 28 active research grants on the possible therapeutic uses of marijuana.

The NIDA, the Drug Enforcement Agency ( DEA) and the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA) all have a clear course of action available for those applying to conduct this type of research. In May, the DEA even upped the amount of marijuana that can be produced for research purposes in the United States.

Regardless of the federal government's classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, clinical research can be conducted on marijuana and is being done today. To state otherwise is inaccurate.

6TH DISTRICT, CHAIRMAN, HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE. WASHINGTON.

[end]

To the Editor:

In the 1960s, civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, and elsewhere faced local police officers armed with hand held batons, fire hoses, attack dogs and horse-mounted riot control officers.

Recently, in Ferguson, Missouri, civic rights protestors went up against aggressive local police officers equipped with body armor, automatic weapons, armored personnel carriers and at least one police sniper aiming a telescope-equipped assault rifle at the protestors.

Street protests today look a lot like those of the 1960s but, with drug war-driven militarization of local law enforcement agencies since then, the police response in Ferguson now looks a lot like urban warfare.

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A consensus stretching from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other has coalesced in support of the view that the war on drugs, as currently waged, is not working. Despite millions of arrests and billions in expenditures, the country's punishment-only approach has failed to stem drug use.

Some states, including Virginia, have launched alternative approaches such as drug courts - a reform this newspaper has reported on at length. Now localities are getting in on the act.

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In the Colonies' early years, Virginia's House of Burgesses required planters to grow hemp. The plant - a close relative of marijuana - can be used for a variety of purposes, from the medicinal to the industrial. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other notables farmed the stuff. Hemp's utility remained unquestioned through WWII, when the federal government ran "Hemp for Victory!" propaganda campaigns.

But then came the War on Drugs, and suddenly hemp became suspect - even though it contains so little THC you'd have to smoke a whole bale to catch a minor buzz. Lumped in with psychoactive marijuana, industrial hemp became verboten.

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To the Editor:

Heroin has made a comeback - oddly enough that has happened since we have been in Afghanistan. Why?

Is our law enforcement that ineffective? Are our legislators paying more attention to re-elections, pay raises and lobbyists? Is there no enforceable plan to stop the terrible destruction caused by the use of this drug? Where is the "War on Drugs"? Do more "people of power" need to lose loved ones to this?

Where does heroin come from? How is it that the media never tells us that 90 percent or more of the heroin found on our streets and in the arms of our dead young people comes from Afghanistan! The very place where our soldiers are dying to keep Afghanis free! No wonder the tribal leaders of

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The trouble with government, P.J. O'Rourke once observed, is that nobody ever wants to say, "Stick a fork in it - it's done." In support of that thesis Virginia has recently provided Exhibits No. 3,487,912 and 3,487,913.

Exhibit No. 3,487,912: Last week, the state's congressional delegation - both senators and every congressman except Bobby Scott - wrote a letter to Gov. Terry McAuliffe urging him to set up a task force to address the "growing heroin epidemic in Virginia." Many localities, they note, "are on track to see double the number of heroin overdose deaths over last year."

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Regarding Reihan Salam's June 1 commentary ("Bring back Prohibition"):

Ending marijuana prohibition makes more sense than revisiting alcohol prohibition. States with medical marijuana access have seen a drop in fatal car accidents. Researchers believe that consumers are substituting marijuana for alcohol, leading to a reduction in drunken driving deaths. Marijuana is easily safer than alcohol, and the substitution effect is well documented.

The days when shameless politicians can get away with confusing the drug war's tremendous collateral damage with a comparatively harmless plant are coming to an end. If the goal of marijuana prohibition is to subsidize violent drug cartels, prohibition is a grand success. The drug war distorts supply-and-demand dynamics so that big money grows on little trees. If the goal is to deter use, marijuana prohibition is a catastrophic failure. The U.S. has almost double the rate of marijuana use as the Netherlands where marijuana is legal.

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America is rushing headlong toward legalizing the recreational use of marijuana. A growing majority - 54 percent as of a Pew survey released in April - favor legalization, and an even larger majority of millennials (69 percent) feels the same way. Colorado and Washington are the first states to move decisively in this direction, but they won't be the last.

I basically think this is an OK development. Like Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at UCLA who is my guru on the regulation of controlled substances, I see full commercial legalization as a truly terrible idea, while I think noncommercial legalization, ideally via monopolies owned and operated by state governments, would be an improvement over the status quo. Regardless, marijuana legalization is coming, one way or another.

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If Americans honestly want to lower heroin addiction rates as last week's story suggests ["Heroin: It's here, and there are consequences"], they should end marijuana prohibition. An important reason to end marijuana prohibition that doesn't get mentioned is because a ban increases hard drug addiction rates by putting citizens who choose to use the relatively safe plant into contact with people who often also sell hard drugs.

Furthermore, the government claims heroin is no worse than marijuana - and that methamphetamine and cocaine are less harmful drugs - by insisting marijuana is a schedule I substance (alongside heroin), while methamphetamine and cocaine are only schedule II substances.

How many citizens tried marijuana and realized it is not nearly as dangerous as claimed and believed other substances must not be either - - only to find themselves addicted to hard drugs? Can the message from marijuana prohibitionists be any worse for vulnerable citizens?

Dillon, Colo.

[end]

Today, heroin is cheaper and, being illegal, easier for addicts to obtain than prescription painkillers. The consequences - a dramatic nationwide rise in overdose deaths since last year, increased thefts and related crimes, crowded jails, overtaxed social services - are not just making headlines across the country and in the neighboring counties and cities of Virginia's Piedmont. They're here. "It would be a mistake to think Rappahannock County is somehow immune," said Virginia State Police Captain Gary Settle, a Rappahannock native who heads the VSP's Bureau of Criminal Investigations at its Culpeper Division headquarters, at a roundtable discussion and interview last week with the Rappahannock News - a forum attended by Rappahannock County Sheriff Connie C. Smith and other state police special agents and investigators who lead VSP's drug-enforcement efforts in the region.

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Rehab, drug court gives NN teen new life

NEWPORT NEWS -- Spice took over his life in middle school. Nothing else mattered. Being high became the norm.

At 12, he picked up his first cigarette. Soon the Newport News teen, now 18, was smoking marijuana, too. "Cigarettes and weed," he said in a single breath, making no distinction. "Weed was just part of life. I smoked weed all the time -- after school, every weekend."

Halfway through eighth grade, he moved on to spice, which had the advantage of being cheaper and, at the time, both legally obtainable and undetectable in drug screens.

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Police Mum on Potential Investigations

NEWPORT NEWS -- If you listen to the U.S. Navy, Newport News and Hampton are problem cities for the retail sale of spice.

But unlike nearby counties the two cities haven't raided stores that sell spice, which a local prosecutor and a defense attorney both say has everything to do with a state statute that makes convictions tricky.

There's one standard for sailors and another one -- a higher one -- for a prosecutor seeking a conviction, said Anton Bell, Hampton's commonwealth's attorney.

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Rep. Morgan Griffith is a pretty straight-laced fellow, and that may well make him the right person to take up the cause for medical marijuana.

The 9th District Republican has filed a bill that would allow doctors to prescribe marijuana in 21 states, including Virginia, with laws permitting its use for medicinal purposes.

Those state laws are largely meaningless now because physicians who recommend marijuana to their patients could be charged under a federal law that still bans it.

It's a serious cause, and a personal one, for Griffith, whose support for using marijuana as a painkiller traces back to his experience with a cancer patient whose friends smuggled the drug to him while he was in the hospital to help stimulate his appetite.

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