Ismael Gonzalez-Gonzalez was supposed to be deported nine years ago, but Cuba wouldn't take him.

Instead, he wound up in Louisville and, police say, emerged as a local boss directing the flow of drugs in the Louisville area and beyond for a Mexican cartel.

It's unclear how Gonzalez, a convicted felon who was arrested in a surprise drug raid last summer, first entered the United States before he ended up in Louisville, where he settled into a house in Jeffersontown. Many details about his case remain hidden in sealed federal court records.

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After over a year of waiting for a needle exchange, the Clark County Health Department will open its syringe exchange at the end of January.

The needle exchange, located at 1301 Akers Ave. in Jeffersonville, will start Jan. 26 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and be open each Thursday from then on. Dr. Kevin Burke, the Clark County health commissioner, said he hopes the program will eventually provide services two days a week and operate the needle exchange at other locations.

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Clouded by controversies surrounding the recreational use of pot and a common view that it is a gateway to more serious drug abuse and addiction, medical applications of marijuana are not clearly understood.

Based on the reams of disclaimers included with every prescription, all forms of medicine have some unwanted -- and potentially harmful -- side effects. Certainly, marijuana will not be the exception.

But it's hard to collect facts when research is not being conducted.

The federal Food and Drug Administration requires scientific clinical trials involving thousands of patients to determine the benefits and risks of any possible medication. So far, researchers have not conducted enough large-scale clinical trials to determine if the benefits of the marijuana plant outweigh its risks in patients it is meant to treat, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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A Kenton County jury recommended a 38-year sentence last week for a Covington man who sold heroin five times to a confidential informant with the Covington Police Department, according to the prosecutor's office.

Donte Little will be 72 years old when he's released if he serves the full sentence. The 33-year-old was convicted of four counts of trafficking in a controlled substance and one count of complicity to trafficking in a controlled substance.

The Covington Police Department's narcotics unit, known as the "D Team," purchased more than 14 grams of heroin from Little on five different days during the fall of 2014, prosecutors said. Investigators testified video and audio recordings were made of the transactions, which totaled more than $2,300.

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And so another session of the Kentucky Assembly comes to an end without passage of a comprehensive cannabis bill. State Senator John Schickel assured the 75 percent of our citizens who are supporters of cannabis law reform that there would be hearings in the interim and something might get done next year. That's interesting because it's the same thing they have been told for the last five years!

One wonders, with 23 states and the District of Columbia having medical cannabis laws, and four states and D.C. having passed recreational cannabis laws, exactly what could possibly be learned from hearings in the interim that haven't already been brought forward? There have been dozens of hearings right here in Kentucky over the last five years. I doubt if our legislators will find anything new on this subject.

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Recently I read a national article about a medical team that looked the other way while a patient was smoking marijuana in the bathroom. On a closer reading of the article, the medical case was from over 20 years ago. First mistake: not doing the math (we'll get to this in a minute). Second mistake: concluding that the answer is "medical" marijuana.

Did you know that the two major compounds that are medicinal in marijuana are already 100 percent legal here in Kentucky?

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In a recent op-ed piece, Frank Rapier, the director of the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area based in London, made a few statements that I think a great deal of Kentucky residents should take issue with.

Rapier begins his column by claiming that the push for marijuana is propagated by corporations that make money off its sale.

I would say that is completely true; but to view that in a negative light is overtly hypocritical.

Both our state and federal governments are heavily influenced by special-interest monies. Rapier's job is to help aid the state in the government's war on drugs. A war that, in 2014, led to the arrest of seven times the number of people for possession of marijuana than for distribution or trafficking.

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Big Business, Not Public Safety, Is the Goal

In Colorado, Teen Pot Use Has Increased

Only a Fraction of Prisoners Convicted for Possession

In response to the column, "Stop waste of money, lives in criminalizing pot," let me say that I agree with Sen. Perry B. Clark on one point: America is being bamboozled.

We are being bamboozled by Big Marijuana.

For several years now, we have witnessed a highly financed, deceptive campaign to legalize marijuana. It started with the premise that marijuana is medicine. Marijuana may contain medical components, but so does opium. We don't smoke opium to get the pain-killing effects of morphine. How could you dose smoked marijuana?

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FRANKFORT, Ky. - Kentucky's evolving battle with drug abuse will continue into the 2016 General Assembly as lawmakers intensify efforts against synthetic drugs that can slip into communities via the Internet, wreaking sudden havoc.

The legislature has enacted at least four bills targeting synthetics since 2010 and is seeking to amp up penalties for traffickers next year following an outbreak in Lewis County of the toxic synthetic drug called "flakka."

"They are no less dangerous than anything else out there, and in many cases, more dangerous," said Van Ingram, head of the state Office of Drug Control Policy. "It seems to pop up in a certain community and makes a run for a short time. Then it fizzles out there and shows up somewhere else."

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