Program In Its 16th Year At Milton MILTON - Tough choices are made a little easier in the Milton Area School District, thanks to a staple program that's been around since 1993. The latest batch of fifth-graders at the three elementary schools graduated this week from the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, organized locally by the Milton Police Department. That includes seven classes and 172 kids, said instructor Jason Engleman, also the school district's school resource officer. The DARE program is as advertised and more. It includes enjoyable and informational lessons on alcohol, tobacco, drugs, peer pressure and related issues. "It's about staying in charge, and giving them the knowledge of how to handle situations on the street that many will be faced with," Engleman said. [continues 523 words]
A joke in the Reagan era was that in the "War on Poverty, poverty won." It's not hard to see who won the War on Drugs, a war that has destroyed more lives than drugs ever have. Note that in the greatest days of America, no drugs were illegal; opium and cocaine were available from Sears Roebuck. The groundswell for marijuana legalization is so obvious that President Obama had to acknowledge it in his recent cyber town-hall event. He sloughed off the issue, observing that legalization would not "grow the economy." However, Sens. Jim Webb, D-Va., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., have introduced legislation to rescue America's malfunctioning prison system. Some decriminalization of drugs will be part of the package. [continues 138 words]
Your April 5 editorial (Gwinnett must wage its own war on drugs) makes the common mistake of confusing drug-related crime with prohibition-related crime. 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. With alcohol prohibition repealed, liquor bootleggers no longer gun each other down in drive-by shootings, nor do consumers go blind drinking unregulated bathtub gin. While U.S. politicians ignore the drug war's historical precedent, European countries are embracing harm reduction, a public health alternative based on the principle that both drug abuse and prohibition have the potential to cause harm. [continues 82 words]
Dear Editor, Every time the police tear out one grow, they make the 90 to 95 per cent of grows they will never catch all that much more valuable. In this way, they are subsidizing the dealers they don't catch. They know this, too, because all science and history on the subject supports this. It leads me to wonder just which side of the law these guys are really on. If the police really cared about reducing crime and drug use and protecting public safety, they would lobby for legalized regulation. [continues 76 words]
Re: "Tobacco crackdown" (Gazette, April 8). Alcohol prohibition was a long and costly failure that did little more than promote violence and corruption. The War on Drugs being waged in Canada and the United States is costing billions of dollars yearly, increasing profit margins for criminal suppliers, financing terrorism, clogging our prison system, and ruining people's lives by burdening them with criminal records that can be much harder to overcome than any addiction. Neither of these repressive prohibitions was successful in eliminating consumption. Now our governments are attempting a de-facto prohibition on tobacco by imposing absurd taxes and banning smoking almost everywhere. It would appear that the motto of our elected representatives is "live and don't learn." Daniel Romano Citizens Against Government Encroachment Montreal [end]
People who support drug prohibition usually have little knowledge of the disastrous effects of America's drug crusade. Most people who favor drug laws have no idea that all of our current "drug problems" come from a lunatic drug war that has continuously failed for more than 90 years. History clearly shows that there was no such thing as "drug crime," "drug gangs" or "criminal drug cartels" before drug prohibition. All of the crime, death, disease and murder associated with drugs began after the drugs were outlawed. [continues 127 words]
Watching reefer madness cretins on Cathedral City's City Council pretend great concern for public health while using phony excuses to deny people the use of marijuana reminds me of Chicken Little's fear of falling skies and the idiotic wars between Lilliput and Blefescu because they cannot agree on whether to break eggs on the small or large end. Then I remember that Chicken Little's weather forecast and Lilliput's egg wars are fiction, leaving marijuana prohibition as the most lunatic activity on the planet. Raymond Givens Palm Springs [end]
Working daily in the Palm Beach County Regional Detention Center puts me in contact with many juveniles. As a substance-abuse interventionist, I talk with many of these kids. I usually ask two questions during preliminary screening: 1) Do you use drugs? The answer in most cases is no; 2) Do you smoke weed? More than 80''percent of the kids answer yes. Most of the kids I see don't smoke joints anymore. The new way of ingesting marijuana is by smoking a "blunt." Many times, the amount of marijuana in a single blunt can be the equivalent of three to five joints. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active chemical in marijuana, is one of the oldest hallucinogenic drugs and addicts more than 150,000 individuals annually. As a former cop, I can tell you that marijuana does not always lead to the use of other drugs. It is my experience, however, that most users of marijuana experimented or continued to use marijuana along with their new drug of choice. [continues 142 words]
As a product of Fairfax County schools (West Springfield High School, class of 1992), I was heartbroken at the story of Josh Anderson, the South Lakes High School junior who committed suicide when faced with expulsion for marijuana ["Unbending Rules on Drugs in Schools Drive One Teen to the Breaking Point," Metro, April 5]. It easily could have been me. Like Josh and far too many of his peers now and my peers then, I experimented with marijuana in high school. And, like Josh, I was stupid. [continues 119 words]
There is a middle ground between drug prohibition and blanket legalization. Switzerland's heroin maintenance program has reduced disease, death and crime among chronic users. If expanded, prescription heroin maintenance would deprive organized crime of a core client base. This would render illegal heroin trafficking unprofitable and spare future generations addiction. Marijuana should be taxed and regulated like alcohol, only without the ubiquitous advertising. Separating the hard- and soft-drug markets is critical. As long as organized crime controls marijuana distribution, consumers of the most popular illicit drug will continue to come into contact with sellers of hard drugs like methamphetamine. This introduction is a direct result of marijuana prohibition. Robert Sharpe (Prohibitions on bad habits just don't work.) [end]
Re: Rhonda Swan's April 3 column "Surrender would be a win," we should treat drugs as a medical problem. The result of our expensive and failed "war" on drugs is that now drugs are coming into our country by the ton. We intimidate other countries to cease growing drugs while wealthy people in the United States snort it up their noses. The poor buy crack and end up in jail. Would it not make more sense to "repeal" this "war," and spend on education and rehabilitation centers? We had enough sense to repeal the banning of alcohol. Why not drugs? [continues 77 words]
Re: "Victoria's street crime leaves tourist shocked," letter, April 12. My wife and I are longtime residents of downtown and, being retired, walk around the downtown and harbour areas almost every day. We used to walk around at any hour we felt so inclined and never had any worries, but in the past 10 years or so we've noticed a dramatic increase in out-in-the-open drug use and drunken violence. The new police chief expressed his opinion that the drunken youth are the big problem. He is mistaken. Many of our friends and previous co-workers who live in the suburbs will not come downtown even during the day, and their reason is simple -- they have the perception that it's an area infested with druggies at all corners. We used to try to dissuade them but they are, sadly, not far off nowadays. [continues 80 words]
Editor: The decriminalization of marijuana is a no-brainer. There is no question that the war on drugs has been a total failure and a total waste of taxpayer money. We have wasted trillions of dollars trying to enforce a flawed ideal. We see the end results in the papers and on the news every day, gangsters shooting each other to get control of the outrageous profits from illegal drugs. We are also ruining other countries with our irrational behavior, for example, Mexico, Colombia where the government is afraid to arrest drug cartel members, even Afghanistan and we know where those illegal drug profits go - to fund the terrorists that are killing our soldiers. [continues 140 words]
There is a strong resemblance between the prohibition of alcohol in the 1930s and the prohibition of marijuana in the 2000s. Once the liquor prohibition was lifted in the '30s, the gangsters and bootleggers were put out of business, leaving millions to flow into Ottawa's treasury. Legalizing marijuana would have the same effect by putting the drug gangs out of business, putting hundreds of billions into Ottawa's treasury to help our economy and stopping the drug killings in our cities. [continues 482 words]
Re: Marijuana ingredient may cut tumours, The Journal, April 2 Congratulations to your open-minded newspaper for actually reporting some scientific news about the value of the medical use of marijuana. For some reason, U.S. newspapers and other media will not report good news like this. Darral Good Shoreline, Wa. [end]
Dear Sir: RE: "Grow-op case drags on through the courts," March 18, 2009. I quote, "They instead found that the Tallons had received a federal medical marijuana licence, giving Larry permission to grow a certain amount for an undisclosed medical condition." This is a perfect example of why the Health Canada Medical Marijuana Access Regulations are dysfunctional. Legal users and growers are stuck in this gray area between legal and illegal, and it not only endangers these sick and often dying patients, it keeps them living in a constant state of fear. [continues 74 words]
