Why Do Cops Arrest More Blacks Than Whites for Possession?

AN EXPLOSIVE report by the American Civil Liberties Union about the racial disparity in marijuana arrests in the United States essentially confirms a new category of crime: smoking weed while black.

The report, released last week, said that while whites and blacks use marijuana in roughly the same amounts, blacks are almost four times more likely to be arrested for possession than whites. The disparity is even worse in Pennsylvania, where African-Americans are more than five times more likely to be arrested than whites. That puts Pennsylvania among the country's worst offenders in racial disparity in marijuana-possession arrest rates.

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JEFFREY WALKER, the veteran Philly narcotics cop who was federally charged yesterday with allegedly robbing a drug dealer, has been the subject of 18 Internal Affairs complaints during his career.

The civilian complaints - none of which was sustained - included accusations of theft, physical and verbal abuse, and illegal searches.

Walker, 44, joined the police force in 1989 and was assigned to the Narcotics Field Unit South 10 years later.

Walker has worked with some of the six narcotics cops who were transferred to different assignments in December after the District Attorney's Office said that the officers would no longer be called to testify in drug cases.

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TWO ACTIVISTS arrested at a pro-marijuana protest on Independence Mall on Saturday had different reactions to the same bad news in court yesterday.

Authorities say Adam Kokesh, a former Marine, and Richard Tamaccio, a comedian who goes by N.A. Poe, "assaulted, resisted, opposed, impeded, and interfered" with National Park rangers at Saturday's "Smokedown Prohibition." U.S. District Judge Thomas J. Rueter ordered both men held for a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday after Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Goldberg said Kokesh has been silent and uncooperative and pointed out Tamaccio's alleged "substantial drug use."

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ALUMINUM BASEBALL bats, frying pans and bullhorns made 7th and Arch streets one noisy corner yesterday, as dozens of activists gathered outside the Federal Detention Center to protest arrests they said were made at a marijuana event Saturday.

"No victim, no crime," the crowd chanted on Arch Street as prisoners tapped on the narrow windows above.

According to the group of protesters, two men were being held at the detention center after being arrested Saturday afternoon at a monthly event at Independence Mall called the "Smokedown Prohibition." Many people openly smoke marijuana at the events to promote legalization, and no arrests have been made or citations issued in the past, the group said.

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IT SOUNDS LIKE some alternate reality, where down is up and hot is cold, but Ed "NJ Weedman" Forchion said the words himself Wednesday morning, and even he can't believe it.

"I'm getting a little stressed," said Forchion, 48. "I have no weed."

Oh yeah, he was arrested again, too, but that's normal for the longtime marijuana activist.

This time, Forchion says, he was a passenger in a car that was pulled over Monday night on Route 73 in Evesham Township, Burlington County. The car had a faulty taillight, but he said that once the officer saw his dreadlocks and a shirt with a marijuana leaf on it, he became the center of attention.

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Should Philly Issue More Summonses Instead of Making Weed Arrests?

ANTHONY GARNER knows that marijuana is illegal in Philadelphia. He just figured that the police focus on drug kingpins and corner dealers these days. They wouldn't waste their time on him.

He was wrong. There he was last summer, sitting in a holding cell for possessing what he estimates was $20 worth of weed, commiserating with others who'd been busted for simply smoking it.

"I didn't think it was going to be this big of a thing," said Garner, 23, a gas-and-electricity salesman from Germantown. "I was in with guys that were locked up for smoking a joint. They didn't even have bags."

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LAST WEEK was the tipping point: For the first time in more than four decades of polling, a majority of Americans say that marijuana should be legalized, the Pew Research Center announced.

It's a slim majority - 52 percent to 45 percent - but the trend is undeniable. Smoking pot will not be a crime forever in America, where someone is arrested for marijuana possession every 42 seconds, on average.

The polls found that 32 percent still believe that smoking marijuana is morally wrong, but that's an 18-point drop from 2006. Seventy-two percent said enforcing marijuana laws costs more than it's worth.

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WHAT DO truck drivers, nuclear-powerplant operators and St. Joe's Prep students have in common? They all must submit to some form of routine, random drug-testing. Just a few days ago, the Prep joined a growing number of schools by saying that for the health and welfare of their students, the school would use a lottery system to drug-test about 180 students a year.

My first reaction is to remove any discussion of constitutional rights with this policy. St. Joe's Prep is a private school, and I agree that it has every right to set a policy like this. It is the school's right to tell parents and students to comply or leave the school. This is a school with a huge waiting list and a great reputation.

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Bad Way to Spend Our Tax Money

IN HIS NOV. 26 letter, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel tries to use progressive language to mask Gov. Corbett's unjustifiable $685 million prison expansion project. Wetzel's two main points are disingenuous and misleading.

First, Wetzel cites a decline in the prison population since June to bolster Corbett's Justice Reinvestment efforts. This is a sleight of hand - using numbers that merely reflect a decline from the sharp increase that happened just before. Pennsylvania's prison population has gone down since June only because the population spiked significantly in the middle of the year. If Wetzel compared today's population to the amount one year ago, he would find that there are actually slightly more people in Pennsylvania's prisons today than there were in October 2011, up from 51,323 to 51,382.

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THE "NJ WEEDMAN" is back in the Garden State, and he's looking to plant one pot-friendly person in the jury pool who might help him blaze a path to permanent freedom.

On Wednesday morning, Ed "NJ Weedman" Forchion will appear in court in Burlington County as jury selection begins in his retrial on marijuana distribution. Police found a pound of herb in his trunk during a 2010 traffic stop.

Forchion, 48, has bone cancer and a medicinal-marijuana card from California. He claims that his weed was for medicinal purposes, and notes that his arrest occurred after New Jersey had passed a law to allow medical marijuana.

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CHRIS GOLDSTEIN, a marijuana advocate and editor of freedomisgreen.com, pulled a lighter from his pocket and sparked a joint at 4:20 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, right in the middle of Independence Park.

Nothing happened, except he got a bit stoned.

"This is how smoking marijuana should be," he said.

But not everyone is so lucky. That's the point.

"Every day, there are thousands of people getting arrested for pot, and for this amount of pot," Goldstein said, holding the burning joint as thick smoke wafted across the park. "Not for a pound of marijuana, not for growing marijuana, but mostly young black men are getting arrested for this."

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I read with great interest your article in the Daily News in which you recommend a carrot-andstick approach to drug addiction (Bykofsky, Aug. 10). I agree completely but wanted to point out that drug courts employ just the kind of sanction-and-reward system that you suggest.

I am the public defender assigned to the Philadelphia Treatment Court, the first drug court to operate in Pennsylvania. We have successfully graduated thousands of drug-addicted participants through an approach that rewards clean time and holds addicts accountable for their behavior. This method employed by drug courts across the nation has proved successful for all kinds of addicts, potheads and cocaine and heroin users alike. The court is in session every week in Room 1006 at the Criminal Justice Center and our judge and coordinator are always happy to speak about our remarkable success.

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AS TERRIBLE as the tragedy of Garrett Reid's death was, the massive amount of play it received in the media and elsewhere - a moment of silence before a Phillies game for a nonplayer who died essentially of self-inflicted wounds? - yanked me back to a question I have grappled with over the years - whether it's time to decriminalize drug use.

Every time I get close to "yes," a case like Reid's pulls me back to "no." Easing up on hard drug enforcement will bring more misery, more addiction, more death.

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Cops Tend to Be High When Giving Drugs 'Street Value'

IT HAPPENS before the news conference, before the plasticwrapped bricks of dope are arranged on the table for the TV cameras and before headlines are made.

Cops calculate the "street value." It's a branch of mathematics in which economies of scale meet public relations.

By envisioning thousands of transactions that will never occur - and sometimes padding the numbers on top of that - law-enforcement agencies can wind up doubling, tripling, quadrupling, quintupling, sextupling or even septupling what the confiscated drugs are worth to the bulk-level dealers who got popped.

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With a Big Bust in January and a Major Conference This Fall, We've Been Psychedelicized

IT TOOK A POLICE battering ram to bust down the door of the West Philadelphia apartment. Once inside, police discovered a colorful cache of psychedelic drugs - enough LSD to open thousands of "doors of perception" for six to eight hours at a time.

The Jan. 31 raid appeared to be a true flashback to a bygone era, with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration calling the 9,500 hits of LSD on tie-dyed images of Homer Simpson and Jerry Garcia an "anomaly" in Philadelphia. And since two of the five suspects arrested were Drexel students, the raid became known as the "Drexel LSD bust" in the media, with reporters interviewing students and getting statements from university officials.

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FACEDOWN ON the pavement with two pounds of pot in her trunk and a cop punching her in the side, Colleen Begley could have packed her bohemian lifestyle away and called it quits.

The Moorestown native could have dimed out all her longtime friends for a lesser sentence, with the hope of someday returning to a cozy life in that affluent suburb, where she could finish college and get into her family's law business. At the very least, she could have moved to Northern California, where there'd be less heat.

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LYNNE ABRAHAM doesn't get it. She didn't get it when she was Philadelphia's district attorney from 1991 until last year.

And she'll probably never get it, no matter how many statistics and reports show that America's 40-year-old "war on drugs" has been a hugely expensive and crime-inducing failure.

"My view remains unchanged with regard to drug abuse," Abraham, 70, said from her office at the Archer & Greiner law firm, where the bulldoggish ex-prosecutor is now a partner.

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YOU'D smoke it.

Or, hey, the economy's down, so maybe you'd sell it to your buddy who brought a joint to the college reunion.

But only about a third of the more than 1,500 readers who voted in a Philly.com poll yesterday said that they would call police - as an Upper Darby couple did last week - if 5 pounds of pot mysteriously showed up on their doorstep.

Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood Sr. said that he's disappointed in the nearly 70 percent of you who wouldn't turn the marijuana over to authorities.

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Most drug dealers in Camden probably have no idea what the acronym HIDTA stands for until they're face down on a street corner in handcuffs.

Since 1995, the Philadelphia-Camden High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) joint task force has been combatting violent drug activity in the city and its surrounding suburbs with a unique lineup of local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies.

Come January, the Drug Enforcement Administration, an agency that sources say has been conspicuously absent from Camden's HIDTA initiative for years, will take over day-to-day operations from the Camden County Prosecutor's Office, the agency that has run the initiative there almost since its inception.

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THE CITY IS still paying thousands of dollars in court-related overtime to four narcotics officers taken off the street after being accused of fabricating evidence and other crimes.

The officers are being paid to go to court for cases that are delayed or withdrawn. They show up at the Criminal Justice Center and do nothing.

Officers Jeffrey and Richard Cujdik, Robert McDonnell Jr. and Thomas Tolstoy, in addition to their $58,000-a-year salaries, have collectively earned more than $15,500 in overtime since being taken off the street, city payroll records show.

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SOME ARGUE, and I'm one of them, that we're entering a new progressive era like the one from 1900 to 1920 that followed the excesses of the robber barons and the Gilded Age.

That period saw the rise of a school of philosophy called Pragmatism. The point was to move beyond ideology and pure power, and look out the window to see how people actually lived their lives and to figure out practical ways to make it all work better.

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City prosecutors yesterday dropped charges against a suspected drug dealer after a judge denied their request to continue the case pending the outcome of an investigation into the arresting officer, Jeffrey Cujdik.

Cujdik is at the center of an FBI and local police probe that arose after Cujdik's longtime informant, Ventura Martinez, said in a Feb. 9 Daily News article that Cujdik had instructed him to lie about some drug buys so that officers could obtain search warrants to enter homes of suspected dealers.

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THE JOCULAR reference in the May 1 Clout column to the medical marijuana bill that I've introduced did not include any of the reasons why I believe this is a necessary and vital step.

Many people, especially as they age, suffer from serious diseases for which existing prescription treatments are inadequate. Marijuana can slow the progression of glaucoma and make other dreadfully painful diseases, like cancer, HIV, multiple sclerosis or Crohn's disease, more bearable.

There is a vast illegal trade in marijuana. Marijuana can be a gateway drug to deadly drugs because it is part of the same criminal distribution system. Allowing legal distribution in limited medical circumstances takes some of its users out of the criminal system.

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The war on drugs was lost long ago, but that hasn't stopped us from wasting more than an estimated $1 trillion fighting it, plus incurring millions of casualties in the form of lives ruined unnecessarily.

In the process, we have purposely rejected effective weapons against drug use in favor of methods that had been proven unworkable, like massive arrests and harsh sentences for possession.

That finally may be changing.

Last week, President Obama appointed A. Thomas McLellan, University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor, as second in command to the nation's drug czar. This will put one of the nation's leading authorities on addiction in charge of drug policy.

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City school district officials are crediting a "courageous" student with reporting another student who police said brought 11 bags of marijuana to Morton Elementary School in Southwest Philadelphia on Tuesday.

The 10-year-old boy who allegedly brought the drugs and gave some to three other students was suspended and likely will be transferred to an alternative program the district runs for students in grades three through five, said Fernando Gallard, a district spokesman.

"There is counseling that we provide in situations like this," Gallard said. "When you are dealing with younger students, you have to make sure that they understand the consequences of their actions." As for the student who notified an assistant principal at the school on 63rd Street near Woodland Avenue, Gallard called that child "courageous."

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I'M A DEVOUT capitalist. My belief in the free market is second only to my faith in the Holy Trinity. But I draw the line at drugs.

Over recent days, some savvy people have exploited both the weakened economy and the deadly violence on our Mexican border to yet again push for the legalization of narcotics.

The argument goes like this:

It's the illegal nature of the drug trade that causes the carnage. Thus, if we treat controlled substances just like any other commodity and regulate them in accordance with existing laws of commerce, we'll eliminate the extreme profit motive. And, presumably, the mayhem.

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Shopkeepers Say Plainclothes Cops Barged In, Looted Stores & Stole Cash

ON A SWELTERING July afternoon in 2007, Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and his narcotics squad members raided an Olney tobacco shop.

Then, with guns drawn, they did something bizarre: They smashed two surveillance cameras with a metal rod, said store owners David and Eunice Nam.

The five plainclothes officers yanked camera wires from the ceiling. They forced the slight, frail Korean couple to the vinyl floor and cuffed them with plastic wrist ties.

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It's a fact written in stone: "If you do not give the people what they want they will find a way to get it."

After some 30 years of the so-called Drug War, the most significant accomplishment is a multitude of small-time street peddlers filling up the jails.

Watch some of the misleading reality police shows on TV, and you'll see that the effort to curtail drug sales is pathetic.

The scenario is just about always the same. Bust into some ramshackle house, confiscate about $300 worth of drugs. Everybody pats each other on the back for a job well done.

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Thanks for Jill Porter's eminently sensible column about Michael Phelps and marijuana ("Phelps a Toke-ing of Pot Legalizers' Affection," Feb. 4). It's worth remembering that no one would raise an eyebrow if Phelps had been photographed hoisting a Bud or a martini. Compared to marijuana, alcohol is more addictive, more toxic and orders of magnitude more likely to make users aggressive or violent. Phelps apparently chose to unwind with a substance that is far safer, despite its legal status. The more than 872,000 U.S. marijuana arrests in 2007 (89 percent were for mere possession) represent an insane waste of national resources at a time when governments at all levels are awash in debt. Enough.

Bruce Mirken Director of Communications Marijuana Policy Project

Washington, D.C.

[end]

Jill, most doctors and researchers, if you look it up, find pot is anything but "harmless." Check Amazon, books, and the Internet for serious research.

You only quote one side: NORML, a questionable group with an agenda, as the sole basis for your opinion: "The evolving opinions about marijuana, based on evidence of its relative harmlessness . . . NORML's St. Pierre said."

This is opinion masquerading as facts.

We deserve better, Jill.

Jill Zhuraw

Philadelphia

[end]

I was offended by Signe's Feb. 5 cartoon of Michael Phelps. Phelps is an Olympic icon, and to portray him with marijuana leaves as gold medals around his neck was insulting.

While I don't condone the use of drugs of any kind, what he did after the Olympics was his business, but he made a huge mistake and he realized it. There is always someone out there ready to take you down and he was caught using a drug and someone got the photo.

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Bo(i)ng! The photo that might change not just our image of Michael Phelps, but drug laws, too.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Michael Phelps smoking pot through a bong might indeed change attitudes.

Not toward Phelps - who'll survive this controversy swimmingly - but toward marijuana.

Instead of forcing him from his pedestal, Phelps' recreational use of marijuana will no doubt push the pendulum further along the road to liberalization of pot laws.

As well it should.

The very fact that the Olympian athlete hasn't been deep-sixed by some of his sponsors shows how tolerant our society has become of the recreational use of weed.

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Council Rock School District Superintendent Mark J. Klein said his staff usually has ears to the ground when it comes to staying on top of dangerous teen trends.

But yesterday, the district was stumped when four sophomore boys at Council Rock High School North in Newtown, Bucks County, became ill after ingesting pills known as Snurf.

According to a release from the district - which cited the pills' packaging as the source of the information - Snurf is an "herbal supplement with mood-altering properties."

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Cartoon Found in Locker of Narcotics Squad Member

INSIDE the locker of a narcotics cop, Philadelphia police officials recently made a shocking discovery: A cartoon of a man, half as an officer in uniform and half as a Klansman with the words: "Blue By Day - - White By Night. White Power," according to police officials.

The officer, Scott Schweizer, who has arrested countless drug suspects in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, was removed from his undercover police duties and given a desk job earlier this month, authorities said.

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FAMILY COURT Judge Lori Dumas Brooks wanted to make sure she wasn't overreacting.

So she held the small blue packet of powdered substance in her palm and showed it around at work yesterday.

Everyone asked the same thing:

What was she doing with crack cocaine?

"I thought she confiscated it in the courtroom," said Administrative Judge Kevin Dougherty.

No one could believe what the tiny pouch actually was: a new breath mint made by - get this - Hershey's. Ice Breakers Pacs, which hit the stores this month, are dissolvable pouches in blue or orange that look uncannily like tiny heat-sealed bags of cocaine, crack, heroin or any other powdered drug.

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Supremes' Disturbing 1st Amendment Rulings

THE U.S. SUPREME Court's schizophrenic rulings on First Amendment issues this week reflect a troubling trend by the Roberts Court.

Most notably, the court has gutted the McCain-Feingold prohibitions against corporations and unions who would bankroll anti-candidate ads that are thinly disguised as issues ads. McCain-Feingold prohibits corporations or unions from financing ads that target specific candidates in the weeks just before an election.

The ruling defangs the bill's enforcement provisions by finding that its restrictions illegally curtail free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.

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BALTIMORE - The strict anti-crime measures proposed by Philadelphia's likely next mayor, Michael Nutter, are also sparking a sharp political debate - 90 miles to our south.

The No. 2 lawmaker in the Baltimore City Council says he will introduce an anti-crime bill in the Maryland city next week that is closely modeled after Nutter's proposals, including the "stop-and-frisk" plan for high-crime neighborhoods.

"Desperate measures are needed when we're in desperate situations," the city council vice president, Robert W. Curran, told The Baltimore Sun. "What I'm trying to do is give the mayor additional tools."

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The stereotypical drug addict doesn't exist. Instead, think Little League, Boy Scouts, cheerleaders, soccer practice, piano lessons. The truth is, nice kids next door do drugs and die of them.

I should know - I lost my 25-year-old son to drugs.

Yet we parents are often the worst-equipped to help because we don't want to believe our kids are on drugs. We don't want to believe that with our nice homes, hard work and anti-drug education in schools, and giving them the best we can think of, they can still head down the path to self-destruction.

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They Want to Know How Son Could Shoot Self in Cop Car

The parents of a Southwest Philadelphia man who police said shot himself in the head while handcuffed in the back seat of a cop car demanded answers yesterday from the Police Department.

Oliver P. Neal Jr. and his ex-wife, Beverly, sat next to family attorneys and complained that police have not contacted them about their son, Oliver P. Neal III, 26, of Wheeler Street near 57th.

"They haven't the decency to knock on my door," said Neal. "Why didn't they contact us? What kind of system is that?"

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I applaud your recent editorial "Who cries for the junkies," but would like to comment on some of your assertions.

The first being that "We have long given up on the notion that there is a war on drugs." The war has not been waged on drugs but on the people who use them. When President Nixon declared his "War on Drugs" in 1971, there were 143 citizens in prison for drug offenses per 100,000 population. Statistics available in 2004 indicate the incarceration rate is about 729 per 100,000 and growing.

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An article in the July 25 Daily News reported that prisons in Philadelphia are about 1,000 over capacity.

There is an obvious solution to this overcrowding: end mandatory minimums for low-level drug offenses. The war on drugs has had a devastating impact on increasing numbers of women who have been incarcerated as a result of these policies.

Unfortunately, many women's organizations have not paid enough attention to the impact of the drug war on women and their families. At its 2005 convention, the National Organization for Women passed a resolution called "Women's rights: Another casualty of the 'War on Drugs.' "

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Substance-Abuse Experts Eye Ways To Cut Drug's Lure

With a recent explosion of deaths and overdoses from fentanyl-laced heroin nationally, local and federal substance-abuse experts huddled in Philadelphia yesterday to plot ways to reduce demand for the deadly drug.

The doable: Law-enforcement authorities and health-care providers should share information to track the drug's sources, so police can snag the suppliers, experts urged.

The difficult: Victims should be automatically screened for fentanyl, despite the prohibitive costs and detection difficulties that have discouraged many coroners and doctors from routine screening, they exhorted.

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Death Grip

Drug deaths are outpacing homicides in Philadelphia, even as the bodies piled up during one of the city's deadliest weekends with 19 shot - six of them fatally.

The last drug overdose occurred on Friday when a 36-year-old man was dead on arrival at 5:03 p.m. at Temple University Hospital.

Early yesterday, Kareem Smith, 33, found shot once in the chest and lying between two parked cars in South Philadelphia, became the most recent homicide.

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State, city and federal authorities have teamed to find the source of a strain that has killed about 70 people in the region since April. B

City, state and federal law enforcement and public health officials yesterday announced a joint regional effort to track the deaths attributed to painkiller-laced heroin and identify the suppliers of the drug.

Heroin mixed with fentanyl has caused about 70 deaths in the Philadelphia region and more than 200 overdoses nationwide since it was first spotted in April, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Meehan said.

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"Wit' or wit'out," the usual phrase to order a South Philly cheesesteak with or without onions, has taken on a deadly new meaning.

Drug dealers are using the expression to ask customers whether they want illicit heroin - or cocaine - with or without fentanyl, a synthetic opiate 40 to 100 times more powerful than morphine.

"It's deadly. The push of a syringe is like pulling a trigger," said U.S. Attorney Patrick Meehan, of the fatal drug mixture that has led to as many as 70 deaths and up to 220 overdoses in the Philadelphia and South Jersey area since April.

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'E" is back in the news - that's Ecstasy, the feel-good party drug. It's also known in the youthful drug culture as "Blue Kisses," the "Hug Drug," "Love Pill" or, simply, "X."

A recent article in the Daily News lauded the interception by the feds of two shipments of 230,000 methamphetamine-laced Ecstasy pills headed for the Philadelphia area. Although this represents a significant number of "trips" that will not be taken, it is also a wake-up call that too many kids are still enamored of mind-altering drugs.

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CHARLES PLINTON was still struggling with the reality of his son's suicide when he found the box of cartridges. Three were missing.

"There were people who wondered if someone else had shot Chuck," Plinton told me. "But I never really thought that. He had bought the gun the same day."

That day was Dec. 12, 2005. Charles A. "Chuck" Plinton Jr. called his mother, Frances Parker Robinson, from his car on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He told her he was going to kill himself and that there was nothing she could do to stop him.

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Arlen Specter says he "may introduce legislation" in the Senate in favor of medical marijuana.

The U.S. senator, who has long supported the use of human stem cells for disease research, told Your Humble Narrator yesterday that he's in favor of a state's right to decide whether to allow its doctors to prescribe marijuana.

Specter himself, who is battling Hodgkin's disease, could be a candidate for medical marijuana use.

The Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that federal agents could arrest people who use doctor-prescribed marijuana in states that have authorized it, including California and Oregon.

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Re Stuart Caesar's letter, "Hidden Pot Agenda" (June 14):

Medical marijuana has nothing to do with "potheads" wanting a good time. It has to do with people in pain who need relief. Someone very close to me decided to stop smoking marijuana, not for medical reasons, but for himself. After about three weeks, he started to lose vision in his left eye.

The doctor told him it was glaucoma and prescribed marijuana in pill form, but his condition only got worse. He eventually started smoking again, and he now has 20/20 vision.

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DURING THE final days of my father's battle with lung cancer, he struggled to remain conscious.

Peace only came courtesy of the morphine that my mother administered under strict orders from his doctor. Back then, in 1982, pain management consisted primarily of heavy doses of narcotics that would dull the pain but also the senses, forcing patients to trade coherence for comfort.

So, given my experience, it is difficult to say this: The Supreme Court was right to hold that the medical marijuana initiatives in 11 mostly western states are unconstitutional.

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