Needle exchanges save money: report
By Bob Bates
Wentworth Courier
October 29, 2009


Editorials / Éditoriaux

Viewpoint: Safe injection sites would clean up Ottawa's ugly habit
By Toni Petter
Centretown News
October 30, 2009

The Associated Press
Thursday, October 29, 2009

Calif. lawmaker holds hearing on legalizing pot

By MARCUS WOHLSEN

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- No tie-dye was on display at a standing-room only hearing held by a California lawmaker on Wednesday in a bid to get his marijuana legalization bill taken seriously.

Instead, suits and sober discussion were the rule at the state Capitol as Assemblyman Tom Ammiano presided over what his office said was the first legislative consideration of the issue since California banned the drug in 1913.

Both sides of the debate were heard, but Ammiano has long had his mind made up.

Before the hearing, the San Francisco Democrat and former comedian called the criminalization of marijuana a failed policy that denies the state significant revenue. He said the bill could put the state in a position to set the national agenda on pot.

"I think we have a real shot at it, particularly in the context of it being in some ways bigger than California," Ammiano said.

His bill would tax and regulate marijuana in the state much like alcohol. Adults 21 and older could legally possess, grow and sell marijuana. The state would charge a $50-per-ounce fee and a 9 percent tax on retail sales.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he does not support legalization but caused a stir in May when he said he was open to debate on the issue.

At least one poll showed a slight majority of Californians would support a tax-and-regulate scheme for pot, but the bill's chances remain unclear. Skeptics have questioned whether the state could truly enforce a tax on marijuana and whether users and sellers would want to expose themselves to possible federal prosecution.

"You're going to create a record of some sort," said Assemblyman Curt Hagman, a San Bernardino County Republican. "You can't force me to self-incriminate myself."

Supporters of Ammiano's bill noted the state already collects taxes from medical marijuana dispensaries with little federal interference.

Legal experts on both sides also agreed at the informational hearing that nothing in current federal law can prevent California from stripping criminal penalties for marijuana from its own books.

"If California decides to legalize marijuana, there's nothing in the Constitution that stands in its way," said Tamar Todd, a staff attorney for the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance.

Speakers at the hearing argued a number of issues, including whether legalization would increase or decrease crime and help or hurt children.

State tax collectors presented an estimate that Ammiano's bill could generate nearly $1.4 billion in tax revenue. They cautioned, however, that the figure depended on several untested assumptions about how rates of use and prices would change following possible legalization.

Rosalie Pacula, director of drug policy research at the nonpartisan Rand Corp., said data on the economics of marijuana were "insufficient on which to base any sound policy."

Pacula said a failed effort in Canada to increase taxes on cigarettes showed that unless taxes had a minimal effect on prevailing prices, "you create the economic incentive for the black market to remain."

As the legalization movement has gained momentum, organized opposition outside law enforcement groups has been sparse. Still, several anti-pot protesters spoke passionately during and after the hearing.

Marijuana use is commonplace among young people in his Sacramento neighborhood, said Bishop Ron Allen, president of the International Faith Based Coalition, an anti-drug religious group.

Legalizing marijuana to tax it would help fill state coffers at the expense of its kids, he said.

"It's blood money, that's it," he said.

_______________________________________________
Dd-world mailing list
https://lists.tni.org/mailman/listinfo/dd-world

David Bratzer is one of the few cops who are speaking out during their employment period and not waiting for retirement to discuss the problems with prohibition...

-----Original Message-----
From: David Bratzer [mailto:davidbratzer@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2009 6:25 PM
To: David Bratzer
Subject: Blog post about LEAP speaker in legal battle

Friends, here is a post about free speech / drug policy:

http://copssaylegalize.blogspot.com/2009/10/leap-speaker-in-nh-legal-battle.html

Dave

 

Lethal Heroin, Killer Coke and Expo 86: How the Downtown Eastside fell apart
It was a cohesive community -- until potent drugs changed everything
Vancouver Sun
October 29, 2009

New drug safety program to be introduced in schools
The Sault Star
October 28, 2009 
 

 Cannabis evidence 'was devalued'
BBC News
October 29, 2009

Alcohol worse than ecstasy - drugs chief
By Alan Travis
Guardian (UK)
October 29, 2009

Alcoholics could face compulsory treatment
By Eric Tlozek
ABC News (Australia)
October 29, 2009


Editorials / Éditoriaux

The right sentence
As Congress weighs the cocaine sentencing disparity, it should remember crack's dangers.
Washington Post
October 29, 2009

The Economist
Oct 22nd 2009

Crime and politics

The velvet glove

Why the soft approach sometimes works

LOOKING after small children is never easy. Many dribble; some bite. But for Joyce Chavis, the problem until a few years ago was that she could not let toddlers in her care step outside her house. The street was packed with prostitutes. Drug-dealers loitered aggressively with pit bulls at their heels. In the local playground the bushes concealed only some of the things that crack-addicted young women were doing to earn their next fix.

Until 2004 the West End neighbourhood in High Point, North Carolina, was an open-air drug market. Gun shots punctuated the night. Honest folk were scared to walk to the shops. Jim Summey, a local preacher, recalls a Sunday when his flock could not park because the street was jammed with johns seeking sex and drugs. When he remonstrated with the dealers, they smashed up his car and shot out 58 windows in his church.

Yet West End is now as peaceful as evensong. It is still poor, but thugs with dogs no longer menace passers-by. The prostitutes have gone, or gone indoors. The corners are quiet. What happened?

The High Point police used to deal with drug-dealers in the traditional manner. They would "come rolling in like an occupying army," as Jim Fealy, the police chief, puts it. They would grab young men, pat them down and arrest the ones with drugs in their pockets. They sent many to jail, but never shut down the drug market for more than a few hours.

African-Americans in neighbourhoods like West End detested the police, and the police grew frustrated that no one in these places called them to report crimes.

But then they tried something different. On the advice of David Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, they started talking to community leaders in West End. They found out who the street drug-dealers were. There were fewer than they had expected: only 16, of whom three were habitually violent. Patiently, they compiled dossiers on each of them. Then they arrested and prosecuted the violent ones, and invited the rest in for a chat.

The young dealers were shown the evidence against them, and given a choice. If they stopped dealing drugs and carrying guns, they would not be prosecuted. A "community co-ordinator" sat down with each of them and asked him what he needed to go straight: a job? Drug treatment? A place to stay? An alarm clock to get to work on time? The community promised to help with all these things. The dealers' neighbours and even grandmothers stood up and told them that what they were doing was wrong, and had to stop. Then prosecutors warned them that if they did not stop that day, they would be sent to jail, possibly for the rest of their lives.

It worked. Nearly all the dealers reformed, bar the odd bit of shoplifting. You can still buy drugs behind closed doors in High Point, but the intervention was never about drugs. It was about making the neighbourhood liveable again. Fears that the open-air drug market would simply move elsewhere proved unfounded. As the same technique was tried in other neighbourhoods and for other types of crime, such as gang-related muggings, the city's overall violent crime rate fell noticeably, from 8.7 per 1,000 people in 2003 to 7.3 in 2008.

The debate about crime is often emotional. Voters want vengeance.

Politicians oblige. Barack Obama supports the death penalty even though he believes it "does little to deter crime". It is justified, he says, because it expresses "the full measure of [a community's] outrage". Such reasoning is widespread, but Mark Kleiman, the author of "When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment", argues that it is unwise. The only good reason to punish, he says, is to prevent crime, either by locking criminals up so they cannot reoffend, or by deterring others.

More threats, less force

Prison sometimes works. Some credit tougher sentencing for the sharp drop in crime since the
early 1990s. The number of incarcerated Americans has quadrupled since 1980, to 2.3m, and many of these people make the streets safer by their absence. But some 500,000 are non-violent drug offenders. And it "ought to bother us" that the incarceration rate for black Americans exceeds that in the Soviet Union at the peak of the Gulag, ventures Mr Kleiman. Incarceration hurts criminals' friends and relatives. It upsets the sex ratio in high-crime areas, making it very hard for young black women to form stable families. The lesson of High Point is that you can reduce crime by making credible threats, without having to lock up so many people.

To deter, a punishment must be swift, certain and severe. Of these, severity matters the least, reckons Mr Kleiman, and there is a trade-off: the harsher the punishment, the more legal safeguards are required to ensure it is not misapplied. States that execute murderers do so only after decades of appeals. This costs millions in legal fees.

So they hardly ever do it, which means it is not much of a deterrent.

It turns out that milder sanctions can be swifter and more certain. For example, in Hawaii, until recently, felons ignored the terms of their probation because the only punishment available was a harsh one: being sent back to prison for the remainder of their term, typically five to ten years. Courts and probation officers were too swamped to handle the necessary paperwork and rebut the legal challenges to such harsh penalties. So violators typically got off scot free. This led people to conclude that they could misbehave with impunity. The chaos only ended when a judge started handing out instant sentences of a week or so. The certain prospect of spending a few days behind bars straight away made most of the probationers behave.

Mr Kleiman suggests several other promising, non-macho approaches to curbing crime. Raise alcohol taxes. Start school days later to prevent after-school crime. Force probationers to wear GPS tags, thus making probation a tough (and much cheaper) alternative to prison. Americans should experiment with such ideas, he says, and if they are serious about justice, the object should be to cut crime, not to make criminals suffer.

_______________________________________________

Dd-world mailing list
https://lists.tni.org/mailman/listinfo/dd-world

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/us/28pot.html?_r=2

 

Push to Legalize Marijuana Gains Ground in California

State lawmakers are holding a hearing on Wednesday on the effects of a bill that would legalize, tax and regulate the drug — in what would be the first such law in the United States [New York Times, USA]

Ottawa deaf to pleas for B.C. crack-inhalation site, advocates say
By Anna Mehler Paperny and Wendy Stueck
Globe and Mail
October 24, 2009

Part 2: The controversy
Is methadone good medicine or just another opiate for addicts?
By Alisha Morrissey
The Telegram
October 24, 2009

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall could change plan on needle exchange programs
By Angela Hall
Regina Leader-Post 
October 23, 2009

Editorials / Éditoriaux

The War on Dogma
The Harper Government is dragging Canada back to the dark ages of drug policy.
By Thomas Kerr
The Mark
October 20, 2009

Questions about pot
Has the Justice Department taken a first step toward decriminalization of marijuana?
Washington Post
October 26, 2009

The New York Times

October 25, 2009

States Pressed Into New Role on Marijuana

By KIRK JOHNSON

GREELEY, Colo. - Health and law enforcement officials around the nation are scrambling to figure out how to regulate medical marijuana now that the federal government has decided it will no longer prosecute legal users or providers.

For years, since the first medical marijuana laws were passed in the mid-1990s, many local and state governments could be confident, if not complacent, knowing that marijuana would be kept in check because it remained illegal under federal law, and that hard-nosed federal prosecutors were not about to forget it.

But with the Justice Department's announcement last week that it would not prosecute people who use marijuana for medical purposes in states where it is legal, local and state officials say they will now have to take on the job themselves.

In New Hampshire, for instance, where some state legislators are considering a medical marijuana law, there is concern that the state health department - already battered by budget cuts - could be hard-pressed to administer the system. In California, where there has been an explosion of medical marijuana suppliers, the authorities in Los Angeles and other jurisdictions are considering a requirement that all medical dispensaries operate as nonprofit organizations.

"The federal government says they're not going to control it, so the only other option we have is to control it ourselves," said Carrol Martin, a City Council member in this community north of Denver, where a ban on marijuana dispensaries was on the agenda at a Council meeting the day after the federal announcement.

At least five states, including New York and New Jersey, are considering laws to allow medical marijuana through legislation or voter referendums, in addition to the 13 states where such laws already exist.
Even while that is happening, scores of local governments in California, Colorado and other states have gone the other way and imposed bans or moratoriums on distribution even though state law allows it.

Some health and legal experts say the Justice Department's decision will promote the spread of marijuana for medical uses because local and state officials often take leadership cues from federal policy. That, the experts said, could lead to more liberal rules in states that already have medical marijuana and to more voters and legislators in other states becoming comfortable with the idea of allowing it. For elected officials who have feared looking soft on crime by backing any sort of legalized marijuana use, the new policy might provide support to reframe the issue.

"The fact that the feds are backing off is going to allow changes that are going to make it more accessible," said Bill Morrisette, a state senator in Oregon and chairman of a committee that oversees the state's medical marijuana law. Mr. Morrisette said he expected a flurry of proposals in the Legislature, including a plan already floated to have the state grow the marijuana crop itself, perhaps on the grounds of the State Penitentiary in Salem.

"It would be very secure," he said.

Here in Greeley, anxiety and enthusiasm were on display as the City Council considered a ban on dispensaries.

Most of those who testified at the hearing, including several dispensary operators, opposed the ban and spoke of marijuana's therapeutic benefits and the taxes that dispensary owners were willing to pour into Greeley's budget, which has been battered by the recession.

But on the seven-member Council, the question was control. Mr. Martin, for example, said that he hated to see the spread of marijuana, but that the barricades had fallen. Still, he said he opposed a local ban on dispensaries.

"If we have no regulations at all, then we can't control it, and our police officers have their hands tied," Mr. Martin said.

Mayor Ed Clark, a former police officer, took the opposite tack in supporting the ban, which passed on a 6-to-1 vote.

"I think we do regulate them, by not allowing dispensaries," Mr. Clark said.

The backdrop to the debate here in Colorado is a sharp expansion in marijuana dispensaries and patients, fueled in part by the State Board of Health decision in July not to impose limits on the number of patients handled by each marijuana provider.

The state attorney general, John W. Suthers, said the federal government's retreat, combined with the growth in demand, had created a legal vacuum.

"The federal Department of Justice is saying it will only go after you if you're in violation of state law," Mr. Suthers said. "But in Colorado it's not clear what state law is."

In New Hampshire, by contrast, where the state legislature is scheduled to meet this week to consider overriding the governor's veto and passing a medical marijuana law, government downsizing has colored the debate.

The state agency that would be responsible for licensing marijuana dispensaries has been battered by budget cuts, said Senator Sylvia B.
Larsen, the president of the New Hampshire Senate and a Democrat.
Concerns about the department, Ms. Larsen said, have made it harder to find two more votes in the Senate to reach a two-thirds majority that is needed to override a veto by Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat.

An even odder situation is unfolding in Maine, which already allows medical marijuana and where residents will vote next month on a measure that would create a new system of distribution and licensing.

The marijuana proposal, several political experts said, has been overshadowed by another fight on the ballot that would overturn a state law and ban same-sex marriage.

The added wrinkle is that opponents of same-sex marriage, said Christian Potholm, a professor of government at Bowdoin College, have heavily recruited young, socially conservative voters, who by and large tend to not be concerned about medical marijuana expansion.

"The 18- to 25-year-old vote is going to be overrepresented because of the gay marriage situation, so overrepresented in favor of medical marijuana," Professor Potholm said.

Some legal scholars said the federal government, by deciding not to enforce its own laws (possession and the sale of marijuana remain federal crimes), has introduced an unpredictable variable into the drug regulation system.

"The next step would be a particular state deciding to legalize marijuana entirely," said Peter J. Cohen, a doctor and a lawyer who teaches public health law at Georgetown University. If federal prosecutors kept their distance even then, Dr. Cohen said, legalized marijuana would become a de facto reality.

Senator Morrisette in Oregon said he thought that exact situation - a state moving toward legalization, perhaps California - could play out much sooner now than might have been imagined even a few weeks ago. And the continuing recession would only help, he said, with advocates for legalization able to promise relief to an overburdened prison system and injection of tax revenues to the state budget.