USA

By Tim Craig, D.C. Wire

 

Medical marijuana is now legal in the District after the Democrat-controlled Congress declined to overrule a D.C Council bill that allows the city to set up as many as eight dispensaries where chronically ill patients can purchase the drug.

 

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) said in a statement the bill become law after Congress finished its business Monday night because neither the House nor Senate opted to intervene.

 

The council approved the bill in May, and under Home Rule Congress had 30 legislative days to review it.

 

By Joe Eskenazi, San Francisco Weekly

 

Ask former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara when he began to support the notion of legalizing marijuana, and you don't get a short answer. It began half a century ago, when he was a rookie cop busting dope fiends in Harlem on a daily basis. It continued as he rose up the ranks, and was sent by the New York Police Department to earn advanced degrees in Harvard -- where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on "the history of criminalizing drugs and its impact on the police." And he served for 18 years as police chief at two major American cities, and knows better than most what it takes to prosecute a war on drugs.

 

Perhaps the shortest answer is that McNamara has felt this way for most of his lifetime. He wasn't in a position to say so before -- but he sure is now.

 

McNamara penned an editorial emphatically supporting legalizing pot -- and voting yes on Proposition 19 --appearing in yesterday's Chronicle. Today he told SF Weekly that the drug policies he was mandated to carry out as a police officer, commander, and chief for more than 35 years were not only unproductive -- they were counterproductive. "We're doing far more damage with the war against marijuana than any good that could possibly be coming out of it."

 

By Bill Quigley, AlterNet

 

The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.

 

Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.

 

The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?

 

By Ryan Grim, Huffington Post

 

Congress addressed a historic wrong on Wednesday afternoon, replacing it instead with a slightly lesser wrong, when the House voted to reduce the disparity in the sentencing of people caught with crack cocaine versus powder cocaine.

 

To be charged with a felony, crack users needed to possess only 5 grams of the drug. To be hit with the same charge, powder cocaine users needed to be caught with 500 grams. That 100-to-1 disparity has frequently been cited by drug war opponents as exhibit A to buttress their claim that drug laws are racist.

 

The moment on the House floor came and went fairly quickly, but the ease with which the bill passed belied a lot of behind-the-scenes activity.

 

PR Newswire

 

PROVIDENCE, R.I., July 28 /PRNewswire/ -- The New England School of Alternative Horticultural Studies, a New England-based medical marijuana training center, today announced the September 2010 launch of its Basic Medical Marijuana training class in Warwick, RI, the first professional medical marijuana training class in the north eastern United States.

 

Rhode Island State law allows registered patients or their caregivers to legally set up an indoor grow with a certain number of marijuana plants for personal medical purposes. Unlike similar schools in California and Colorado, the New England School of Alterative Horticultural Studies operates in the north eastern USA and offers professional medical marijuana training at a fraction of what the cost would be for a north eastern USA based student.

 

OpposingViews.com

 

SAN FRANCISCO -- Medical marijuana patient advocacy group Americans for Safe Access (ASA) filed an important legal brief today in a Ninth Circuit case which aims to correct statements by the federal government that "marijuana has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States." The ASA legal filing points to a policy directive issued last week by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), recognizing medical marijuana and distinguishing it from other illegal controlled substances. In its brief, ASA contends that the VHA directive bolsters advocates' arguments that marijuana does indeed have medical value.

 

The Economist

 

THREE pickup trucks pulled up outside George Norris’s home in Spring, Texas. Six armed police in flak jackets jumped out. Thinking they must have come to the wrong place, Mr Norris opened his front door, and was startled to be shoved against a wall and frisked for weapons. He was forced into a chair for four hours while officers ransacked his house. They pulled out drawers, rifled through papers, dumped things on the floor and eventually loaded 37 boxes of Mr Norris’s possessions onto their pickups. They refused to tell him what he had done wrong. “It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that,” he recalls.

 

The Economist

 

In 2000, four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, which bars Americans from breaking foreign rules when hunting or fishing.

 

The original intent was to prevent Americans from, say, poaching elephants in Kenya. But it has been interpreted to mean that they must abide by every footling wildlife regulation on Earth. The lobster-men had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece. Two are still in jail.

 

By Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle

 

If recreational marijuana is legalized in California, prices of the drug could plummet 80 percent and the number of dope-smokers would rise, but the amount of money the state would bring in through taxes and fees is a big question mark, according to a study released Wednesday.

 

What's more, while the state could save more than $300 million a year by not enforcing current laws outlawing weed, it may lose that much or more in federal funding if Washington decides to punish California's defiance of the U.S. prohibition of dope, the study found.

 

By Terry Hurlbut, Examiner.com

 

Libertarian Joe Siano (candidate for Congress in the 4th District) would repeal federal anti-drug laws, because regulation of comestibles, injectables, and the like are not the federal government's business. Though this puts him at odds with some in the Tea Party movement, he still forthrightly defends this position.

 

One question in the C3 questionnaire reads in part:

 

Where does the Constitution authorize...[the d]enial or restriction of the right of any individual to purchase, consume or transport...recreational drugs? If no such provision be found, will you introduce, sponsor, or otherwise support measures to repeal any unauthorized laws [and] phase out any unauthorized functions [related to this]?