The stronger the pot, the less of it you have to smoke and/or eat to obtain the desired effect. So despite the White House's efforts to raise the alarm about marijuana potency hitting a 30-year high, this is actually great news. And props to the Associated Press for quoting someone that was willing to point that out.

They’ve finally done it.

RAF Harrier jets have been called in to destroy the largest drugs seizure in history after Afghan police discovered hashish worth at least £200 million.

General David McKiernan, the new Nato commander in Afghanistan, said the police had "made a huge step forward" in "curbing the tide of illegal drug trade in this country."

Gen McKiernan added: "With this single find, they have seriously crippled the Taliban's ability to purchase weapons that threaten the safety and security of the Afghan people and the region."

Yup, they've wiped hash off the market. Just like the biggest cocaine bust stopped coke trafficking. Just like the biggest heroin bust stopped heroin imports. And now, this big hash bust has crippled the Taliban’s revenue stream… uh, except for $3 billion from that other drug crop.

But opium represents Afghanistan's biggest drug problem. Last year, Afghans grew 9,000 tons of raw opium, enough to be refined into 880 tons of heroin, or 93 per cent of the world's supply.

Make that Bob Barr, the GOP elephant. Over at the Huffington Post, the former Republican congressman has announced he's had a change of heart.

I'll admit it, just five years ago I was "Public Enemy Number 1" in the eyes of the Libertarian Party. In my 2002 congressional race for Georgia's Seventh District, the Libertarian Party ran scathing attack ads against my stand on Medical Marijuana.

Today, I can reflect on my efforts and see no progress in stopping the widespread use of drugs. I'll even argue that America's drug problem is larger today than it was when Richard Nixon first coined the phrase, "War on Drugs," in 1972.

America's drug problem is only compounded by the vast amounts of money directed at this ongoing battle. In 2005, more than $12 billion was spent on federal drug enforcement efforts while another $30 billion was spent to incarcerate non-violent drug offenders.

Well, isn’t that nice of Barr? Now that he can’t do shit, he’s denounced the lock-'em-up prescript for dealing with drug problems. But in his tenure, Barr backed the most offensive piece of drug legislation in this country’s history: The Barr Amendment. That prevented Washington, D.C. from counting votes for a measure, supported by a majority of voters, that would have allowed access to medical marijuana for the sick and dying. Barr, in essence, was willing to suspend democracy to make sure sick people could be arrested.

His about-face is nothing more than a Naderesque attempt to wedge back into political relevance under the cloak of a third party. And his opposition to the drug war seems a lot like the strategy from Ron Paul, who conveniently co-opted the progressive drug-policy reform platform to earn liberal supporters, knowing full well that a) he’ll never be elected, and b) if he were, he'd never really try to decriminalize pot from the Oval Office.

Americans don’t need political pandering on this issue. We need effective alternatives and leaders who can actually implement them—needle exchanges, medical marijuana distribution programs run by the state, accurate drug information for kids, free on-demand walk-in meth treatment—not hackneyed condemnations of the drug war's bloated budget.

The tight-pocketed conservatives Barr is attempting to pander to may not want to pay for prisons, but they don’t want to pay for treatment, either. While reforming drug policy would save the country money, so would adopting policies based on racial justice, better health care, and compassion. Barr's record shows that on social issues, he has been an elephant at heart, even if he is running as a Libertarian. But, as the joke goes: What do you call the Libertarian health care plan? Don’t get sick.

But I am sick. Sick of White House press secretaries who foisted lies on the country and then tried to exonerate themselves by writing a tell-all book. Sick of generals who capitulated until they retired—then signed a deal with HarperCollins. Sick of Barr and his politics of convenience. Scott McClellan, Ricardo Sanchez, and Barr should have changed their positions when it actually mattered, not when it was politically convenient—and irrelevant.

Suddenly, now that it really feels like summer, these ads for malt-liquor margaritas are everywhere.

Pre-made margaritas are always dubious, like the ones that come in tubs at the liquor store that you’re supposed to freeze. Totes nasty. But, because these Mike’s twist-cap faux cocktails are malt beverages that don’t actually contain any tequila—the flavor of a margarita—they seem even more frightening.

But take my complaint with a grain of salt—and a lime—because they could be great. I haven’t actually drunk (ha!) one. Has anyone? Are they revolting or delicious?

Check this out: An Olympia bar owner, Frank Schnarrs, wound up in court for allowing a “private” smoking area inside his bar. He'd contended that since patrons paid a dollar to get into a second-floor room where servers claimed to be volunteers, it wasn’t a workplace under state law—but a private club—thus exempting it from the indoor smoking ban. Well, the judge called that a “smokescreen,” but that’s not the end of the story.

Thurston County Superior Court Judge Richard Hicks left the door open for Schnarrs to comply if Schnarrs were able to build an indoor designated smoking area using health criteria on par with outdoor smoking rooms created by other bars.

Under the law, a designated smoking area must be at least 25 feet from any doors, windows or ventilation units that would allow secondhand smoke to pollute nonsmoking areas. Schnarrs' attorney, Shawn Newman, said Hicks' ruling recognizes the ambiguity of the state law and so leaves the door open for Schnarrs to come up with a solution.

Darrell Cochran, Thurston County senior environmental health specialist, testified that a hallway to Schnarrs' second floor was at least 25 feet from the first floor. However, Cochran said he had not measured any of the second-floor windows or air intake and exhaust units.

I’m waiting for a call back from the Attorney General’s office, which is trying to find out whether Schnarrs has found a loophole in the smoking ban. If he has, opening the smoking den will still be like trying to thread a camel though a needle's eye--he'll have to prove the area is a private club and not a workplace. If he succeeds, though, you can bet other bar owners will follow, and then the legislature will cinch the loophole.

Marijuana grow op busted in Longview, Washington, once and for all ending the cultivation, distribution, and consumption of marijuana in Washington state.

Flavored Cigarettes Are Hillary and Menthols Are Obama: Officials irked that menthols get a pass.

Jacked Up: Fifty dollar cups of coffee.

Set Up: Sexy Teacher framed in pot bust.

Let Up: Teachers miffed about drug searches.

Fed Up: Pot potency claims unfounded.

Winning the War on Drugs: In Los Angeles.

Winning the War on Drugs: In Gaza.

County Line: Mendocino restricts pot growing.

Last Meal: Jail guard accused of smuggling drugs in tacos and chili.

Last Trip: Rock poster icon Alton Kelly is gratefully dead.

Today's bust of a drug ring should once and for all put a stop to the distribution and consumption of illegal substances in our area.

You’ve seen Jonathan Golob get all smart here on Slog, and you’ve seen me ramble about pot—but now you can listen to him being smart and me ramble on a podcast all about drugs. We talk about such sophisticated topics as: how opiates can stop the shits, pharmaceutical pot sprays, and pot-brownie overdoses that make you wish you could die. You can listen to the Dear Science podcast—drug edition—over here.

At Seattle Central Community College, signs says no smoking is allowed within 50 feet of doorways that open directly to the sidewalk. What’s that to mean?

“Any door or window, you’ve got to be 50 feet away to smoke,” said Richard, a passerby who read one of the signs last night. He couldn’t remember which, he said, but the 50-foot rule is either a city or a state law. Of course, it’s neither.

Since I-901 went into effect in late 2005, Washington’s indoor smoking ban has prohibited people from smoking within 25 feet of a workplace’s door or window. But if people are within 50 feet of the Seattle Central building shown above (next to a large parking lot that provides a 26-to-50 foot range for legal smoking), college spokeswoman Laura Mansfield says, “We ask them to back up.”

The college implemented the rule, Mansfield says, because 25 feet didn’t provide faculty “enough room to enter a building without encountering smoke.”

Dan Sytman from the State Attorney General’s Office says the 25-foot rule is only a presumptive limit. However, he notes, that although the statute explicitly allows business owners to make more lenient rules, “the law makes no mention of a longer distance.”

“Any business can create their own policy that is far and away more than the state law,” clarifies Scott Neal of the county health department’s Tobacco Prevention Program, which penalizes establishments that violate the smoking rules. “Can I come in there and enforce it?” he says. “No.” That’s up to the Seattle Police Department, he says.

So will the SPD enforce Seattle Central’s sign? “I don’t believe that they can dictate or say you have to be beyond this point to smoke when the law says 25 feet,” says police spokeswoman Renée Witt. “We could only enforce the 25-feet rule.”

That’s not exactly how the researchers in Australia couched their findings, but that's what their study shows...

Long-term heavy use of marijuana may cause two important brain structures to shrink, Australian researchers said on Monday.

Brain scans showed the hippocampus and amygdala were smaller in men who were heavy marijuana users compared to nonusers, the researchers said. The men had smoked at least five marijuana cigarettes daily for on average 20 years.

The study, published in the American Medical Association's journal Archives of General Psychiatry, also found the heavy cannabis users earned lower scores than the nonusers in a verbal learning task -- trying to recall a list of 15 words.

For the 15 pot smokers involved in the study, smoking pot all day for 20 years straight shrunk their brains. Of course, if they’d been drinking alcohol all day for 20 years straight, that too would have shrunk their brains, but after only 15 years, the alcohol would have also melted their livers.

Residents of Clay Terrace in northeast Washington said a D.C. police officer shot and killed a family dog during a drug raid last Friday. Police were conducting a raid when the suspects started running. An officer was chasing them and ran past the Bailey family residence.

The Baileys' dog, a 5-year-old pit bull-Rottweiler mix named Precious, was inside their fence. The family said the officer saw the dog attached to a leash behind the fence and shot at the dog twice, hitting it once.

Police said the dog was aggressive toward the officer. "The officer fired in defense of his life," said Cmdr. Robert Contee.

"This fence was still closed at the time of the shooting," said dog owner Michael Bailey. "The gate only came open while she had the dog between her legs and proceeded to restrain the dog, which was still on the leash."

Two comments: Naming a Pit Bull-Rottweiler mix “Precious” is nothing short of hilarious. It’s like naming your alligator “Snuggler.” Second, what the fuckmuffin? The dog wasn’t even at the house that had been raided for drugs; she was behind the fence of another property and on a leash.

Custom Made: Border agents intercept cocaine fabricated into Jesus statue.

Mary must have made it through.

In More Depressing News: Congress has approved Plan Mexico, an effort to further militarize drug interdiction, although lawmakers did trim Bush’s request by a over $100 million. Regardless, we’re still sending a ton of money to beef up the Mexican drug war. How’s that been going so far?

Since President Felipe Calderón of Mexico started his drug war in 2007, more than 200 law enforcement officers have been killed, among them at least two dozen top commanders. The overall body count is estimated to be 1,300 people so far this year, on track to exceed the roughly 2,500 drug-related killings in 2007.

Will adding military presence to the equation in Mexico--like what we've done in Colombia--invite more of what happened to these officers? Or will it reduce the amount of drugs (perhaps molded into the shape of a prophet) that make it to the US? History says the answer to the latter is no.

It seems that Obama gets it--that Americans' appetites for drugs cannot be suppressed through military force in the third world and that the supply chain is largely a result of our demand. He said:

Because if we’ve learned anything in our history in the Americas, it’s that true security cannot come from force alone. Not as long as there are towns in Mexico where drug kingpins are more powerful than judges. Not as long as there are children who grow up afraid of the police. Not as long as drugs and gangs move north across our border, while guns and cash move south in return.

But, alas, he doesn’t get it.

For the people of Colombia – who have suffered at the hands of killers of every sort – that means battling all sources of violence. When I am President, we will continue the Andean Counter-Drug Program, and update it to meet evolving challenges.

Who Else Gets Swept Up? This cartel hired a 12 year old.

In Good News: Pot defendants in Denver no longer have to appear in court.

Teacher: Busted for heroin then back to class for the day.

Hailey: Marijuana is the lowest priority in Idaho town.

Junkies: B.C. court protects safe injection site.

Parolees: Get green light to smoke medical marijuana.

May 26, 1971: In tapes released after leaving office, President Richard M. Nixon says, "You know it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them?"

Maybe not everyone, and maybe not permanently, but definitely for these guys for a while...

Two teenagers face drug charges after police allegedly found a large amount of suspected marijuana in their hotel this weekend.

On Sunday at about 10:30 p.m., Ocean City police responded to the Majestic Hotel after receiving complaints that a strong odor of marijuana was coming from room 420. After approaching the room and noting a clear aroma of burning marijuana, officer’s knocked on the door and confronted the hotel guests.

When officers asked the two men, 19-year-old Gary Herget Jr. and 19-year-old Sean Locklear, if there was any marijuana in the hotel room, they informed officers that they “smoked it all.” Officers then asked if they could search the room for any more marijuana and the men responded, “sure, go ahead.”

After a thorough search of the hotel room, officers discovered nine plastic baggies full of suspected marijuana, a digital scale and nearly 200 empty plastic baggies.

Selling dope out of a smoke-filled hotel room number 420 is one of the most boneheaded things someone could possibly do. But inviting the cops to search that room--which your feeble mind knows is packed with felonies--that's the most boneheaded thing someone could possibly do.

Connecticut.

Easton police say a man whose house guest died in a police-involved shooting has been charged with drug offenses.

Officers were serving a search warrant at Ronald Terebesi Jr.'s home to investigate narcotics allegations when the shooting occurred May 18.

Police say Gonzalo Guizan of Norwalk was killed by police when he "charged the entry team and physically encountered" two of the officers. The shooting remains under investigation.

The 42-year-old Terebesi was charged Saturday with possessing drugs and drug paraphernalia, police said. They say it was discovered in his house during the search.

I think it's safe to assume that Guizan, RIP, didn't realize that the people he was approaching were armed police officers prepared to shoot him. Because, generally, if someone enters a house without knocking you'd think it was burglar breaking the law. But these officers weren't breaking the law. Busting open someone's door and killing his house guest--who wasn't even suspected of a crime--that's a perfectly legal way to make a bust for possession of drugs and paraphernalia. Terebesi wasn't even charged with sales.

An unwitting passenger arriving at Japan's Narita airport has received 142g [about 5 ounces] of cannabis after a customs test went awry, officials say.

A customs officer hid a package of the banned substance in a side pocket of a randomly chosen suitcase in order to test airport security. Sniffer dogs failed to detect the cannabis and the officer could not remember which bag he had put it in. Anyone finding the package has been asked to contact customs officials.

The customs officer conducted the test on a passenger's bag against regulations. Normally a training suitcase is used.

"I knew that using passengers' bags is prohibited, but I did it because I wanted to improve the sniffer dog's ability," the officer was quoted as saying.

Damn, all I ever get are those snooping notes from TSA.

He Wasn’t Actually a DEA Agent: But he was raiding houses.

After Increasing Pot Penalties: UK considers downgrading ecstasy.

Webb of Truths: “The time has come to stop locking up people for mere possession and use of marijuana.”

Vancouver: Cops want a safe-injection site in BC to save lives, but Susan Martinuk thinks that would be morally wrong.

Washington: Border security increases and so does the domestic pot harvest.

Appealing: Doc accused of running pill mill.

Concealing: Department of Health delays medical-marijuana rules.

Healing: Massachusetts considers $5 million treatment plan.

Incense: Psychoactive.

Scandinavians: World’s leading coffee drinkers.

Smokers: Even quitting in packs.

So much for that “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope” bullshit: Man busted using weed to buy snacks.

As we all know, the only thing more exciting than hearing someone talk about their dreams is hearing someone talk about their hallucinogenic trips. This lady took a lot of mushrooms anally and then put an eight minute description of the whole thing on YouTube.

Via The Best American Poetry Blog, oddly enough.

Amy Winehouse [insert your own sick-Amy image here; I don't have the heart] is reportedly going to try rehab again (though she's also reportedly denying it), this time under the care of detox-specialist Dr. Andre Waismann in Israel, who claims to reverse chemical dependency in a mere 36 hours. His anesthesia-assisted rapid detox, which he calls the ANR Method (Accelerated Neuroregulation), is fascinating. From an article from the Cyprus Review, posted on his treatment center's website:

Waismann's method, which has been successfully implemented since the mid-1995, relies on the skills of anaesthetists and ICU doctors to reverse the illness of addiction. Under the revolutionary treatment, an antinarcotic drug or narcotic antagonist called Naltrexone is administrated to the patient in a four-hour process, during which the patient is under anesthetic, suppressing the unbearable pain that would otherwise accompany the treatment. Naltrexon tablets are then taken for the following 10 months, by the end of which the body's receptors will have changed and shrunk, thus reversing permanently the effects of narcotic craving....
Waismann's treatment blocks the opioid receptors in the brain to which the active components to heroin - as well as naturally-produced endorphins - bind, so that regardless of how much heroin there is in the body, it can no longer reach the brain. The patient therefore becomes immediately "clean", sleeping through an extremely powerful process of withdrawal.

The process is described in more detail here.

At $12,800 (the price Winehouse will pay, according to Starpulse, not including the plane tickets), it's probably too pricey for non-celeb addicts.

McCain's Ambien Use: a Security Threat?

(Frankly, I'm more worried about him going to sleep and never waking up than his accidental sleep-walking/-fucking/-driving/-nuclear-war-starting. But thanks for tackling it, ABC.)

This just in.

A jury convicted an Atlanta police officer Tuesday of lying to investigators after a botched drug raid in which a 92-year-old woman was killed, but cleared him of two more serious charges.

After deliberating for parts of four days, the jury convicted Arthur Tesler of making false statements. He was acquitted of charges that he violated his oath of a public officer and false imprisonment under color of legal process. Tesler, who is on leave from the police force, faces up to five years in prison.

Plainclothes narcotics officers used a special "no-knock" warrant to raid Kathryn Johnston's home on Nov. 21, 2006. Police fired 39 bullets, hitting Johnston five or six times, prosecutors said.

An informant had described buying drugs from a dealer there, police said. Since the raid, authorities have said the warrant was based on false information. When the officers burst in without warning, Johnston fired at them, and they fired back, killing her.

Hooray, briefly. The jury decided the cop had been a schmuck and he should do time. Good. But, surprisingly, the offense under consideration wasn't bursting into an innocent 92-year-old woman's house and shooting her five times. Which seems pretty offensive. We're told that these strong-arm tactics are necessary to stamp out drugs. Of course, stopping drug use is impossible, and these raids are a cure worse than the disease. As long as cops are encouraged to break down people's doors and charge in with guns for routine drug enforcement, homeowners will continue to pull guns and get shot in their hallways. How long until "no knock" raids go on trial?

From Germany, a new way to remind drunks that they're drunk:

So how to capture the attention of any potential drunk drivers? Well, where do most people go when they’re drunk? (Apart from the bar, that is. Or maybe a kebab.) They go to the toilet. As such, we thought the urinal would be the perfect medium to reach our target audience in a fresh, surprising way.

h/t Metafilter.

Footnote: The Piss Screen game was invented by British advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, whose first p.r. coup was this billboard campaign, which helped Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party take over in the UK general election of 1979:

Murdered Undercover: A 23-year-old civilian informant in Florida.

Governor Charlie Crist says he's not ready to push for any changes in the way police use confidential informants, at least not yet. Today Crist responded to the case of Rachel Hoffman a police informant, 23, who was murdered after disappearing during an undercover drug operation in Tallahassee.

Hoffman was arrested for using and selling ecstasy and marijuana, and police recruited her to participate in a drug bust as a way to avoid prison time.

But the drug operation targeting two alleged drug dealers went awry and her body was found two days later.

More:

"All indications were she would be a very good choice as a confidential informant, she would follow directions and there would be no issues," Tallahassee Police spokesman David McCranie said Monday.

But police say at the last minute, she changed the location of the meeting with the two men, Andrea J. Green and Deneilo Bradshaw, in a Tallahassee-area park to buy drugs and a gun from them as part of a sting.

The police officer handling the case pleaded with her to call off the meeting, McCranie said. "For whatever reason she did not call it off," McCranie said. "And that ultimately led to her murder."

Hoffman's stepfather, Mike Weiss, told The Tampa Tribune Monday that police should stop falling back on what Hoffman did because she shouldn't have been put in the position in the first place. "They took a 23-year-old relatively naive person and put her in a life-threatening situation," Weiss told the newspaper.

High Opinion: Canadians want to legalize pot.

High Class: Educated stoners.

Long Time Coming: Seattle woman sentenced to 21 years for meth.

GDP of THC: Second place in B.C.

Denied: Inmate's request for pot.

Decried: Ecuador opposes US military outpost.

Decide: Court overturns murder conviction of woman who used cocaine and miscarried.

Projected: Unprecedented new trend of marijuana in movies (forget about this, this, this, this, and this).

Last Days: Deadline for Ontario retailers to display cigarettes.

Last Toast: Robert Mondavi is dead.

The Obama interview in Willamette Week.

Would you stop the DEA's raids on Oregon medical marijuana growers?

I would because I think our federal agents have better things to do, like catching criminals and preventing terrorism. The way I want to approach the issue of medical marijuana is to base it on science, and if there is sound science that supports the use of medical marijuana and if it is controlled and prescribed in a way that other medicine is prescribed, then it's something that I think we should consider.

Seems an innocuous enough answer: He'll stop the raids on sick people, but he won't "support" medical marijuana until it goes through the same rigors as pharmaceuticals. (Not that there isn't a ton of evidence already.) Of course, that's a cop-out response because he's not promising to stop prosecutions and the government usually won't fund or allow "sound" research on the schedule-one drug. In the meantime, he says, we have higher priorities. Here's the RNC's retort...

Barack Obama’s pledge to stop Executive agencies from implementing laws passed by Congress raises serious doubts about his understanding of what the job of the President of the United States actually is. His refusal to enforce the law reveals that Barack Obama doesn’t have the experience necessary to do the job of President, or that he fundamentally lacks the judgment to carry out the most basic functions of the Executive Branch. What other laws would Barack Obama direct federal agents not to enforce?

Gee, RNC, it seems like Obama agrees with the current Republican administration: After 9/11, the federal government overhauled priorities for the FBI--federal agents--directing resources away from certain domestic crimes and toward terrorism.

But there's no question that the GOP has pulled an about-face on terrorism before. The real question is this: Given the public support for medical pot in swing states, will McCain try to muzzle the RNC on the medical-marijuana issue before November?

Hey, kids! It's time for some pothead math!

If you were to smoke 50 joints a day, each roughly 3/4s of a gram, you'd be smoking well over an ounce of weed every day.

And that's just fucking crazy.

The federal government wants you to know that smoking pot is linked to health problems.

Heavy marijuana use can boost blood levels of a particular protein, perhaps raising a person's risk of a heart attack or stroke, U.S. government researchers said on Tuesday.

[Dr. Jean Lud Cadet of the National Institute on Drug Abuse] said a lot of previous research has focused on the effects of marijuana on the brain. His team looked elsewhere in the body, measuring blood protein levels in 18 long-term, heavy marijuana users and 24 other people who did not use the drug.

Levels of a protein called apolipoprotein C-III were found to be 30 percent higher in the marijuana users compared to the others. This protein is involved in the body's metabolism of triglycerides -- a type of fat found in the blood -- and higher levels cause increased levels of triglycerides, Cadet added. High levels of triglycerides can contribute to hardening of the arteries or thickening of the artery walls, raising the risk of stroke, heart attack and heart disease.

Be still my heart. How much pot constitutes heavy marijuana use? How much is too much?

The marijuana users in the study averaged smoking 78 to 350 marijuana cigarettes per week, based on self-reported drug history, the researchers said.

So if you’re smoking 350 joints a week—that’s 50 joints a day—you’ve really got to cut down. You should really cut down even if you're only smoking a measly 11 joints a day. Please make a note of it.

Via the NORML Blog.

The menthol debate.

Some public health experts are questioning why menthol, the most widely used cigarette flavoring and the most popular cigarette choice of African-American smokers, is receiving special protection as Congress tries to regulate tobacco for the first time.

The legislation, which would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to oversee tobacco products, would try to reduce smoking’s allure to young people by banning most flavored cigarettes, including clove and cinnamon.

Menthol is particularly controversial because public health authorities have worried about its health effects on African-Americans. Nearly 75 percent of black smokers use menthol brands, compared with only about one in four white smokers.

While Philip Morris and other tobacco companies acknowledge the health hazards of smoking, they contend that menthol does nothing to worsen those risks. One of the government’s current top public health scientists on tobacco, however, says there are few definitive answers about the health impact of menthol cigarettes. Still, he points to several studies that suggest menthol smokers may be exposed to higher levels of dangerous compounds than nonmenthol smokers.

Banning any flavor of cigarette, even if it's more dangerous, is as dumb an idea as trying to prohibit booze or pot. Really, it’s the same dumb idea.

Here’s what we should do: Don’t penalize the flavored smokes popular with women or African Americans. Tax cigarettes more. All cigarettes. But how much? Some folks would say slap a $20 charge on each pack. That won’t work; there’s a threshold point where a high cost creates a less-expensive black market. In Canada and the UK, where smokes can sell for more than $10 a pack, the black market makes up about 25-30 percent of the market, and news stories emerge every week about some bust of contraband cigarette traffickers. As much as I don't want cigarette smokers to die horrible painful deaths (or to pay for their health care), I really don't want to get caught in the crossfire of cigarette enforcement. The moment someone’s shot over a truck full of Kools, we’ve gone too far.

Germany: Binge drinking replaces pot smoking.

Arkansas: Winning the War on Drugs one bullet at a time.

Cross-Country Race: Disparities in rising national arrests.

Circular Logic: Depression leads to pot smoking leads to depression.

Pot Head: Teens use severed human head as bong.

Growing Ganja: In the name of the Lord.

Shooting Fish in a Barrel: Feds arrest 100 college students in frat-boy drug sting.

Turning Lemons into Lemonade: Students transform bust coverage into Drug War scrutiny.

Cigarettes: Damage is reversible.

Tarred and Feathered: Smokers who bought cigarettes online owe $30,000 in unpaid taxes.

Congress: Pissed at DEA for medical marijuana raids (.pdf).

Getting Wheelchair Weed in California: Super easy.

"3 Accused of Using Corpse Head to Smoke Pot"

The UK has a new policy to send send stoners to the slammer.

Cannabis will be raised to a class B drug with a maximum five year jail term for users, the government said on Wednesday, rejecting a recommendation from its own drugs advisers to leave the classification unchanged.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the decision had been made because of concern, particularly amongst the public, about the "alarming" use of skunk, a stronger strain of the narcotic which now dominates the market.

"I want it to be clearly understood that this powerful form of cannabis is an illegal and harmful drug," Smith told parliament, vowing the change would be backed by crackdowns on cannabis farms.

"There is a compelling case for us to act now, rather than risk the future health of young people."

Her announcement followed the publication of a report by the independent Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) which said there was insufficient evidence to regrade cannabis to the more serious class B.

The UK had downgraded pot to a Class-C offense in 2004, reducing the penalty for smoking pot to a stern warning from the coppers. However, officers could still arrest repeat offenders and people smoking in public or around kids. But the reason bigwigs justified changing the policy to jail pot smokers for five damn years, according to the Home Secretary, was purportedly a shift in public opinion: Respondents to a survey said they believed today’s pot--which they call skunk--is more potent and more dangerous. And they are right about one thing, according to the research of the ACMD, it is more potent. Almost twice as potent. But cracking down on drugs is the reason it's stronger. In the days of prohibition, hard liquor was all the rage—because a bottle of grain alcohol was easier to conceal than a keg of beer—and a growing a few plants of high-quality skunk is easier to conceal than a field of sativa.

But if the weathervane of public policy is public opinion, where does the British public stand on penalties for this super-bud? The poll found that “44% wished cannabis to remain Class C… and 19% wished it to be legalized.” Only 19 percent of the public wanted to increase the penalties.

The other justification is that more people are using this allegedly more-harmful pot. But according that pesky report: "...some cannabis smokers seek the maximum effects while others inhale only a sufficient quantity of THC to obtain a particular degree of intoxication." (It bears mentioning that Marinol, the prescription pharmaceutical, is 100 percent THC.) The report (.pdf) continues, “Despite the high prevalence of cannabis use, particularly among young people… use appears to have declined by around 20% to 25% over the past five years in all age groups. Similar findings have been reported from a national survey of English secondary schools.” Yeah, that decline occurred in the years pot penalties decreased. So even if pot use is a problem, and pot is more potent, the number of people using it has gone down. Based on all this research, what were those recommendations again from Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs--based on concrete science? “Cannabis should remain a Class C drug.”

Because science indicates cracking down on pot--in the UK, or in the US--doesn't reduce marijuana use. But why base drug policies on science?

Dozens of San Diego State University students were arrested after a sweeping drug investigation found that some fraternity members openly dealt drugs and one even sent a mass text message advertising cocaine, authorities said Tuesday.

Two kilograms of cocaine were seized, along with 350 Ecstasy pills, marijuana, psychedelic mushrooms, hash oil, methamphetamine, illicit prescription drugs, several guns and at least $60,000 in cash, authorities said.... Those arrested included a student who was about to receive a criminal justice degree and another who was to receive a master's degree in homeland security....

Shawn Collinsworth, executive director of the national office of Phi Kappa Psi, said he was told by two of the SDSU fraternity chapter's leaders that four of its members were arrested. He added the fraternity is cooperating with the investigation.

"It isn't behavior becoming of Phi Kappa Psi," Collinsworth said.

Poor bastards. Full story here.

Remember that report released by researchers in New Zealand who claimed smoking a joint a day was just as cancerous as smoking a daily pack of cigarettes? A scientist at the UCLA, Dr. Donald Tashkin, who conducted a more comprehensive study in the U.S., says the New Zealand study is bogus. From Counterpunch:

Tashkin said the New Zealanders employed "statistical sleight of hand." He deemed it "completely implausible that smokers of only 365 joints of marijuana have a risk for developing lung cancer similar to that of smokers of 7,000 tobacco cigarettes... Their small sample size led to vastly inflated estimates...”

"For tobacco they found what you'd expect: a higher risk for lung cancer and a clear dose-response relationship. A 24-fold increase in the people who smoked the most... What about marijuana? If they smoked a small or moderate amount there was no increased risk, in fact slightly less than one. But if they were in the upper third of the group, then their risk was six-fold... A rather surprising finding, and one has to be cautious about interpreting the results because of the very small number of cases (14) and controls (4)."

Tashkin and colleagues at UCLA conducted a major study [600 lung-cancer patients and 1,040 controls] in which they measured lung function of various cohorts over eight years and found that tobacco-only smokers had an accelerated rate of decline, but marijuana smokers -even if they smoked tobacco as well- experienced the same rate of decline as non-smokers. "The more tobacco smoked, the greater the rate of decline," said Tashkin. "In contrast, no matter how much marijuana was smoked, the rate of decline was similar to normal." Tashkin concluded that his and other studies "do not support the concept that regular smoking of marijuana leads to COPD [Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease]."

Of course, smoking anything is bad for your lungs. If you're going to get high, use a vaporizer, bake brownies, or buy the best pot you can afford and smoke less of it.

New York City: Racial bias in skyrocketing pot arrests.

A study released Tuesday reported that between 1998 and 2007, the police arrested 374,900 people whose most serious crime was the lowest-level misdemeanor marijuana offense.

That is more than eight times the number of arrests on those same charges between 1988 and 1997, when 45,300 people were picked up for having a small amount of pot.

Nearly everyone involved in this wave of marijuana arrests is male: 90 percent were men, although national studies show that men and women use pot in roughly equal rates. And 83 percent of those charged in these cases were black or Latino, according to the study. Blacks accounted for 52 percent of the arrests, twice their share of the city’s population. Whites, who are about 35 percent of the population, were only 15 percent of those charged — even though federal surveys show that whites are more likely than blacks or Latinos to use pot.

South Korea: Six teachers busted getting high.

Which employers aren’t drug testing? These ones.

Alcohol Impact Areas: Meaningless.

Thrifty Consumers: Cutting back on Starbucks.

One Down, An Infinite Number To Go: Colombia kills kingpin.

Probed: Wachovia for drug-money laundering.

Rerouted: Cocaine to Europe.

Detained: Child placed in state custody after father accidentally gives him hard lemonade at baseball game.

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn't even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

"I'd never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it," Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. "And it's certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old."

But it wasn't until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo's hand. "You know this is an alcoholic beverage?" the guard asked the professor.

"You've got to be kidding," Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo's blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol. But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

The problem with medical-marijuana marches, such as the one beginning Saturday at noon in Volunteer Park, is that people who hike for miles through the city don’t seem terribly sick. They just don’t appear to need life-saving medicine. Moreover, the stoners banging on djembes in the crowd seem to march mostly for their allegiance to the counterculture.

But those people aren’t the reason to march for medical marijuana. Well, not all of them. Some of those “stoners” are only healthy enough to trek through the city because marijuana has helped manage their MS, severe pain, wasting syndrome, etc. So they are the living proof that medical marijuana works. But even those folks are not why we go.

We march for the people who can’t.

Yesterday afternoon Timothy Garon died at Bailey-Boushay House. He had Hepatitis-C and needed a new liver, but Harborview and UW Medical Center denied him a transplant because he used medical marijuana. Even though it was recommended by his physician, and legal under state law, and didn’t cause liver damage—the hospitals called it substance abuse. If he’d instead taken federally approved drugs that caused liver damage, the docs probably would have let him live.

The people who need medical marijuana today have cancer and full-blown AIDS, and without pot they are too ill to hold down food or even anti-nausea pills. Those are the people who would be marching for medical marijuana tomorrow—if they could.

You and I are those people; at least, we will be. We will probably die from cancer or an equally miserable condition. So will our friends and families. But before we die, we can either experience pain and nausea, or we can hang out and watch Oprah reruns with our family and eat pudding. Medical marijuana, for many of us, could be the deciding factor.

Hospital officials, lawmakers, and opinion leaders routinely dismiss the proven medical value of pot and consider federal reform a low priority. And it is a low priority, until you or someone you love needs it. If they get it and nothing bad happens as a result, great. But as it stands, sick people are arrested for it, or in Mr. Garon’s case, he died because of it. So be healthy, and march on Saturday before you need that pot brownie. You can thank yourself later.

Seattle's march, held in conjunction with 200 other cities, begins at noon on Saturday, May 3 in Volunteer Park and heads to a rally at Westlake Park. The poster is super hippie dippy. Too bad it looks like that.

Unless the patient used medical marijuana—in which case, hey, feel free to murder the poor bastard.

A musician who was denied a liver transplant because he used marijuana with medical approval under Washington state law to ease the symptoms of advanced hepatitis C died Thursday.

The death of Timothy Garon, 56, at Bailey-Boushay House, an intensive care nursing center was confirmed to The Associated Press by his lawyer.... Dr. Brad Roter, the physician who authorized Garon to smoke pot to alleviate for nausea and abdominal pain and to stimulate his appetite, said he did not know it would be such a hurdle if Garon were to need a transplant.

Garon died a week after his doctor told him a University of Washington Medical Center committee had again denied him a spot on the liver transplant list because of his use of marijuana, although it was authorized under Washington state law.

The sadists at the University of Washington Medical Center—and Swedish Medical Center—didn't just deny this guy a transplant. They really seemed to get off on torturing this dying man. Check out these details from the PI report:

He had been in the hospice for two months and previously was rejected for a transplant at Swedish Medical Center for the same reason he later got from the university hospital.

Swedish said he would be considered if he avoided pot for six months and the university hospital offered to reconsider if he enrolled in a 60-day drug treatment program, but doctors said his liver disease was too advanced for him to last that long. The university hospital committee agreed to reconsider anyway, then denied him again.

Here is Dom's previous post about this medical travesty. And here again are those numbers...

UW Division of Transplant: (206) 598-6700

The fax number: (206) 598-0628

The chief of the division is Jorge D. Reyes: reyesjd@u.washington.edu

The director is Kay Wicks: kwicks@u.washington.edu

The full directory for transplant staff is over here.

Brooklyn Park police were looking for a meth lab, but they found a fish tank and the chemicals needed to maintain it.

And a few hours later, when the city sent a contractor to fix the door the police had smashed open Monday afternoon, it was obvious the city was trying to fix a mistake. It happened while Kathy Adams was sleeping. “And the next thing I know, a police officer is trying to get me out bed,” she said.

Adams, a 54-year-old former nurse who said she suffers from a bad back caused by a patient who attacked her a few years ago, was handcuffed. So was her 49-year-old husband.

Police were executing a search warrant signed by Hennepin County Judge Ivy Bernhardson, who believed there was probable cause the Adams’s home was a meth lab.

“From a cursory view, it doesn’t look like our officers did anything wrong,” said Capt. Greg Roehl. Roehl said the drug task force was acting on a tip from a subcontractor for CenterPoint Energy, who had been in the home Friday to install a hot water heater.

“He got hit with a chemical smell that he said made him light headed, feel kind of nauseous,” Roehl said. The smell was vinegar, and maybe pickling lime, which were clearly marked in a bathroom Mr. Adams uses to mix chemicals for his salt water fish tank.

This story has a happy ending—the city came and fixed the door!--so what's the problem with a cadre of armed officers breaking it down? Adams, as many Americans do, could have had a gun in her bedroom. If she'd pulled it out, not knowing the men walking into her bedroom were cops, she could have unwittingly shot a cop. Or the cops could have shot her. Over a fish tank.

Meth is nasty crap, agreed. But investigating it doesn't require risking innocent lives.

Dr. Albert Hofmann, inventor of LSD, is dead at 102.

There's uncertainty on teh nets whether Hofmann's passing is just a rumor. However, a call to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies confirms he died last night in his home in Basel, Switzerland. In his honor, please enjoy this classic video of his "problem child" on the battlefield.

Tip from NaFun.

While Timothy Garon is dying here in Seattle without a liver transplant because he used medical marijuana, folks in Michigan are fighting over a medical-marijuana initiative. An organization calling itself “True Compassion,” funded through the U.S. Department of Justice, is running a slick television ad to quash the measure.

It’s a crisp ad, but, with an ironic twist, it uses muddy logic. Apples aren’t bananas, check. Dogs aren’t cats, check. Pot isn’t harmless, check. I think everyone is on board so far. Pot doesn’t help some people… wait.

Here’s the strategy behind the ad (and the federal government's latest talking points against medical marijuana). First, it implies that the debate over medical marijuana boils down to pot being either harmless or dangerous. As we know, all drugs prescribed by doctors have some potential for danger, but we accept that potential harm because our doctor believes the benefits outweigh the risks. This is true for everything from Ambien to Zyrtec. Pot is a drug, so when it’s used for medical purposes, it should be held to the same standards as every drug—not compared to some mystical hippie claim that it’s harmless. Now, do some trashy hippies with angels hanging from their rear-view mirrors claim pot is “just a plant” from “Mother Nature” and “God doesn’t make mistakes” and blah, blah, blah? Sure they say those things, but those people are total dips. Licensed physicians are the ones recommending medical marijuana.

Next, the ad suggests that pot isn’t helpful to anybody. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 66-year-old Jim Ware, a cancer survivor and former cop.

More stories like Ware's are over here. Last, the ad makes a familiar claim which is outright false: “Every major health organization rejects smoked marijuana.” There's been limited research on medical marijuana because, well, the government rarely allows it. Nevertheless, medical marijuana has been supported by the American College of Physicians, American Nurses Association, American Public Health Association, American Academy of HIV Medicine, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Lymphoma Foundation of America, AIDS Action Council, American Academy of HIV Medicine, National Association of People With AIDS, and others.

This debate isn’t about medical marijuana, of course; it’s about recreational pot smoking. The admission that medical marijuana is an acceptable treatment for the severely ill is to concede that the government has been lying. Pot isn’t purely dangerous, and pot, like alcohol, should be legal.

I was having trouble sleeping.

That's not unusual for me. I've always been a light/only occasional sleeper. And conditions were perfect for a sleepless night—I was sleeping on a couch in my aunt's living room in Tucson, I had to get up early for a flight the next morning, And, um, I had just watched my mother die. So when I was offered an Ambien I decided to take it.

I'd been offered Ambien in the past, mostly by a friend that swears by the drug. Ambien also inspires my boyfriend to swear—mostly at me, since he has to deal with me when I haven't slept for a few days. He's long wanted me to get a prescription but I've always refused. Isn't Ambien that drug that makes people sleep walk, eat, fuck, drive, etc.? Did I really want to start taking that drug?

But... I made an exception that night and took the pill. When I woke up and it was still dark I figured that, shit, Ambien isn't that great. It was groggy, but I wasn't asleep. So the drug didn't work—not for me, anyhow. But when I looked at the clock in the kitchen it wasn't 2 AM, my usual wake-up time, but 6:30 AM. I'd been asleep for nine hours. Nine hours in a row.

I got a prescription. I took the drug every night for three weeks. I slept and slept and slept and slept. But one night I couldn't take the pill—I was home alone with the kid and I needed to be capable of waking up in the middle of the night and snapping to attention if there was a late-night emergency, a nightmare, a zombie attack, etc. So I didn't take the pill—and I didn't sleep. Not at all, not a wink.

The next day I got online and looked up Ambien's less spectacular side effects—the side-effects that hadn't made headlines—and guess what I found? One of the side effects was insomnia. Insomnia! But you'll only get insomnia, I read, or get insomnia back, if you stop taking the drug. They call it "rebound insomnia."

I stopped taking Ambien—and I didn't sleep for three days.

Nice drug they've got there. Glad I'm not addicted to it. Anymore.

This story came out over the weekend, but as of late this morning, Timothy Garon was still barely hanging on—in his hospice bed at Bailey-Boushay House. "He's going to be dead here in a couple days," says his attorney Douglas Hiatt. Garon needs a liver transplant to survive.

Timothy Garon's face and arms are hauntingly skeletal, but the fluid building up in his abdomen makes the 56-year-old musician look eight months pregnant.

His liver, ravaged by hepatitis C, is failing. Without a new one, his doctors tell him, he will be dead in days.

But Garon's been refused a spot on the transplant list, largely because he has used marijuana, even though it was legally approved for medical reasons.

Garon, who has been hospitalized or in hospice care for two months straight, said he turned to the university hospital after Seattle's Harborview Medical Center told him he needed six months of abstinence.

The university also denied him, but said it would reconsider if he enrolled in a 60-day drug-treatment program. This week, at the urging of Garon's lawyer, the university's transplant team reconsidered anyway, but it stuck to its decision.

Dr. Jorge Reyes, a liver transplant surgeon at the UW Medical Center, said that while medical marijuana use isn't in itself a sign of substance abuse, it must be evaluated in the context of each patient.

"The concern is that patients who have been using it will not be able to stop," Reyes said. Reyes and other UW officials declined to discuss Garon's case.

Dr. Reyes’s voicemail box is full at the UW Medical Center. My calls to the transplant division this morning haven’t been returned. Their lips are apparently zipped and they don't want to reveal who is on the transplant committee. But you can still contact the UW transplant division and try to get answers.

Below is the main number and individual email addresses. Call and write. Ask who made this decision, what their names are and can you speak to them. Ask how Mr. Garon’s past marijuana use--as recommended by his physician and completely legal under state law--means he wouldn’t benefit from a liver transplant from the state hospital.

UW Division of Transplant: (206) 598-6700

The fax number: (206) 598-0628

The chief of the division is Jorge D. Reyes: reyesjd@u.washington.edu

The director is Kay Wicks: kwicks@u.washington.edu

The full directory for transplant staff is over here.

The committee that made the decision knows full well that the marijuana Mr. Garon smoked hasn’t caused liver damage. Instead, Dr. Reyes justifies the decisions in the AP article by saying marijuana can be habit-forming, and he’s worried that Mr. Garon would continue to use marijuana.

Excuse me, but what sort of backward logic concludes it’s best to let a man to die because he used the very medication that helped him live? Hep-C is explicitly covered under Washington’s Medical Use of Marijuana Act for helping curb the nausea caused by the disease’s viral load. In the article, another doc grasps at straws by saying that a form of mold that can be found on marijuana could cause his body to reject the new organ—if Mr. Garon smokes pot—but he wouldn’t smoke pot if doctors told him not to, because he’s not addicted to it like a crack addict. It’s marijuana, one of the least habit-forming of all psychoactive drugs. So he’s being denied the transplant for something that hasn’t happened. I know I’ve gotten my ranties in a bunch, but the UW’s decision is a death sentence for Mr. Garon.

One more time:

The number to call: (206) 598-6700

The email address to write: reyesjd@u.washington.edu