Odds and Ends

“bullet” Scott Morgan has a good piece up What’s So Funny About Trying to Legalize Marijuana? where he takes issue with people like William Teach at Stop the ACLU who mock those looking to legalize marijuana and then essentially agree that pot should be legalized. It’s a syndrome that we see quite a bit.
“bullet” Alisson Kilkenny: Cops Say to Legalize Drugs at Huffington Post. Nothing particularly new here to us, but a good article and always great to see LEAP and their view getting more press.
“bullet” How about this for a promo for a TV show? To kick off its next season, Showtime’s “Weeds” gives us a brief history of… weed.

“bullet” The Drug War destroys what it touches.

Sheriff Raymond M. Martin has been the law for nearly 20 years in a struggling southern Illinois county. But federal prosecutors say he’s been breaking it lately by peddling pounds of pot, some seized by his own department, often in uniform and from his patrol vehicle. […]
The dealer grew unsettled over time and wanted out, but Martin would have none of that, Rountree wrote. At least twice, the sheriff pulled his service revolver and insisted emphatically to the dealer that making him “disappear” would be “that easy,” according to the affidavit.

“bullet” Drug Czar Kerlikowske testified on the budget yesterday.
I may have more on this later. It was a bit.. odd. I felt like I needed to be reading between the lines at times. Sure, there was a lot of the standard stuff that a drug czar would say in such a presentation (justifying all the budget items with the drug war language of the past), but then there were statements like this:

There continues to be much discussion in the media about whether personal use of drugs should be decriminalized. What we cannot lose sight of during this discussion, is that we all agree addiction is a preventable and treatable chronic condition.

Notice the use of a non-sequitur instead of denunciation, and the offhand acceptance of the idea of discussion.
He also made another statement that we need to hold up to him whenever possible:

During my tenure, debate will be continuous and inclusive of disparate ideas.