According to the Galveston County Daily News…

‘Major drug dealer’ taken down in La Marque raid

By T.J. Aulds The Daily News Published February 21, 2010

LA MARQUE — A man La Marque police said was one of the city’s “major drug dealers” was arrested during an early morning raid Saturday, Chief Randall Aragon [...]

And the winner is…

Roger Morgan, Chairman and executive director of Coalition for a Drug-Free California, with Drug czar’s office keeps drug use down

Before one throws the “drug czar” out with the bath water (“The drug czar should go,” Commentary, Feb. 8 ) he should look closely at the critics.

Teenagers who laugh [...]

Addiction. It’s a loaded word. Lots of baggage, lots of uncertainty in its meaning. It gets tossed around a lot in reference to marijuana, from those who claim that marijuana is provably addictive, to those who say there is no such thing as addiction.

Regardless of those views, I think most people would agree that there are some marijuana users whose use appears to most people to be excessive. And whether that’s reality or perception, it’s still a very real hurdle.

Making this all even more topical, we now have a very real and current controversy regarding the definition of addiction: War Over Addiction: Evaluating The DSM-V

You’ve heard about the Drug War? Well there’s a war being fought over addiction by the Task Force revising the psychiatric bible in the United States.

Called DSM-V, it will be referred to by every therapist, child development specialist, and family court considering mental health issues, as well as criminal court concerning psychiatric defenses. [...]

This template for diagnosing our “mental disorders” has been struggling with addiction – like so many of us. The term “addiction” does not appear in DSM-IV. Rather, “dependence” was introduced as a replacement for addiction in the hope of defining the syndrome more precisely and less emotionally.

DSM-V plans to reintroduce addiction.

This is a roundabout way of leading to the real post, here.

Danny Chapin, the managing editor of AllTreatment.com, a directory for drug rehab centers and substance abuse information resource, approached me about having a dialog about marijuana addiction with all of you, as he searches for understanding himself.

I thought it was a brilliant idea. I wanted to hear what he had to say and also get a chance to respond.

So here we go. I’ll let you have first crack at it, and I’ll respond tomorrow, probably asking Danny for a follow-up post.

Great editorial in the Aurora, Colorado Sentinal after the recent medical marijuana raid.

Sweetin’s comments raise serious questions about just who’s in charge of this federal agency, and how inappropriate it is for this agency to usurp state’s rights in contradiction to the will of the president. [...]

As to Sweetin’s remarks about the [...]

There’s a great editorial in the New York Times yesterday: A Blue-Ribbon Look at Criminal Justice

The nation’s criminal justice system is in need of an overhaul. This is particularly true of its incarceration policies. Too many people are being put behind bars who do not need to be there, at great cost to the states, and not enough attention is being paid to helping released prisoners re-enter society.

It goes on to endorse the Jim Webb blue-ribbon commission to review the Justice system. Is it possible that people are finally waking up to the notion that we shouldn’t be incarcerating everyone? For years, the default position in society has seemed to be that putting more people in jail was by definition somehow always good. But views are changing, and perhaps the Times has an idea why:

The high imprisonment rate has long been troubling as a matter of fairness, but with the recession it has become an enormous financial burden. States have begun, out of fiscal necessity, to parole prisoners faster and in larger numbers, and to look for alternatives to incarceration. This scattershot approach is far from ideal. It would be better to have experts address these issues at a national level in a more methodical way.

And yes, they even mention the drug war:

The commission also would look at sentencing policies for drug crimes, including their impact on minority communities, something that is long overdue, as well as the involvement of foreign-based gangs in crime in the United States.

Their conclusion:

The Senate leadership needs to push it to a vote, and the House needs to get to work on passing a companion bill. A broad consensus has emerged that the system is broken.

Very nice. I hope it gets a lot of play. It isn’t just that we need the blue-ribbon commission, but we need the discussion and the realization by the public that incarceration isn’t necessarily a good thing. Wouldn’t it be nice someday if we reached a point where the public demanded legislators, police, and prosecutors to defend the specific benefits to society of each use of what should be limited prison resources?

Now, is it just the New York Times talking about this?

No.

In a speech today before the house and Senate, [Missouri Chief Justice William Ray] Price [Jr.] said Missouri’s “broken strategy of cramming inmates into prisons” isn’t working and costs the state millions of dollars each year.

He said the state should focus on rehabilitating nonviolent offenders, instead of sending them to jail. Jailing nonviolent offenders, Price said, frequently leads to higher recidivism rates. 41.6 percent of nonviolent offenders who are jailed, then released, return to jail within two years, he said.

Perhaps we are making real progress. Perhaps people are ready to talk.

But what about leadership?

I was astonished to read this speech delivered yesterday by Attorney General Eric Holder to the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives: