Top cop says 12yo girl’s strip search justified

That’s the world in which we live — the world of the drug war.

If you believe that hiring a drug-sniffing dog to go through your house is a good way to get connected to your child’s life, then you might want to re-think your entire parenting approach.

Dog for hire sniffs out drug problems

Parents concerned about whether their children are using narcotics, businesses wanting to enforce [...]

I got an email from President Barack Obama on Friday. I didn’t realize he knew me, but it was a nice letter and apparently he wants to hear from me personally!

The day after I delivered my State of the Union Address to Congress, I took off to connect with ordinary Americans around the [...]

Posting has been extremely light the past few days as I’ve been exceptionally busy with a variety of diverse and interesting projects (description after the fold)

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Wayne State Law School symposium on the federal-state dichotomy on marijuana. Kevin Sabet starts at about 22 minutes, and Dan Riffle, Legislative Analyst for MPP starts at about 43 minutes, and he gets in some really nice counters to Kevin Sabet’s “extremism.” Dan talks about tax policy as it could relate to marijuana sales (interesting).

I haven’t listened to the whole video yet, but there’s some really good stuff here.

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Continuing on the theme of the fed-state dichotomy, we have Can a Strong Coalition of Pot Activists Define Medical Marijuana Regulation — And Avoid the Feds?

A broad coalition of California advocates has filed a statewide medical marijuana regulation initiative aimed at ending the years-long confusion over what is and what is not allowed under state law by explicitly allowing sales and legalizing dispensaries statewide absent affirmative local popular votes to ban them.

It’s an ambitious move to further codify the medical marijuana system and make it harder for the feds to interfere, but time is short for it to get on the ballot.

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Mark Kleiman proposed a design problem as an assignment to his students: “How can you tax and regulate, at the state level, something that remains a Federal felony?”

Turns out that a group of his students came up with a pretty smart notion. Here’s their idea: Designing State-Level Cannabis Legalization

It could work — purely intended as a short term solution until the feds get out of the game, obviously. The idea is to make it difficult for the feds to get in there and bust operations (too many in this instance) while also not keeping state records the feds could seize that are trackable to individual sellers.

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Virginia Sheriffs Addicted to Drug Cash

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Michael P. Botticelli to be nominated as Deputy Director of the ONDCP

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Interesting piece about a shadowy drug store – the Silk Road on a “secret” internet… Amazon.com for Illegal Drugs?

Americans for Forfeiture Reform report on another cash grab, this time by prosecutors. Buried in a proposed New York State bill is a measure that “was inserted at the request of prosecutors, especially Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.”

The measure increases the percentage of forfeiture takings that the DA’s office can keep. [...]