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Most of these rights were the main casualties in the War on Drugs. See US: This Is Your Bill of Rights, On Drugs for some other egregious examples of the police getting out of hand. You do not have to tell the police your name, address or let them photograph you. Since this is America the police have the right to ask you anything that they want; and you have the right to ignore them. These rights are laid out in the ACLU 's web site. I think that the best place to read about what the police can and cannot do when they approach you is a study by the New York Attorney General's Office entitled The New York City Police Department's "Stop & Frisk" Practices. This article goes on to site case law supporting things like "civilians are not required to answer or to provide proof of identity":

See De Bour, 40 N.Y.2d at 219, 386 N.Y.S.2d at 382 n.1; see also People v. Powell, 246 A.D.2d 366, 667 N.Y.S.2d 725 (1st Dep't 1998)

Some of this information is specific to the state of New York but much of it is applicable for people in every state. This report goes on to explain things like Federal law provides a floor for state standards. This means that states may enact tougher restrictions on their police departments but that they cannot give the police more lattitude to do things like question citizens.

The practice mentioned in the article will stand until someone sues to have it stopped. Here we are back with the ACLU again. They seem to be about the only organization that has deep enough pockets to pursue things like this. And the worst that is going to happen is they are told to stop. In reality the state and federal prosecutors are probably right when they say that the collecting of this information is legal. This is because the people that got into this file didn't walk away from the police in the manner that is outlined in the Supreme Court's decision in Terry v. Ohio and subsequent case law. For the police to detain you - meaning that you cannot just ignore them and walk away - they must first reasonably concluded that the suspect is engaged in criminal activity. The article in question says that the people were detained for loitering so the police have found what they say is a criminal activity. Make them prove it! Make them file a detailed report of the stop. File your complaints with the entities I listed above and make them justify their stop to their superiors. Make their superiors justify the stop to the local paper and the federal authorities. If everyone that was annoyed would push just a little then it would work more than one or two people pressing really hard.

Unfortunately the police are rarely required to justify their actions much less defend them in an official inquiry. Police enjoy something called qualified indemnity that protects them from the consequences of their actions in all but the most severe of circumstances. And even then they get off with a slap on the wrist instead of the punishment that they deserve. Case in point:

I used to live Colorado where they have a law similiar to that in many other states called capital murder. It states that if someone dies while in the commission of a felony that all people committing that felony can be charged with first degree murder. Perjury is a felony; that is what swearing out a false affidavit is. So when an officer lies while asking a judge for a search warrant they have committed a felony. When an innocent person dies in the execution of that search warrant it should be capital murder. If the person that lies is a police officer then it works out differently. They can even get their job back and the opportunity to lie again. This was not his first mistake. The FBI has even been critized for that very same offense.

We MUST stand up for our rights or we will loose them.
Regards, Tres.

Most of these rights were the main casualties in the War on Drugs. See US: This Is Your Bill of Rights, On Drugs for some other egregious examples of the police getting out of hand. You do not have to tell the police your name, address or let them photograph you. Since this is America the police have the right to ask you anything that they want; and you have the right to ignore them. These rights are laid out in the ACLU 's web site. I think that the best place to read about what the police can and cannot do when they approach you is a study by the New York Attorney General's Office entitled The New York City Police Department's "Stop & Frisk" Practices. This article goes on to site case law supporting things like "civilians are not required to answer or to provide proof of identity":

See De Bour, 40 N.Y.2d at 219, 386 N.Y.S.2d at 382 n.1; see also People v. Powell, 246 A.D.2d 366, 667 N.Y.S.2d 725 (1st Dep't 1998)

Some of this information is specific to the state of New York but much of it is applicable for people in every state. This report goes on to explain things like Federal law provides a floor for state standards. This means that states may enact tougher restrictions on their police departments but that they cannot give the police more lattitude to do things like question citizens.

The practice mentioned in the article will stand until someone sues to have it stopped. Here we are back with the ACLU again. They seem to be about the only organization that has deep enough pockets to pursue things like this. And the worst that is going to happen is they are told to stop. In reality the state and federal prosecutors are probably right when they say that the collecting of this information is legal. This is because the people that got into this file didn't walk away from the police in the manner that is outlined in the Supreme Court's decision in Terry v. Ohio and subsequent case law. For the police to detain you - meaning that you cannot just ignore them and walk away - they must first reasonably concluded that the suspect is engaged in criminal activity. The article in question says that the people were detained for loitering so the police have found what they say is a criminal activity. Make them prove it! Make them file a detailed report of the stop. File your complaints with the entities I listed above and make them justify their stop to their superiors. Make their superiors justify the stop to the local paper and the federal authorities. If everyone that was annoyed would push just a little then it would work more than one or two people pressing really hard.

Unfortunately the police are rarely required to justify their actions much less defend them in an official inquiry. Police enjoy something called qualified indemnity that protects them from the consequences of their actions in all but the most severe of circumstances. And even then they get off with a slap on the wrist instead of the punishment that they deserve. Case in point:

I used to live Colorado where they have a law similiar to that in many other states called capital murder. It states that if someone dies while in the commission of a felony that all people committing that felony can be charged with first degree murder. Perjury is a felony; that is what swearing out a false affidavit is. So when an officer lies while asking a judge for a search warrant they have committed a felony. When an innocent person dies in the execution of that search warrant it should be capital murder. If the person that lies is a police officer then it works out differently. They can even get their job back and the opportunity to lie again. This was not his first mistake. The FBI has even been critized for that very same offense.

We MUST stand up for our rights or we will loose them.
Regards, Tres.

Most of these rights were the main casualties in the War on Drugs. See US: This Is Your Bill of Rights, On Drugs for some other egregious examples of the police getting out of hand. You do not have to tell the police your name, address or let them photograph you. Since this is America the police have the right to ask you anything that they want; and you have the right to ignore them. These rights are laid out in the ACLU 's web site. I think that the best place to read about what the police can and cannot do when they approach you is a study by the New York Attorney General's Office entitled The New York City Police Department's "Stop & Frisk" Practices. This article goes on to site case law supporting things like "civilians are not required to answer or to provide proof of identity":

See De Bour, 40 N.Y.2d at 219, 386 N.Y.S.2d at 382 n.1; see also People v. Powell, 246 A.D.2d 366, 667 N.Y.S.2d 725 (1st Dep't 1998)

Some of this information is specific to the state of New York but much of it is applicable for people in every state. This report goes on to explain things like Federal law provides a floor for state standards. This means that states may enact tougher restrictions on their police departments but that they cannot give the police more lattitude to do things like question citizens.

The practice mentioned in the article will stand until someone sues to have it stopped. Here we are back with the ACLU again. They seem to be about the only organization that has deep enough pockets to pursue things like this. And the worst that is going to happen is they are told to stop. In reality the state and federal prosecutors are probably right when they say that the collecting of this information is legal. This is because the people that got into this file didn't walk away from the police in the manner that is outlined in the Supreme Court's decision in Terry v. Ohio and subsequent case law. For the police to detain you - meaning that you cannot just ignore them and walk away - they must first reasonably concluded that the suspect is engaged in criminal activity. The article in question says that the people were detained for loitering so the police have found what they say is a criminal activity. Make them prove it! Make them file a detailed report of the stop. File your complaints with the entities I listed above and make them justify their stop to their superiors. Make their superiors justify the stop to the local paper and the federal authorities. If everyone that was annoyed would push just a little then it would work more than one or two people pressing really hard.

Unfortunately the police are rarely required to justify their actions much less defend them in an official inquiry. Police enjoy something called qualified indemnity that protects them from the consequences of their actions in all but the most severe of circumstances. And even then they get off with a slap on the wrist instead of the punishment that they deserve. Case in point:

I used to live Colorado where they have a law similiar to that in many other states called capital murder. It states that if someone dies while in the commission of a felony that all people committing that felony can be charged with first degree murder. Perjury is a felony; that is what swearing out a false affidavit is. So when an officer lies while asking a judge for a search warrant they have committed a felony. When an innocent person dies in the execution of that search warrant it should be capital murder. If the person that lies is a police officer then it works out differently. They can even get their job back and the opportunity to lie again. This was not his first mistake. The FBI has even been critized for that very same offense.

We MUST stand up for our rights or we will loose them.
Regards, Tres.

Most of these rights were the main casualties in the War on Drugs. See US: This Is Your Bill of Rights, On Drugs for some other egregious examples of the police getting out of hand. You do not have to tell the police your name, address or let them photograph you. Since this is America the police have the right to ask you anything that they want; and you have the right to ignore them. These rights are laid out in the ACLU 's web site. I think that the best place to read about what the police can and cannot do when they approach you is a study by the New York Attorney General's Office entitled The New York City Police Department's "Stop & Frisk" Practices. This article goes on to site case law supporting things like "civilians are not required to answer or to provide proof of identity":

See De Bour, 40 N.Y.2d at 219, 386 N.Y.S.2d at 382 n.1; see also People v. Powell, 246 A.D.2d 366, 667 N.Y.S.2d 725 (1st Dep't 1998)

Some of this information is specific to the state of New York but much of it is applicable for people in every state. This report goes on to explain things like Federal law provides a floor for state standards. This means that states may enact tougher restrictions on their police departments but that they cannot give the police more lattitude to do things like question citizens.

The practice mentioned in the article will stand until someone sues to have it stopped. Here we are back with the ACLU again. They seem to be about the only organization that has deep enough pockets to pursue things like this. And the worst that is going to happen is they are told to stop. In reality the state and federal prosecutors are probably right when they say that the collecting of this information is legal. This is because the people that got into this file didn't walk away from the police in the manner that is outlined in the Supreme Court's decision in Terry v. Ohio and subsequent case law. For the police to detain you - meaning that you cannot just ignore them and walk away - they must first reasonably concluded that the suspect is engaged in criminal activity. The article in question says that the people were detained for loitering so the police have found what they say is a criminal activity. Make them prove it! Make them file a detailed report of the stop. File your complaints with the entities I listed above and make them justify their stop to their superiors. Make their superiors justify the stop to the local paper and the federal authorities. If everyone that was annoyed would push just a little then it would work more than one or two people pressing really hard.

Unfortunately the police are rarely required to justify their actions much less defend them in an official inquiry. Police enjoy something called qualified indemnity that protects them from the consequences of their actions in all but the most severe of circumstances. And even then they get off with a slap on the wrist instead of the punishment that they deserve. Case in point:

I used to live Colorado where they have a law similiar to that in many other states called capital murder. It states that if someone dies while in the commission of a felony that all people committing that felony can be charged with first degree murder. Perjury is a felony; that is what swearing out a false affidavit is. So when an officer lies while asking a judge for a search warrant they have committed a felony. When an innocent person dies in the execution of that search warrant it should be capital murder. If the person that lies is a police officer then it works out differently. They can even get their job back and the opportunity to lie again. This was not his first mistake. The FBI has even been critized for that very same offense.

We MUST stand up for our rights or we will loose them.
Regards, Tres.

The prison industry (actually the unions representing prison guards, even moreso than the corporations) is lobbying hard for ever-harsher laws, including a mandatory life sentence for possession of drugs.

Smoking pot doesn't cure cancer, and nobody claims it does.

In the study on rats a research team from Complutense University and Autonoma University in Madrid found that marijuana's active ingredient - -- called THC -- killed tumor cells in advanced cases of glioma, a quick-killing cancer for which there is currently no effective treatment. But, the scientists stress, it is unlikely that lighting up a joint will do anything to prevent or cure cancer.

Well, there's this, or this, or this, or this, just from the first 10 Google results. To be sure, medical marijuana use is legal in some areas, but cops arrest them anyway.

The word manufacture means create, not use. If you possess marijuana seeds with the intent to grow pot, that would be illegal, but if you merely possess marijuana (with some seeds attached) with the intent to smoke, that's not illegal (under federal law).

Huh? I'm allowed to have it but I'm not allowed to grow it, buy it, import it, or do anything that might bring it into my possession? Also, if I cultivate marijuana and make a joint out of it, mighn't that count as manufacturing? Moot point, since regardless of what the law is supposed to be, there are thousands of people arrested every year for nothing more than possession. Not selling it, not growing/synthesizing it, not using it, but simply having it on their person.

Wait a second now. Making the fruits of your work public does affect interstate commerce.

My point was that a lot of people will work a way around the DRM, and some of them will make it public, despite it being illegal to do so. Hollings and co. will look at that and say, "Guess we need to clamp down further" and try to limit even personal development of workarounds. And it's not unreasonable to think they'll try.

I think the achilles heel of the CBDTPA is section (3) part (d)
"In achieving the goals of setting open security standards that will provide effective security for copyrighted works, the security system standards shall ensure, to the extent practicable, that
(1) the standard security technologies are
(A) reliable;
(B) renewable;
(C) resistant to attack;
(D) readily implemented;
(E) modular;
(F) applicable in multiple technology platforms;
(G) extensible;
(H) upgradable;
(I) not cost prohibitive; and
(2) any software portion of such standards is based on open source code."

In other words, the perfect secure system, that can not only tell the difference between protected and unprotected bits, but can also tell when I'm making a legitimate copy under the Fair Use doctrine (section 3, part e), all to be implemented in hardware and software that you sell to hackers who have lots of spare time. What a joke. I agree with you in that respect, but you and I know infinitely more about computers than any judge or politician is likely to. 'Security' is the new computer buzzword and they'll toss it around like it's a minor feature that you can add in your spare time.

Mmm, British Columbia...with it's Marijuana Party, large cannabis clubs, and high pot tolerance, not to mention everything else.

I've always liked that part of the continent...

No US aid went to the Taliban, as the US (and the rest of the world except for Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the UAE) did not recognize it as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

It's amazing how such concerns disappear when it comes to the War on Drugs. The US gave the Taliban a $43 million grant in exchange for their cracking down on the cultivation of opium poppies.

By the way, they refer to themselves as Muslims, not Moslems. While not necessarily offensive, Moslem is a bit like the word Negro in that it was commonly used in the past without any negative connotation, but has fallen out of use. These jackasses in the fezes seem to be the main group who uses the term now.

-Bruce

Al Giordano is a former Boston Phoenix reporter. He's an American.

This was an awesome victory for those of us in the reform movement. Quite simply, the drug reform movement is about as grassroots as you can get, and most of our journalism is online: DRCnet, MAP, Cannabis News, and of course Narconews, as mentioned in the article.

The print media has begun to acknowledge the worldwide shift in attitude towards drugs (and especailly, the war on them) - but still mass media outlets including large American newspapers and especially TV still spew ridiculous retoric straight out of 1980's Just Say No propoganda.

What this article also didn't mention is that the EFF had a hand in helping Narconews with their court victory. Bravo to these brave individuals!

Another WoD-WoT link: Uncle Sam wrote the Taliban a big fat check to the tune of US$43 million for "winning" their war on drugs. This was just back in May by the same administration! Probably paid for some of those terrorist-training camps we hear about getting bombed on the news.

The United States government supported Osama bin Laden. We funded, armed and trained his forces, both in war and terrorism. We helped build his terrorist army to fight a superpower, the Soviet Union. I don't like communism, but our politicians created a monster in Afghanistan. Now it seems that monster has attacked us.

Those that are now protesting against the bombing in Afghanistan condemned the Taliban long before tragedy of September 11. And yet the United States continued to fund them through May of this year.

• The United States Supported Pinochet.
• The United States Supported Saddam Hussein, even after he used nerve gas on his own people in 1988.
• And the United States supported the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
• Even today the United States trains people in torture and terrorism at The School of the Americas.

I do think that something should be done about the Taliban's tyranny, but you have to realize that the Afghans are the first victims, not our enemies.

If we are really to put an end to terrorism we must stop our politicians from creating terrorists in the first place.

oh ya! you dont think kansas has anything but ordinary? check this out http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1839/a06.html? 345
the cost of living is really nice here too and i got pretty nice bandwidth. now damn thats slack!

They encourage locals to grow and export poppy products (heroin & opium) to the point that Afghanistan is the #1 supplier of those drugs worldwide. Only 10% of their land is arable, and 90% of that is used for poppy production. This results in the vast majority of the gov't income.

Your information is dated. The Taliban have eliminated opium production.

The four-year drought might deserve a share of blame for the current famine.

Yeah, well apparently Bush gave the Taliban 43 million dollars last may because they banned all drugs in their country. Way to go.

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n922/a09.html


I suggest everyone read what Michael Moore has to say about this:

http://www.michaelmoore.com/

Apparently, he gets lots of cash from fund-raising organizations operating in rich (read: G7) countries. Could these be found out, their efforts proved illegal, their money confiscated?

He also gets money from the US !!! look at this article.

$43 million were given to the taliban for stopping opium-production.

stop this war against drugs and dont support this fanatic people !!!

If you have any doubts about the legitimacy of this, remember that they used the _latest brain imaging techniques_!!!

You can ask the author about
what else to smoke while writing these in-depth, well-researched articles :)

P.P.S. in all seriousness, the blank looks of the teenagers walking out of the arcade has been worrying me for a while...

Heh, these guys had the ingenious idea of using one such silo as an LSD Lab. Shame they were caught by the US Gov't. Imagine how insanely high you could get off an LSD tab the size of a missile...

We tried voting her out, but lost something like 40-60. The op-ed columns were surprisingly uniform in their labeling of Tom Campbell as someone who "doesn't quite have what it takes" to make it in the Senate, and even more consistent in portraying her prolific selling-out as "effectiveness" and "getting things done". You can search for some of the juicy tidbits at Media Awareness Project. Here's just one sorry example, with glowing references to the Maxxam Headwaters buyout.

Slashdot readers ought to vote against her based solely on her continuing support of the CDA. Californians ought to vote her out simply because she's as corrupt as they come. 5.5 more years...

-jhp

We tried voting her out, but lost something like 40-60. The op-ed columns were surprisingly uniform in their labeling of Tom Campbell as someone who "doesn't quite have what it takes" to make it in the Senate, and even more consistent in portraying her prolific selling-out as "effectiveness" and "getting things done". You can search for some of the juicy tidbits at Media Awareness Project. Here's just one sorry example, with glowing references to the Maxxam Headwaters buyout.

Slashdot readers ought to vote against her based solely on her continuing support of the CDA. Californians ought to vote her out simply because she's as corrupt as they come. 5.5 more years...

-jhp

Lancaster California, from my (detached) view, seems to be a town full of iodine seeking crank junkies and intolerant white-folk --

NAZI GANG CALLED KEY PLAYER IN DRUG TRADE
California town sees rash of hate crime
Grammy Min discuesses trial for not keeping records on crystal iodine sales

I could be wrong in my opinion, but I find it kind of fitting that Katz would choose an incident in Lancaster to examplify the blight of school informants ...

Because the U.S. has been stuck in a low-grade civil war since the 1960s.

Although most of the currently illegal drugs were outlawed early in the century, drug politics didn't really take their current shape until Nixon seized upon a "war on drugs" as a convenient proxy war against young hippies and radicals. It wasn't politically possible to directly criminalize young people in general, so he did the next best thing -- pick what he perceived to be an attribute of his young political enemies -- recreational drug use -- and criminalize that.

Nixon came and went, and Carter toyed with the idea of stopping the drug war, but he didn't do it -- one of the major errors of his administration -- and by the time Reagan was elected, the drug war had already proved extraordinarily effective as a "law and order" issue -- in spite of the fact that drug prohibition causes much of the disorder and lawlessness that getting "tough on drugs" is supposed to correct.

Now, there is simply too much money in the drug war for it to be stopped from within the government. In California, for instance, the prison guards lobby is one of the strongest political entities in the state. Pharmaceutical companies are also in on the game -- with their billion dollar drug testing programs, and with the billions of dollars in patented drugs that do exactly the same thing as unpatentable illegal drugs (Marinol for instance.)

The media profits immensely from the drug war -- they receive millions of dollars in U.S. government anti-drug advertising, and also take money to insert government anti-drug messages in their programming. You can organize an anti-drug-war demonstration, and the only thing that you can be assured of is that it will either not be covered by the media, or mocked by the media. They know who is paying them. When the media are forced to cover anti-prohibition stories, they heavily slant them. Usually, the headline or the first sentence will have a cute little pun -- "Initiative goes to pot", that makes the article appear trivial and funny, and such articles tend to use derogatory terms such as "pothead", or invoke stereotypes -- "The police really suck," said a protester. "We just want to toke up the kind" in the same way that a newspaper of another generation might have used the word "nigger", or invoke negative stereotypes against blacks. Drug users are uniformly portrayed as ignorant, lazy, prone to crime, politically irrelevant, and in need of government suppression and control.

Quite simply, illegal drug users -- be they recreational or medicinal users -- have about as many civil rights in the United States as blacks had in the 1940s.

There appear to be two effective methods of counterattack against the drug war machine.

The first are voter initiatives, in the states that allow them. Right now, the only successful initiatives have been for decriminalizing medicinal marijuana, but initiatives for outright legalization have a surprisingly strong showing. Did you hear about the Alaska marijuana decriminalization initiative? Probably not. The results were hardly covered. 40% of the voting population voted not only to legalize marijuana for all adults, for all purposes, but also to issue pardons and reparations to drug-war prisoners. The organizers of the initiative will try again in two years, and I believe that they will win by the end of the decade.

The second effective resource against drug prohibition is the internet. If you read a newspaper, you'll be lucky to find a single article about the drug war that isn't pro-war, but there are some excellent web sites that are documenting the drug war.

mapinc is an archive of thousands of drug-war related stories gathered mostly from print publications. It's an excellent place to get a good "feel" of the pulse of the drug war. Click on the blue "50000+ Drug-Related News Clippings!" link for the meat of the site.

Richard Cowan's Marijuananews is another excellent resource. Cowan picks out articles, and provides biting analysis. It's one of my favorite sites on the net.

In a nutshell, the drug war continues unabated because it has become part of American life. So many people and entities -- the government, corporations, individuals -- directly profit from drug prohibition, that it has taken on a life of its own.

I believe that drug prohibition will only be destroyed at the polling place, because, in the end, the victims of drug prohibition are individuals, and not just individuals who use drugs. The model employee who has never missed a day in his life who is fired because he went to a concert, and inhaled enough second-hand marijuana smoke to show up on his surprise drug test the next day. The mother whose child was shot to death by the police in a botched police swat attack on the wrong house. The father who stands up against a school drug-testing program, and bears the wrath of his community. The person who sees their best friend -- who is fighting cancer -- arrested and imprisoned for using marijuana to control the symptoms of chemotherapy. The parent who thinks that DARE creates an unhealthy fascination with drugs. The parent whose child becomes addicted to heroin, because their DARE instructor said that heroin is just as bad as marijuana, and because the kid already knows that pot is not addictive, she decides that the officer is lying to her -- which he is -- and starts using an addictive drug. The kid who "just says no" to marijuana, then is hooked on a lifetime addiction to tobacco, while his pot-smoking friends stop using pot when they get tired of it.

Even if you don't use drugs, you should oppose drug prohibition, for the simple reason that you could find yourself, a friend of yours, or a member of your own family on that list tomorrow.

Your opinion that drug dealers do not harm anyone is incorrect- people who could have been productive are ruined through exploitation of their weakness. They provide a temporary illusary benefit to the user, while destroying the users potential. If you create an addict and do not believe you are evil, you are a fool or a liar.

True, a person who uses nicotene or other drugs is aware of the health risk, but the nature of the substance prevents them from attempting to quit.

Using a persons desire for your own benefit, with no regard for their life, is evil and produces more evil. This is what a drug dealer does.

Drugs create an illusion of a perfect life

Reign in Hell.. Serve in heaven...

Just think before you write or speak, because thought is either a cure or a disease, and is spread by every single word you write or speak.

I recently talked to a friend of mine who grew up in north Philly. When he was a kid in the ghetto, the people he looked up to were the dealer's.

Table 1. Chances of going to State or Federal prison for the first time,
by age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin

Total------5.1
White*-----2.5
Black*----16.2
Hispanic---9.4

*Excludes persons of Hispanic origin.

DARE Should Be Discontinued

The War on Drugs and DARE are failures

Reality Check Due In Drug Prevention
The New York Times
By Richard Rothstein

September 27, 2000 - Drug use by our youth is a problem that cries out for commitment, diligence, and honesty by school administrators and elected officials. Instead, for far too long, our drug-prevention policies have been driven by mindless adherence to a wasteful, ineffective, feel-good program, Drug Abuse Resistance Education DARE. DARE has been a huge public-relations success, but a failure at accomplishing the goal of long-term drug-abuse prevention.

Before taxpayers' money is spent for drug prevention, any program receiving the funds should prove its worth.

Our school administrators and elected leaders should insist on no less. However, with DARE, the moneyas well as the crucial opportunities to implement programs that actually workhas been blown.

In a recent guest column appearing in this newspaper, Glenn Levant, the president of DARE America, stated that "DARE has become the most successful drug abuse and violence reduction program in the nation..." He is accurate, but only if "success" is based on the amount of tax and foundation money spent on a program or the number of schools that have used the program.

However, if "success" is based on the effectiveness of a program in reaching the goal of reduced drug abuse over the long-term, DARE has been a dismal failure, according to numerous published studies.

In a Kokomo, Ind., study, researchers found that the level of drug use among DARE graduates was almost identical to the usage among non-DARE students. The only statistically meaningful difference was that more DARE students reported recent use of marijuana than those who had not been through the DARE program.

The Department of Justice commissioned the Research Triangle Institute RTI to evaluate DARE. Its published findings reflect that DARE students use more marijuana than non-DARE students.

The RTI concluded that DARE's core-curriculum effect on the use of other drugs, except tobacco, is not statistically significant. According to the RTI, DARE might very well be taking the place of other, more beneficial, drug-prevention programs that adolescents otherwise could be receiving.

When the City of Oakland decided to dump DARE after spending more than 600,000 per year, the director of Oakland's Family Council on Drug Awareness noted, "The bottom line is that DARE is an expensive program that seems to be making the situation worse."

In the longest follow-up study conducted regarding the effectiveness of DARE, the results of which were published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, the researchers noted that "[t]he widespread popularity of DARE is especially noteworthy, given the lack of evidence for its efficacy." They repeated the findings of many other researchers: "[T]he preponderance of evidence suggests that DARE has no long-term effect on drug use."

After it became apparent I was going to terminate Salt Lake City's involvement in the DARE program, several people came to complain at the City Council meeting on July 11. Among them were the director of DARE for the state of Utah, officers of the Utah Council for Crime Prevention, several DARE officers, and a member of the Salt Lake City School Board. Although they all spoke passionately for the continuation of DARE, not one of them made reference to any research published in a peer-reviewed journal demonstrating the effectiveness of DARE. In fact, the Salt Lake City school board member said she was "appalled" because I provided my research to the school board, yet she failed to mention any research to support her apparently intuitive notion that DARE accomplishes its objective.

Drug prevention is too important to be left to those who refuse to become familiar with the research -- or with the availability of other programs that have been proved to work. The DARE program, and those who have advocated it to the exclusion of effective programs, should be held accountable to the public.

Most important, our community should demand that our schools replace DARE with research-based programs that will help us attain our goal of significantly reduced drug abuse among our youth.

Among those programs are Life Skills Training LST, Students Taught Awareness and Resistance STAR, and Athletes Training and Learning to Avoid Steroids ATLAS. I have provided information concerning these programs and their effectiveness to the Salt Lake City school board.

Our common goal is to cut drug abuse among our youth.

A means of helping to accomplish that goal is to implement in our schools drug-prevention programs that actually work. Those who fail to insist on effective drug-prevention programs in our schools are betraying our youth and our community.

And those who are unfamiliar with the research and insist on retaining DARE in our schools simply because it is a "popular" program are not part of the drug-abuse solution; they are part of the problem.

--

Look up the following (if you need more just reply and I will give you a ton): Frontline:busted..how effective is D.A.R.E
War on Drugs Clock
Interesting Fact Sheet from canadian sources That should get you started on how and why D.A.R.E. does not work. The US prohibition against drugs in an incredible failure. In the first 12 years of the War on Drugs (begining with Reagan's presidency) the US Gov. spent a record 3 Trillion dollars. If you worked out the numbers that is about $12,000 for every man, woman and child in the US. I don't know about you but my feeling is that this is an incredible waste of money. I could think of agencies like NASA who I would rather see me $1,000 a year spent on rather than the bullshit we call a war on drugs. I can't find an exact figure for the model but last year the 6th largest growth industry in the US was Prisons according to a Frontline report I saw not too long ago. The War on Drugs as it is being waged is the most blatant racist violation of US citizens rights. The statistic of 3 out of 4 black males (between ages 17-34)in inner cities being incarcerated at one point or another for a drug offense should point that out. The distribution of drug use is not vastly different between any particular ethnic, racial or financial demographic yet we relentlessly persecute blacks for it. This is an utter disgrace. Caucasians do drugs too. I don't see 3 out of 4 of us in jail for it.If this were really a WAR then we would handle it completely different but we won't. It is always election fodder and makes the righteous candidates look foolish for saying truthfully that the war is dumb. Jocelyn Elders was ridiculed out of her position as Surgeon General for saying that the drug problem is a health problem not a criminal problem. The CIA was busted selling and marketing cocaine in 'Contragate' to help fund subversive actions during the Iran/Iraq war. The list goes on there I could continue to add to ad infinitum.People for the most part are opposed to legalization/decriminalization for all the wrong reasons based upon the disinformation you are presented with in the educational system. Could we please stop brainwashing the next generation and teach them the facts? How many of us were forced to watch Reefer Madness? How much of the 'facts' presented therein is totally bullshit? Will crime go UP if decriminaliztion occurs? No because a) you will kill the black market that feeds off of it b) drugs will be much cheaper c)the quality will be better d)street gangs who finance themselves on drug sales will be out of business e)we would stop letting violent offenders out of jail to house mandatory sentencing guidlined drug offenders and the rediculous 3 time offender laws that require people to be jailed the rest of thier lives for the sale or use f)the relentless seizure of properites would end. Drug use for the most part is a victimless crime.We have to stop this madness and soon. Cops needlessly are being killed. FBI agents bodies are turning up in graves in Mexico. Our Presidential candidates have used drugs: Gore and Bush links. I am totally for decriminalization and when I say that I mean clean across the board, not just pot or coke I mean EVERYTHING. What a person does in thier own home on thier own time is thier business. You do what you want. I care not. If you do drugs and get behind the wheel of a car we take away you liscense forever(something I totally advocate for DUI offenders to) end of story. The basic tenet of freedom is the right to be left alone and not be unduly harrassed. Why isn't it that way now?Please, Uncle Sam, stop blowing my hard earned tax dollars on the bullshit and stop trying to brainwash our children.

What's the government's batting average for drug programs that actually work??? Hmm... maybe .010 in a good season. Let's face it... drugs need to be treated as an addiction and not a crime. We need to inform young people about drugs by telling them the truth... not lies and more lies like the DEA does. Don't get me wrong, some of the information provided is true, however, a large amount is just plain wrong.

We need to stop spending our War on Drugs money(3 trillion in the last 12 years) on law enforment efforts and start spending more of it on prevention and addiction programs such as D.A.R.E. or AA

Thank you.

-toolj23

This article is number 8 in a series of articles entitled "Why The War On Drugs Has Failed" published by the Ottowa Citizen in Canada. It talks about the erosion of civil liberties that the War on Drugs has caused, including things like the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act in the US and Section 462.2 in Canada which prevent free speech when it relates to drugs.

If you've got the time, the whole series is incredibly interesting and deals with the entire nature and consequences of the War on Drugs. There are plenty more articles on the subject at the Media Awareness Project.

This article is number 8 in a series of articles entitled "Why The War On Drugs Has Failed" published by the Ottowa Citizen in Canada. It talks about the erosion of civil liberties that the War on Drugs has caused, including things like the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act in the US and Section 462.2 in Canada which prevent free speech when it relates to drugs.

If you've got the time, the whole series is incredibly interesting and deals with the entire nature and consequences of the War on Drugs. There are plenty more articles on the subject at the Media Awareness Project.

It's gotten so bad that in the not-so-distant past (last 3-5 months?), I managed to catch 3 or 4 shows back-to-back on the same channel, where the entire plot focused on an after-school specialesque anti-drug message.

I don't think I've EVERY heard of someone reaching Lethal dosage...

Oh, it's not just theoretical rat-torture. Although the guy in question did have to take ~90 pills = 18g = ~180 cups of strong coffee = 600 Penguin Mints...

Of course, I must warn against someone eating half a pound of chocolate covered espresso beans, unless they want to stay up for two days.

Yeah, the half-life can be a problem. You're much better off with ephedrine (clean, no jitters), Nicorette(TM) (shorter-acting), or cocaine (the side effect where you turn into God is pretty nice).

- Michael Cohn

These two things are NOT the same. They are from the same family of plants, but they are NOT the same. Marijuana plants are typically very bushy & leafy, whereas hemp plants are primarily a main fibrous stalk, with very little leaves. Hemp is/was grown for the fibers in the stalk and NOT the leaves. If you want, try smoking some leaves from a hemp plant, and all you're likely to get is a headache.

I hate it when people mistakenly equate the two in the effort to justify legalization of marijuana when they're really talking about the many uses of hemp. True hemp advocates know this, but the marijuana advocates rarely know the difference. Don't agree with me? Read this or this or this or do your own search on the phrase "hemp is not marijuana".


Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.

Repression never stops. The Spanish Inquisition comes back every few years. Right now it's the atheists and OSS zealots. In a few years it'll be the Blacks again.

Actually, right now it's drug users. As of a few days ago, the U.S. passed the two-million prisoner mark. According to the Department of Justice's own figures, one quarter of those, or one half million U.S. citizens are imprisoned for non-violent drug offences alone.

Mandatory minimum prison sentences were applied in 64 percent of drug cases in 1998. The average length of imprisonment for drug offenses was 76 months; for firearms violations it was 63 months; and for manslaughter, it was 45 months. -- The Washington Post

Even if you find yourself with incurable cancer, like Steve Kubby, and all that is keeping you alive is regular use of medical marijuana, you are subject to imprisonment and likely death in prison from deprivation of your medicine if you are caught using an illegal medicine, i.e. one that is not patented by a campaign-contributing pharmaceutical company. Many medical marijuana patients, once discovered, find themselves under a court order not to use the only medicine that will keep them alive, and are subject to drug tests, and risk imprisonment and death in prison if they dare to continue using their medicine.

Drug users in general are subject to abuse and murder by the police. Their property is subject to seizure without trial, thus bankrupting them and preventing them from defending themselves. They are sent to special "drug courts" where they find that their constitutional rights don't apply. They are subject to "mandatory minimum" sentencing rules that forbid the judge from using any discretion in sentencing, hence the 76 month average drug sentence.

Back to the original point, if you go back far enough, the origins of most religions are based on the teachings of individuals who have had mystical -- i.e. hallucinatory, drug-like experiences. During the inquisition, someone who accidently ate the wrong mushroom, had a "mystical" experience, and claimed to have seen God would be put to death. In the year 2000, someone attempting to replicate the experience would face years in prison if caught.

Atheists and blacks, by contrast, are protected by a host of federal and state laws.

Such a model does exist: the one I'm thinking of, however, is focussed to fighting the War on (some) Drugs.

For example, when TV's Judge Judy Sheindlin made some really idiotic comments in Australia about addiction, activists mobilized and, through their letters, got several advertisers to withdraw their sponsorship as well as generated some news coverage.

I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to /. to implement a similar advocacy information center...

-Duketor (tim.meehan@utoronto.ca)

Such a model does exist: the one I'm thinking of, however, is focussed to fighting the War on (some) Drugs.

For example, when TV's Judge Judy Sheindlin made some really idiotic comments in Australia about addiction, activists mobilized and, through their letters, got several advertisers to withdraw their sponsorship as well as generated some news coverage.

I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to /. to implement a similar advocacy information center...

-Duketor (tim.meehan@utoronto.ca)

Here's a better article

What is more likely to happen is that the agent will take the stand, and lie about what happened.

In a very recent case, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Douglas Strickland testified that it is routine practice for the highway patrol's drug interdiction teams to lie under oath in exactly these cases.

From an editorial on the case:


THE CONTROVERSY STEMS from a May 19, 1998, car search. At the time, Strickland and Trooper Bruce Hutheson told a Polk County judge that they had pulled up alongside a broken-down Lincoln Continental stopped on Interstate 4. They said they became suspicious of the driver, Michael Flynn, because he would not give them access to the trunk so they could check if a fuel shut-off switch had malfunctioned. When they called over the police dog they just happened to have with them, it homed in on the back of the car. Inside they ``discovered'' 220 pounds of cocaine. The state judge, on the basis of this evidence, set bail at $1 million.

Trouble was, the troopers neglected to tell the judge they knew all along that the car contained drugs. They had been with the FBI when the car was loaded. The FBI, we now know, was conducting a reverse sting and had used a remote control device planted in the car to make it inoperable.

So, in theory, he "won't do anything" because the information was obtained illegally, but in the absolutely corrupt-to-the-core "real world" of the FBI in the 1990s, he will simply lie to the judge about where the evidence came from.