Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2000
Subject: Penthouse Exposes Mindless War On Marijuana

Penthouse Exposes Mindless War On Marijuana

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PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
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DrugSense FOCUS Alert # 176 Thursday June 26, 2000

The number of problems created by marijuana prohibition make it
difficult to give a good overview in a single article, but writer
Michael Simmons makes a nice attempt in Penthouse this month. His
article (below) shows how many people are getting hurt by the war on
pot, and how activists are working to stop it.

Please write a letter to the magazine to thank editors for
distributing this important information.

WRITE A LETTER TODAY

If not YOU who? If not NOW when?

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E-mailing a copy directly to [email protected] Your letter will then
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and be motivated to follow suit

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CONTACT INFO

Source: Penthouse (US)
Contact: [email protected]

***************************************************************************

ARTICLE

US: Reefer Mindless
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n884/a06.html
Newshawk: Jo-D and Tom-E
Pubdate: Tue, 01 Aug 2000
Source: Penthouse (US)
Section: Cover story
Copyright: 2000 General Media Communications, Inc.
Contact: [email protected]
Address: 11 Penn Plaza, Twelfth Floor, New York, NY 10001
Fax: (212) 702-6262
Website: http://www.penthouse.com
Author: Michael Simmons

REEFER MINDLESS

[On the cover: Special Report: Reefer Mindless – It’s time to end the
vicious, stupid, losing war on pot]

As we enter a new century, the decades-long war against marijuana
continues, with pot busts doubling in the past decade, and tens of
thousands of Americans behind bars for possessing, growing, or selling
the nation’s third favorite recreational drug. When will this official
Reefer Madness end? Possibly sooner than anyone thinks.

“We are locking up this country!” the boyish-looking man in a suit
thundered from the podium. “Should drug use in the privacy of your own
home =85 end you up in jail?”

The packed crowd in a conference room at the Pyramid Crowne Plaza
Hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico, answered the question with an
emphatic “NO!”

“Does anybody want to press a button and retroactively punish the 80
million Americans who have done illegal drugs?” the man asked. “NO!”
the crowd roared back again. “And did I mention that I’m one of those
people? I’m one of the 80 million!”

This impassioned speech, delivered last November before a group of drug-law
reformers attending a panel discussion on “The Drug War: Who Is Winning?,”
could have been made by any one of 70 million Americans who have smoked
pot, or the millions more who’ve tried harder stuff. But here was Gary E.
Johnson, second-term Republican governor of New Mexico, denouncing the war
on drugs as “a miserable failure.” The 47-year-old triathlete, who now
abstains from all mind-altering substances, including sugar, admitted prior
to winning his first term in 1994 to using both marijuana and cocaine
during his college days. After declining to run for higher office following
his second and last term (which expires January 2002), Johnson began to air
his maverick views. He has received enthusiastic praise from those who see
the drug war as an attack by the government on its own citizens. He’s also
become the whipping boy for everybody from White House drug czar Barry
McCaffrey, who claimed that school kids were referring to the governor as
“Puff Daddy” Johnson (“This is goofy thinking that’s harmful to New
Mexico,” remarked the czar — “He ought to be ashamed of himself”), to
fellow New Mexican politicos and law-enforcement officials, to a
middle-school cheer leading team that refused to meet with Johnson because
of his views.

In a conversation after the conference, Johnson discoursed upon the
“reefer madness” scare tactics prevalent in his own youth, today’s
ludicrous brain-on-drugs-equals-fried-eggs analogy, and the inability
of rule makers to differentiate between substances as disparate as pot
and heroin. “We lived the lie,” he said. “Kids continue to live it,
see it played out on them. Take the [Partnership for a Drug-Free
America] advertisement, ‘Here’s your brain, here’s your brain on
drugs.’ Well, okay, so that means marijuana. We experienced the same
thing. We did marijuana. And it’s not what it’s been portrayed. You
don’t lose your mind. You don’t have a propensity to do crime. It’s
okay. It’s not a bad experience. So does that mean what the rest of
the government is telling us is also a lie?”

[snip]

Johnson is a mind-blowing anomaly — a politician who tells the truth,
consequences be damned. And the core truth he speaks is that at the
heart of the multibillion-dollar drug war and its thousands of related
jobs in law enforcement and the prisons system is the nonsensical
demonization of marijuana. For 63 years, since the passage of the
Marihuana (sic) Tax Act of 1937, Americans have been told that pot is
an addictive narcotic that causes everything from amotivational
syndrome to sociopathic behavior to premature death. (The Controlled
Substances Act of 1970 classified marijuana as a Schedule I drug,
along with heroin and L.S.D., thus categorizing it as a substance with
a high potential for abuse and no medicinal applications.) Yet as we
enter the twenty-first century, pot is the third favorite recreational
drug of choice in the United States after alcohol and tobacco. Unlike
alcohol and tobacco, however, marijuana cannot be bought legally for
pleasure or relaxation by Americans who run to the corner store.
Unlike alcohol or tobacco, marijuana found in the possession of adults
can result in criminal sanctions ranging from the equivalent of a
parking ticket to, in the case of a federal statute governing the
import or growing of more than 50,000 plants or pounds, the death penalty.

But the truth is that, slowly and inexorably, the Berlin Wall of
Prohibition is crumbling. The millions of Americans who have either
tried or continue to smoke marijuana know that its negative side
effects are either overstated or outright lies, and public outrage at
the constitutional violations perpetrated in the name of the drug war
is increasing exponentially. Medical marijuana has enjoyed majority
support wherever it’s been on a ballot. And farmers looking for a
profitable crop, entrepreneurs looking for an environmentally and
financially green product, and young people looking for a cause have
transformed hemp — the non psychoactive cousin of marijuana, with
hundreds of beneficial uses — into a $200-million-a-year industry.

Still, there is a dangerous disconnect at work in America regarding
marijuana. Viewers guffaw when the gang in That ’70s Show paints a
marijuana leaf on the town’s water tower — cultural code that
marijuana is a relatively harmless drug as well as a rite of passage
for youth. Reefer jokes are cracked on The Simpsons and by Jay Leno on
the Tonight Show, and weed is smoked to hilarious effect in such major
studio movies as Dazed and Confused and The Big Lebowski. Meanwhile,
tens of thousands of Americans are arrested annually, imprisoned, and
made to face forfeiture of their homes and belongings because of its
use, cultivation, or sale. Furthermore, draconian mandatory minimum
sentencing (the least amount of prison time to be served by law)
passed by Congress and many states is grossly disproportionate to the
alleged crime, as well as leaving judges no leeway to take into
consideration the particulars of each case.

[snip]

Last November, Time magazine ran a tongue-in-cheek but factually
accurate breakdown of the particular social groups that prefer certain
drugs. For pot smokers, the social group was described as “everyone.”

According to recent studies, more than 70 million Americans have
smoked marijuana at least once in their lifetime, 11 million use it
monthly, and about half of those inhale almost daily; this means that
about five percent of people over the age of 12 can be loosely defined
as pot smokers, and between five and six million of them are dedicated
stoners.

Of course these figures must be gauged against the reality that many
potheads will not ‘fess up to illegal behavior, even when guaranteed
anonymity. With “zero tolerance” the watch-phrase of the antidrug
forces and corporate policy makers, such paranoia is completely
justified. If you factor in expanded police power to search and seize,
payments to informants, snitching for plea bargains, aggressive
conspiracy charges, and mandatory urine testing, the pot smokers’
dilemma becomes abundantly clear. Their jobs and their families, not
to mention their very freedom from imprisonment, are constantly at
stake. As R. Keith Stroup, the 56- year-old founder and director of
the Washington-based National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws, observes, “People are in the closet; they’re intimidated after
20 years of the war on drugs. They can’t be honest; they might lose
their jobs, or they might get drug-tested. There are all kinds of
reasons why people are not necessarily honest about how they feel
about marijuana smoking — including those of us who smoke.”

[snip]

Although domestic pot production has been rising steadily over the
years, with increasing amounts being grown indoors under scrupulous
conditions aimed at producing high-potency, high-priced weed, it is
imported marijuana, primarily from Mexico, that remains the toker’s
mainstay, especially in locales where there is no pot-growing culture
and high-quality strains are hard to find or afford.

Debate rages over whether marijuana is stronger than it was 20 years
ago. The antidrug warriors say yes, maintaining it’s so much more
potent that it’s a different drug, thereby justifying their
zero-tolerance tactics. To bolster their contention, they point to
research done at the University of Mississippi, the home of the
federal government’s pot farm. The Potency Monitoring Project at Ole
Miss has found that pot is stronger now than in the early seventies,
though its average strength has been consistent since the early
eighties. On the other hand, independent analyses have detected higher
THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, pot’s psychoactive cannabinoid) content in
such seventies strains as Maui Wowie and Thai Stick than in most
currently avail- able strains, bolstering the contention of pot
advocates that today’s weed presents no unique danger.

Not content to attack marijuana alone, zero-tolerance zealots also
target its “delivery systems.” Most states have some form of anti
paraphernalia laws on the books, and while there are no available
statistics on how many candy-store owners get raided for carrying
Bambu rolling papers, the paraphernalia laws come in handy when
prosecutors want to “pile on” years to a drug offender’s prison
sentence. Furthermore, the paraphernalia laws are often used by the
local police as a pretext for an assault in what is at its core a
cultural war. Says NORML’s deputy director Allen St. Pierre, “It’s
literally town by town by town. If a shop owner has things such as
NORML information, or High Times or other countercultural magazines at
hand, or if there are T-shirts or other cultural affectations in the
store that would lead a reasonable person to believe that marijuana
was part of the culture within, then that’s the standard that one
would probably use to arrest somebody for selling paraphernalia.
That’s why most prudent paraphernalia stores strew their displays with
tobacco and insist on 18′ and over, as they should, and have zero
discussions beyond the obvious.”

From sea to shining sea, and contrary to popular perception, the war
against marijuana is increasing in intensity. According to available
data, pot busts have accelerated in the 1990s, most notably during the
phony-liberal Clinton administration. F.B.I. statistics for 1998
record 682,885 marijuana arrests, 88 percent for mere possession,
belying law enforcement’s conventional spin that the enforcers are
mainly concerned with large-scale growth and distribution rackets.
These figures are slightly lower than those of the year before, when
NORML noted that the Clinton administration had already out busted the
kinder, gentler George Bush by 30 percent on an average yearly basis.
In fact, pot busts have more than doubled since 1990, while those for
heroin and cocaine fell by more than 50 percent. In 1998, 44 percent
of all drug arrests were for marijuana; one out of every 25 criminal
arrests was for marijuana possession; and one in seven persons in
prison for drugs had been convicted on marijuana charges.
(Interestingly, the number of pot arrests has risen steadily while the
estimated number of smokers has fallen off from a reported high in
1979.) Approximately 43,000 Americans are presently behind state or
federal bars for marijuana, at an estimated social cost of $7.5
billion annually. More Americans get popped annually for marijuana
(and many receive harsher sentences) than for murder, rape, robbery,
and aggravated assault combined. According to current federal
mandatory minimum-sentencing law, you can be imprisoned for 15 to 21
months and fined $1 million for delivery or sale of a single joint,
and slapped with five to 40 years and a $2 million fine for possessing
more than 100 plants. Cultivating or selling more than 1,000 plants or
1,000 kilograms can earn you a life sentence in a federal
penitentiary.

[snip]

Matters are far from laid-back for pot enthusiasts in California. Last
October, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, an interagency
eradication effort, announced that it had already seized 241,164
plants for the year 1999. The confiscated plants had an estimated
value of $965 million, up 80 percent over the ’98 tallies, and 40
percent higher than the previous record year of 1985. And while
law-enforcement figures warned that the passage in 1996 of Proposition
215, the initiative that legalized medical marijuana in California,
would tie their hands and create a de facto legalization of
recreational marijuana use in the state, there were nearly 2,000 state
pot prisoners in California is July of ’99, an increase of ten percent
since the proposition passed with the support of 56 percent of voters.
In fact, while possession of less than an ounce is punishable by a
relatively light $100 fine, the state’s cops and prosecutors see red
when it comes to anything greater than an ounce, especially where
cultivation and/or distribution are concerned, with the possible
exemption (thanks to Proposition 215, as we shall see) of some medical
marijuana operations.

New York State tops the United States for the greatest number of pot
busts per 100,000 smokers (at 6,294 as of 1997), but regionally most
take place in Mid-western states (for sales/manufacture) and the
Midwest and South (for possession). Justice in some of these states is
often wildly disproportionate to the alleged crime, even when compared
with the national standard. Oklahoma, for example, has what are
overall probably the harshest pot penalties in the United States.
Possession of any amount (such as the residue of a joint) can bring up
to a year in jail and a $500 fine. A second offense (a second bust for
the residue of a joint) warrants two years to life and a $20,000 fine.
Possession of paraphernalia (say, a single rolling paper) is
punishable by a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Four years to life
imprisonment is mandated for sale or delivery of under 25 pounds, and
the minimum penalty increases with larger quantities. Punishments are
doubled for sale to a minor or within 1,000 feet of a school. And, as
in several other states, you can have your driver’s license suspended
as penalty even if you’re not driving while nabbed.

Will Foster is the most well-known victim of Oklahoma’s zero-tolerance
legislation. The 42-year-old Tulsa father of three was given a 93-year
sentence in 1997 for 60 plants (said the prosecutor; 10 plants and 50
seedlings and clones, Foster maintained). Foster has advanced
rheumatoid arthritis, precisely the kind of ailment for which pot has
been shown to be an effective medicine in numerous studies, including
six presented to the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C., in
1997. In the summer of 1998, Foster’s sentence was reduced to 20
years, but Governor Frank Keating has ignored repeated pleas and
declined to pardon him. In fact, Keating is pushing the Oklahoma
legislature to toughen its marijuana laws.

Latter-day frontier injustice is not limited to state law, however.
Current federal mandatory-minimum (or “man-min”) sentencing, codified
by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, prevents judges from using their
discretion and orders lopsided sentences disproportionate to the
alleged crimes. A man-min sentence can be reduced only if the
defendant cooperates with the prosecution and snitches others out in
the pursuit of questionable conspiracy convictions. It’s a quid pro
qua deal: You give us the names of fellow travelers in order to notch
our belts with more guilty verdicts, and you’ll do less time or none
at all. Often, far more culpable informants receive lighter sentences
than the people they inform on. Throw in forfeiture laws, according to
which, until recently, a drug offender — or even anyone suspected
prior to trial — forfeits his or her assets to be divvied up among
the law-enforcement agencies involved in the case, and the result is
incentive for cops and prosecutors to use the Constitution as toilet
paper.

Consequently, the number of conspiracy prosecutions against Americans
arrested for the sale or manufacture of weed has soared, wreaking
havoc on thousands of lives. Take, for example, the horror visited
upon the Tucker family of Georgia.

[snip]

In some cases, alleged marijuana transgressors face a far more deadly
penalty than prison. Donald Scott, a 61-year-old wealthy Malibu
rancher, was murdered in 1992 by a joint task force (comprised of
members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, L.A.P.D., Park
Service, D.E.A., Forest Service, California National Guard, and
California Bureau of Narcotics) conducting an early-morning raid on
the pretense that Scott was growing pot on his property. Responding to
his wife’s screams, a clueless Scott grabbed a gun and confronted the
intruders. Two bullets were pumped into him. No pot was found. Ventura
County District Attorney Michael D. Bradbury released a report
criticizing the task force for using false information to secure a
search warrant. Bradbury characterized the effort as an attempt to use
forfeiture laws to slice up Scott’s considerable assets between the
participating agencies. “Clearly one of the primary purposes was a
land grab by the Sheriff’s Department,” Bradbury wrote. While no
law-enforcement agency or officer was ever charged with a crime, Los
Angeles County and the feds tentatively agreed to pay $5 million to
Scott’s survivors earlier this year.

More recently, Mario Paz, a 65-year-old father of six and grandfather
of 14, was shot dead in his Compton, California, home last August by
officers from the nearby El Monte Police Department who were engaged
in an ongoing investigation. Again, it was an early-morning putsch on
an uncomprehending victim. It turns out a suspected pot dealer had
used Paz’s address as a mail drop. And once again no marijuana was
found, nor was any police officer charged with murder. In January, Q.
J. Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran filed a suit on behalf of Paz’s
survivors, accusing the cities of El Monte and Compton of wrongful
death and conspiracy to violate Paz’s civil rights.

[The article has been cut here and snipped above to keep this mailing
to a reasonable size. To read the rest of the article, visit
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n884/a06.html]

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SAMPLE LETTER

To the editor:

Thank you for your article Reefer Mindless. It’s heartening to see
more and more people come forward to try to stop the drug war
fascists. It’s clearer than ever that the marijuana user isn’t the bad
guy in this war, that role falls to our own government.

The article was probably written some time ago, so did not mention the
unfortunate death of author and medical marijuana activist Peter
McWilliams. Peter had been arrested on marijuana charges and was
forbidden to mention his illness, Aids and cancer, or the legality of
medical marijuana in his state at his trial. Left with no defense he
was forced to plead guilty. As a term of Peters bail he was required
to submit to urine tests for marijuana, the only drug that helped him
keep down his medication. His mother was told that she would lose her
house if he failed the test, so Peter obeyed his masters. On June 14th
Peter choked to death on his own vomit as a direct result of being
forbidden to use marijuana by Federal judge George King. We’ve lost
another good man to the will of petty dictators.

Jeff Flanagan

IMPORTANT: Always include your address and telephone
number

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at least somewhat so that the paper does not receive numerous copies of the
same letter and so that the original author receives credit for his/her work.
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Prepared by Stephen Young – http://home.att.net/~theyoungfamily Focus
Alert Specialist

Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000
Subject: Peter McWilliams Becomes Drug War Fatality

Peter McWilliams Becomes Drug War Fatality

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PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
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DrugSense FOCUS Alert #175 June, 22, 2000

Despite grave illness, legal troubles and financial problems, Peter
McWilliams always spread the word about the cruel folly of the drug
war. Peter was finally silenced last week thanks to the policies he
protested so eloquently. An AIDS and cancer patient who was denied
medical marijuana while waiting to be sentenced on drug charges, Peter
choked to death after vomiting. Considering that he used marijuana to
quell nausea from AIDS-fighting drugs, there is no question that
court-ordered restrictions of his medical marijuana use helped to kill
Peter.

There have been some observers who have noticed this, like William F.
Buckley (see below). Unfortunately, many obituaries written for Peter
simply said that he died after a long battle with AIDS and cancer.
Please write a letter to thank Buckley for exposing the real truth
behind Peter’s death and/or write a letter to any of the newspapers
that ran an obituary of Peter to let them know that Peter’s death and
many of his recent troubles were all the result of drug
prohibition.

WRITE A LETTER TODAY

It’s not what others do it’s what YOU do

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PLEASE SEND US A COPY OF YOUR LETTER OR TELL US WHAT YOU DID ( Letter,
Phone, fax etc.)

Please post a copy your letter or report your action to the sent
letter list ([email protected]) if you are subscribed, or by
E-mailing a copy directly to [email protected] Your letter will then
be forwarded to the list with so others can learn from your efforts
and be motivated to follow suit

This is VERY IMPORTANT as it is the only way we have of gauging our
impact and effectiveness.

**************************************************************************

CONTACT INFO

Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Contact: [email protected]

EXTRA CREDIT

The LA Times (and many other papers) ran obituaries that didn’t
mention the fact that Peter died from a symptom that medical marijuana
could have prevented. The LA Times obituary can be found here:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n832/a10.html

Please write to the Times and other papers to let editors and readers
know what really happened.

Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Contact: [email protected]

To find other obituaries and commentary on Peter’s death, go to MAP’s
DrugNews archive at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/ and click ‘”go” on
the Quick Link box that lists “Peter McWilliams” as a hot topic.

All of the following newspapers have printed versions of this story
with the same basic information. Please send a copy of you letter to
these papers, and your local newspaper as well.

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ARTICLE

US: Column: Peter McWilliams, R.I.P.
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n849/a10.html
Newshawk: There is no justice in the war on drugs! http://www.november.org
Pubdate: Wed, 21 Jun 2000
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Copyright: 2000 The Sacramento Bee
Contact: [email protected]
Address: P.O.Box 15779, Sacramento CA 95852
Feedback: http://www.sacbee.com/about_us/sacbeemail.html
Website: http://www.sacbee.com/
Forum: http://www.sacbee.com/voices/voices_forum.html
Author: William Buckley
Note: Write to William Buckley at Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St.,
Kansas City, Mo. 64111. His column appears in many newspapers. Bookmark:
MAP’s link to Peter McWilliams items is
http://www.mapinc.org/mcwilliams.htm

PETER MCWILLIAMS, R.I.P. Peter McWilliams is dead. Age? Fifty.
Profession? Author, poet, publisher.

Particular focus of interest? The federal judge in California (George
King) would decide in a few weeks how long a sentence to hand down,
and whether to send McWilliams to prison or let him serve his sentence
at home.

What was his offense? He collaborated in growing marijuana
plants.

What was his defense? Well, the judge wouldn’t allow him to plead his
defense to the jury. If given a chance, the defense would have argued
that under Proposition 215, passed into California constitutional law
in 1996, infirm Californians who got medical relief from marijuana
were permitted to use it. The judge also forbade any mention that
McWilliams suffered from AIDS and cancer, and got relief from the marijuana.

What was he doing when he died? Vomiting. The vomiting hit him while
in his bathtub, and he choked to death.

Was there nothing he might have done to still the impulse to vomit?
Yes, he could have taken marijuana; but the judge’s bail terms forbade
him to do so, and he submitted to weekly urine tests to confirm that
he was living up to the terms of his bail.

Did anybody take note of the risk he was undergoing? He took Marinol –
— a proffered, legal substitute, but reported after using it that it
worked for him only about one-third of the time. When it didn’t work,
he vomited.

Was there no public protest against the judge’s ruling? Yes. On June
9, the television program “20/20” devoted a segment to the McWilliams
plight. Commentator John Stossel summarized:

“McWilliams is out of prison on the condition that he not smoke
marijuana, but it was the marijuana that kept him from vomiting up his
medication. I can understand that the federal drug police don’t agree
with what some states have decided to do about medical marijuana, but
does that give them the right to just end-run those laws and lock people up?”

Shortly after the trial last year, Charles Levendosky, writing in the
Ventura County (Calif.) Star, summarized: “The cancer treatment
resulted in complete remission.” But only the marijuana gave him
sustained relief from the vomiting that proved mortal.

Is it being said, in plain language, that the judge’s obstinacy
resulted in killing McWilliams? Yes. The Libertarian Party press
release has made exactly that charge. “McWilliams was prohibited from
using medical marijuna — and being denied access to the drug’s
anti-nausea properties almost certainly caused his death.”

Reflecting on the judge’s refusal to let the jury know that there was
understandable reason for McWilliams to believe he was acting legally,
I ended a column in this space in November by writing, “So, the fate
of Peter McWilliams is in the hands of Judge King. Perhaps the cool
thing for him to do is delay a ruling for a few months, and just let
Peter McWilliams die.” Well, that happened last week, on June 14.

The struggle against a fanatical imposition of federal laws on
marijuana will continue, as also on the question whether federal laws
can stifle state initiatives. Those who believe the marijuana laws are
insanely misdirected have a martyr.

Peter was a wry, mythogenic guy, humorous, affectionate, articulate,
shrewd, sassy. He courted anarchy at the moral level. His most recent
book (his final book) was called “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do.”
We were old friends, and I owe my early conversion to word processing
to his guidebook on how to do it. Over the years we corresponded, and
he would amiably twit my conservative opinions. When I judged him to
have gone rampant on his own individualistic views in his book, I
wrote him to that effect. I cherish his reply — nice acerbic
deference, the supreme put-down.

“Please remember the Law of Relativity as applied to politics: In
order for you to be right, at least someone else must be wrong. Your
rightness is only shown in relation to the other’s wrongness.
Conversely, your rightness is necessary for people like me to look
truly wrong. Before Bach, people said of bad organ music, ‘That’s not
quite right.’ After Bach, people said flatly, ‘That’s wrong.’ This
allowed dedicated composers to grow, and cast the neophytes back to
writing how-to-be-happy music. So, thank me for my wrongness, as so
many reviews of my book will doubtless say, ‘People should read more
of a truly great political commentator: William F. Buckley Jr.'”

Imagine such a spirit ending its life at 50, just because they
wouldn’t let him have a toke. We have to console ourselves with the
comment of the two prosecutors. They said they were “saddened” by
Peter McWilliams’ death. Many of us are — by his death and the causes
of it.

******************************************************************************

SAMPLE LETTER

To the editor:

Supporters of marijuana prohibition sometimes say the war on weed is
worth all its drawbacks if it saves one child. But they never
acknowledge that marijuana prohibition is killing people, even though
no human being ever died from marijuana use. William F. Buckley was
completely correct to trace Peter McWilliam’s death to the federal war
on drugs and the bureaucrats who enforce it.

Before ever being convicted of anything, Peter’s property, including a
book in progress were seized. Then he was denied the right to use
effective medicine, despite state law that gave him that right. And
when he was tried he was not allowed to use a medical defense. When
Peter choked on his own vomit (a symptom he probably wouldn’t have
exhibited had he been allowed to use medical marijuana) it was last
blow in a vicious government assault against an enlightened individual
who embodied the injustice of the drug war. I hope Peter does rest in
peace, but I hope his death will help to agitate more citizens to
fight against the cruel policy that killed him.

Stephen Young

IMPORTANT: Always include your address and telephone
number

Please note: If you choose to use this letter as a model please modify it
at least somewhat so that the paper does not receive numerous copies of the
same letter and so that the original author receives credit for his/her work.
—————————————————————————-

ADDITIONAL INFO to help you in your letter writing
efforts

3 Tips for Letter Writers http://www.mapinc.org/3tips.htm

Letter Writers Style Guide http://www.mapinc.org/style.htm

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Prepared by Stephen Young – http://home.att.net/~theyoungfamily Focus
Alert Specialist

Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2000
Subject: Drug War Targets Minorities – Write A Letter Today

Drug War Targets Minorities

——-
PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
——-

DrugSense FOCUS Alert #174 Friday June 9, 2000

The inherent racism of the drug war is obvious, but it was confirmed
again this week as Human Rights Watch released a report showing
African Americans are punished for drug charges at rates that are
astronomical compared with other groups. According to the Washington
Post, “In Maryland, for example, blacks make up 27 percent of the
population and 90 percent of those sent to prison on drug charges =AD
for a rate that is 28 times greater than whites.”

Every major newspaper has picked up on this story, offering an
opportunity to point out that the drug war has always been based on
racism. Please write a letter to the Washington Post, other large
circulation newspapers and your own local newspaper to explain that
the disparities are completely predictable consequence of the war on
drugs.

WRITE A LETTER TODAY

It’s not what others do it’s what YOU do

***************************************************************************

PLEASE SEND US A COPY OF YOUR LETTER OR TELL US WHAT YOU DID ( Letter,
Phone, fax etc.)

Please post a copy your letter or report your action to the sent
letter list ([email protected]) if you are subscribed, or by
E-mailing a copy directly to [email protected] Your letter will then
be forwarded to the list with so others can learn from your efforts
and be motivated to follow suit

This is VERY IMPORTANT as it is the only way we have of gauging our
impact and effectiveness.

**************************************************************************

CONTACT INFO

Source: Washington Post
Contact: [email protected]

EXTRA CREDIT

All of the following newspapers have printed versions of this story
with the same basic information. Please send a copy of you letter to
these papers, and your local newspaper as well.

Title: US: STUDY: WAR ON DRUGS IS STACKED AGAINST BLACKS
Source: USA Today (US)
Contact: [email protected]

Title: Race Analysis Cites Disparity In Sentencing For Narcotics
Source: New York Times (NY)
Contact: [email protected]

Title: Blacks Unfairly Targeted In Fight On Drugs, Report Says
Source: Los Angeles Times
Contact: [email protected]

Title: RACE REPORT SINGLES OUT ILLINOIS FOR DRUG-CONVICTION DISPARITY
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Contact: [email protected]

Title: Drug War Targets Blacks, Report Says
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Contact: [email protected]

Title: State No 2 In Racial Gap In Drug Sentences
Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (WI)
Contact: [email protected]

Title: Drug Efforts Target Blacks, Study Finds
Source: The Baltimore Sun(MD)
Contact: [email protected]

Title: Nation’s War On Drugs Targets Blacks Unfairly, Study Finds
Source: Tampa Tribune (FL)
Contact: [email protected]

***************************************************************************

ARTICLE

US: More Whites Use Drugs, More Blacks Imprisoned
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n771.a03.html
Newshawk: Jo-D and Tom-E
Pubdate: Thu, 08 Jun 2000
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company
Contact: [email protected]
Address: 1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
Feedback: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Author: Michael A. Fletcher, Washington Post Staff Writer

REPORT: MORE WHITES USE DRUGS, MORE BLACKS IMPRISONED

The nation’s war on drugs unfairly targets African Americans, who are
far more likely to be imprisoned for drug offenses than whites even
though far more whites use illegal drugs than blacks, according to a
new report by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

The report, to be released today, said that African Americans
accounted for 62 percent of the drug offenders sent to state prisons
nationwide in 1996, the most recent year for which statistics are
available, although they represent just 12 percent of the U.S.
population. Overall, black men are sent to state prisons on drug
charges at 13 times the rate of white men, according to the study,
which analyzes a wide range of Justice Department information for 37
states to come up with its findings.

These disparities exist even though data gathered by the Department of
Health and Human Services show that in 1991, 1992 and 1993, about five
times as many whites had used cocaine than blacks, the report said.
The report added that drug transactions among blacks often are easier
for police to target because they more often occur in public than do
drug transactions among whites.

“These racial disparities are a national scandal,” said Ken Roth,
executive director of Human Rights Watch, an international human
rights organization. “Black and white drug offenders get radically
different treatment in the American justice system. This is not only
profoundly unfair to blacks, it also corrodes the American ideal of
equal justice for all.”

The disparities are particularly striking in individual states, where
black men are sent to prison on drug charges at rates as much as 57
times greater than that of white men. In Maryland, for example, blacks
make up 27 percent of the population and 90 percent of those sent to
prison on drug charges =AD; for a rate that is 28 times greater than
whites.

In Virginia, meanwhile, blacks are 82 percent of those sent to prison
on drug charges and just 20 percent of the population. Overall, they
are sent to prison on drug charges at a rate 21 times greater than
whites.

“More blacks were sent to state prison nationwide on drug charges than
for crimes of violence,” Jamie Fellner, associate counsel for Human
Rights Watch, wrote in the report. “Only 27 percent of black
admissions to prison were for crimes of violence =AD; compared to 38
percent for drug offenses.”

The Human Rights Watch report adds to a growing array of studies
documenting racial disparities in the nation’s criminal justice
system. A report last month by the Leadership Conference on Civil
Rights found that African Americans and Hispanics are treated more
harshly than similarly situated whites at every level of the criminal
justice system. And that report came on the heels of a study by the
National Council on Crime and Delinquency showing that black and
Hispanic youth are more likely than whites to be arrested, prosecuted,
held in jail without bail and sentenced to long prison terms.

Remedies suggested in the Human Rights Watch report include the repeal
of mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenders, increasing drug
treatment and eliminating racial profiling as a police tactic.

Largely because of the huge disparity in imprisonment for drug
offenses, blacks are sent to prison at 8.2 times the rate of whites.
Overall, one in 20 black men over the age of 18 is in a state or
federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men.

“Prison is a legitimate criminal sanction,” the report said. “But it
should be used sensibly, justly, parsimoniously, and with due
consideration . . . and respect for human dignity required by
international human rights law. The incarceration of hundreds of
thousands of low-level, non-violent drug offenders betrays
indifference to such considerations.”

******************************************************************************

SAMPLE LETTER

To the editor:

For those who still promote drug prohibition as a cure for social
ills, a recent report by Human Rights Watch should be a ear-splitting
wake up call. The report, which documents the huge disparity in the
way different races are punished for drug crimes, shows that in some
states black men are sent to prison on drug charges at rates as much
as 57 times greater than that of white men, even though many more
whites than black use illegal drugs.

The report raises serious questions about the availability equal
justice in the U.S., but those of us who follow the drug war closely
aren’t surprised at all. The drug war was initially implemented to
maintain racial disparity. Drugs associated with particular ethnic
groups were outlawed in a conscious effort to control those groups.
Hamilton Wright, who helped to promote the first federal drug laws in
the early part of the twentieth century, used this reasoning to
support cocaine prohibition: “Cocaine is often the direct incentive to
the crime of rape by the Negroes…” Others like Wright used similar
language when they talked about opium use by Chinese or marijuana use
by Mexicans.

But, as the Human Rights Watch report has been issued in more
politically correct times, I suspect many supporters of drug
prohibition will say they abhor racial inequities in drug sentencing,
even though they also believe the drug war should be “mended, not
ended.” The sincerity of such statements will be at best questionable.
A look at the history of the drug war shows it is now smoothly
functioning just as its designers intended.

Stephen Young

IMPORTANT: Always include your address and telephone
number

Please note: If you choose to use this letter as a model please modify it
at least somewhat so that the paper does not receive numerous copies of the
same letter and so that the original author receives credit for his/her work.
—————————————————————————-

ADDITIONAL INFO to help you in your letter writing
efforts

3 Tips for Letter Writers http://www.mapinc.org/3tips.htm

Letter Writers Style Guide http://www.mapinc.org/style.htm

****************************************************************************

TO SUBSCRIBE, DONATE, VOLUNTEER TO HELP, OR UPDATE YOUR EMAIL SEE

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Prepared by Stephen Young – http://home.att.net/~theyoungfamily Focus
Alert Specialist

Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000
Subject: Time Magazine Tempers Ecstasy Hysteria

DrugSense FOCUS Alert #173 June 3, 2000

Time Magazine Tempers Ecstasy Hysteria

——-
PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
——-

DrugSense FOCUS Alert #173 June 3, 2000

Time Magazine isn’t always the place to look for the balanced
reporting of drug news, but this week seems to be a little different.
The magazine published a good piece on Ecstasy (below), giving equal
time to both adherents and opponents of the club drug.

The reporter acknowledges that Ecstasy is not as dangerous as the drug
warriors would like us to believe, and he also points out that the
crusaders’ willingness to demonize the drug may hurt their cause: “But
one reason ecstasy is so fascinating, and thus dangerous to antidrug
crusaders, is that it appears to be a safer drug than heroin and
cocaine, at least in the short run, and appears to have more
potentially therapeutic benefits.”

Please write a letter to Time to thank editors for presenting an
unusually fair article on an illegal drug, and to encourage them to
challenge the overkill of anti-drug crusaders again in the future.

Thanks for your effort and support.

WRITE A LETTER TODAY

It’s not what others do it’s what YOU do

***************************************************************************

PLEASE SEND US A COPY OF YOUR LETTER OR TELL US WHAT YOU DID ( Letter,
Phone, fax etc.)

Please post a copy your letter or report your action to the sent
letter list ([email protected]) if you are subscribed, or by
E-mailing a copy directly to [email protected] Your letter will then
be forwarded to the list with so others can learn from your efforts
and be motivated to follow suit

This is VERY IMPORTANT as it is the only way we have of gauging our
impact and effectiveness.

**************************************************************************

CONTACT INFO

Source: Time Magazine (US)
Contact: [email protected]

***************************************************************************
ARTICLE

URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n713/a04.html
Pubdate: Mon, 05 Jun 2000
Source: Time Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2000 Time Inc.
Page: 62
Contact: [email protected]
Address: Time Magazine Letters, Time & Life Bldg., Rockefeller Center, NY,
NY 10020
Fax: (212) 522-8949
Website: http://www.time.com/
Author: John Cloud
Note: With Reporting By Carole Buia/Miami, Greg Fulton/Atlanta, Alice
Park/New York, Elaine Shannon And Dick Thompson/Washington Cited:
http://ecstasy.org http://clubdrugs.org
Cited: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies:

MAPS.org – Support Psychedelic Science

Cited: DanceSafe: http://www.dancesafe.org

Bookmark: For more on ecstasy click this link: http://www.mapinc.org/mdma.htm

THE LURE OF ECSTASY

The elixir best known for powering raves is an 80-year-old illegal
drug. But it’s showing up outside clubs too, and advocates claim it
even has therapeutic benefits. Just how dangerous is it?

Cobb County, GA., May 11, 2000. It’s a Thursday morning, and
18-year-old “Karen” and five friends decide to go for it. They skip
first period and sneak into the woods near their upscale high school.
One of them takes out six rolls–six ecstasy pills–and they each
swallow one. Then back to school, flying on a drug they once used
only on weekends. Now they smile stupid gelatinous smiles at one
another, even as high school passes them by. That night they will all
go out and drop more ecstasy, rolling into the early hours of another
school day. It’s rare that anyone would take ecstasy so often–it’s
not physically addictive–but teenagers everywhere have begun
experimenting with it. “The cliques are pretty big in my school,”
Karen says, “and every clique does it.”

Grand Rapids, Mich., May 1997. Sue and Shane Stevens have sent the
three kids away for the weekend. They have locked the doors and
hidden the car so no one will bug them. Tonight they hope to talk
about Shane’s cancer, a topic they have mostly avoided for years. It
has eaten away at their marriage just as it corrodes his kidney. A
friend has recommended that they take ecstasy, except he calls it MDMA
and says therapists used it 20 years ago to get people to discuss
difficult topics. And, in fact, after tonight, Sue and Shane will
open up, and Sue will come to believe MDMA is prolonging her
marriage–and perhaps Shane’s life.

So we know that ecstasy is versatile. Actually, that’s one of the
first things we knew about it. Alexander Shulgin, 74, the biochemist
who in 1978 published the first scientific article about the drug’s
effect on humans, noticed this panacea quality back then. The drug
“could be all things to all people,” he recalled later, a cure for one
student’s speech impediment and for one’s bad LSD trip, and a way for
Shulgin to have fun at cocktail parties without martinis.

The ready availability of ecstasy, from Cobb County to Grand Rapids,
is a newer phenomenon. Ecstasy–or “e”–enjoyed a brief spurt of
mainstream use in the ’80s, before the government outlawed it in 1985.
Until recently, it remained common only on the margins of society–in
clubland, in gay America, in lower Manhattan. But in the past year or
so, ecstasy has returned to the heartland. Established drug dealers
and mobsters have taken over the trade, and they are meeting the
astonishing demand in places like Flagstaff, Ariz., where “Katrina,” a
student at Northern Arizona University who first took it last summer,
can now buy it easily; or San Marcos, Texas, a town of 39,000 where
authorities found 500 pills last month; or Richmond, Va., where a
police investigation led to the arrest this year of a man thought to
have sold tens of thousands of hits of e. On May 12, authorities
seized half a million pills at San Francisco’s airport–the biggest e
bust ever. Each pill costs pennies to make but sells for between $20
and $40, so someone missed a big payday.

Ecstasy remains a niche drug. The number of people who use it once a
month remains so small–less than 1% of the population–that ecstasy
use doesn’t register in the government’s drug survey. (By comparison,
5% of Americans older than 12 say they use marijuana once a month, and
1.8% use cocaine.) But ecstasy use is growing. Eight percent of U.S.
high school seniors say they have tried it at least once, up from 5.8%
in 1997; teen use of most other drugs declined in the late ’90s.
Nationwide, customs officers have already seized more ecstasy this
fiscal year, more than 5.4 million hits, than in all of last year. In
1998 they seized just 750,000 hits.

The drug’s appeal has never been limited to ravers. Today it can be
found for sale on Bourbon Street in New Orleans along with the 24-hour
booze; a group of lawyers in Little Rock, Ark., takes it occasionally,
as does a cheer leading captain at a Miami high school. The drug is
also showing up in hip-hop circles. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony raps a paean
to it on its latest album: “Oh, man, I don’t even f___ with the weed
no more.”

Indeed, much of the ecstasy taking–and the law enforcement under way
to end it–has been accompanied by breathlessness. “It appears that
the ecstasy problem will eclipse the crack-cocaine problem we
experienced in the late 1980s,” a cop told the Richmond
Times-Dispatch. In April, 60 Minutes II prominently featured an
Orlando, Fla., detective dolorously noting that “ecstasy is no
different from crack, heroin.” On the other side of the spectrum, at
http://ecstasy.org , you can find equally bloated praise of the drug.
“We sing, we laugh, we share/ and most of all, we care,” gushes an
awful poem on the site, which also includes testimonials from folks
who say ecstasy can treat schizophrenia and help you make “contact
with dead relatives.”

Ecstasy is popular because it appears to have few negative
consequences. But “these are not just benign, fun drugs,” says Alan
Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “They
carry serious short-term and long-term dangers.” Those like Leshner
who fight the war on drugs overstate these dangers occasionally–and
users usually understate them. But one reason ecstasy is so
fascinating, and thus dangerous to antidrug crusaders, is that it
appears to be a safer drug than heroin and cocaine, at least in the
short run, and appears to have more potentially therapeutic benefits.

Even so, the Federal Government has launched a major p.r. effort to
fight ecstasy based on the Internet at http://clubdrugs.org . Last
week two Senators, Bob Graham of Florida and Charles Grassley of Iowa,
introduced an ecstasy anti proliferation bill, which would stiffen
penalties for trafficking in the drug. Under the new law, someone
caught selling about 100 hits of ecstasy could be charged as a drug
trafficker; current law sets the threshold at about 300,000 pills. “I
think this is the time to take a forceful set of initiatives to try to
reverse the tide,” says Graham.

What’s the appeal of ecstasy? As a user put it, it’s “a six-hour
orgasm.” About half an hour after you swallow a hit of e, you begin to
feel peaceful, empathetic and energetic–not edgy, just clear. Pot
relaxes but sometimes confuses; LSD stupefies; cocaine wires. Ecstasy
has none of those immediate down sides. “Jack,” 29, an Indiana native
who has taken ecstasy about 40 times, said the only time he felt as
good as he does on e was when he found out he had won a Rhodes
scholarship. He enjoys feeling logorrheic: ecstasy users often talk
endlessly, maybe about a silly song that’s playing or maybe about a
terrible burden on them. E allows the mind to wander, but not into
hallucinations. Users retain control. Jack can allow his social
defenses to crumble on ecstasy, and he finds he can get close to
people from different backgrounds. “People I would never have talked
to, because I’m mostly in the Manhattan business world, I talk to on
ecstasy. I’ve made some friends I never would have had.”

All this marveling should raise suspicions, however. It’s probably
not a good idea to try to duplicate the best moment of one’s life 40
times, if only because it will cheapen the truly good times. And even
as they help open the mind to new experiences, drugs also can distort
the reality to which users ineluctably return. Is ecstasy snake oil?
And how harmful is it?

This is what we know:

An ecstasy pill most probably won’t kill you or cure you. It is also
unlike pretty much every other illicit drug. Ecstasy pills are (or at
least they are supposed to be) made of a compound called
methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA. It’s an old drug: Germany
issued the patent for it in 1914 to the German company E. Merck.
Contrary to ecstasy lore, and there’s tons of it, Merck wasn’t trying
to develop a diet drug when it synthesized MDMA. Instead, its
chemists simply thought it could be a promising intermediary substance
that might be used to help develop more advanced therapeutic drugs.
There’s also no evidence that any living creature took it at the
time–not Merck employees and certainly not Nazi soldiers, another
common myth. (They wouldn’t have made very aggressive killers.)

Yet MDMA all but disappeared until 1953. That’s when the U.S. Army
funded a secret University of Michigan animal study of eight drugs,
including MDMA. The cold war was on, and for years its combatants had
been researching scores of substances as potential weapons. The
Michigan study found that none of the compounds under review was
particularly toxic–which means there will be no war machines armed
with ecstasy-filled bombs. It also means that although MDMA is more
toxic than, say, the cactus-based psychedelic mescaline, it would take
a big dose of e, something like 14 of today’s purest pills ingested at
once, to kill you.

It doesn’t mean ecstasy is harmless. Broadly speaking, there are two
dangers: first, a pill you assume to be MDMA could actually contain
something else. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most serious
short-term medical problems that arise from “ecstasy” are actually
caused by pills adulterated with other, more harmful substances (more
on this later). Second, and more controversially, MDMA itself might do
harm.

There’s a long-standing debate about MDMA’s dangers, which will take
much more research to resolve. The theory is that MDMA’s perils
spring from the same neurochemical reaction that causes its pleasures.
After MDMA enters the bloodstream, it aims with laser-like precision
at the brain cells that release serotonin, a chemical that is the
body’s primary regulator of mood. MDMA causes these cells to disgorge
their contents and flood the brain with serotonin.

But forcibly catapulting serotonin levels could be risky. Of course,
millions of Americans manipulate serotonin when they take Prozac. But
ecstasy actually shoves serotonin from its storage sites, according to
Dr. John Morgan, a professor of pharmacology at the City University of
New York (cuny). Prozac just prevents the serotonin that’s already
been naturally secreted from being taken back up into brain cells.

Normally, serotonin levels are exquisitely maintained, which is
crucial because the chemical helps manage not only mood but also body
temperature. In fact, overheating is MDMA’s worst short-term danger.
Flushing the system with serotonin, particularly when users take
several pills over the course of one night, can short-circuit the
body’s ability to control its temperature. Dancing in close quarters
doesn’t help, and because some novice users don’t know to drink water,
e users’ temperatures can climb as high as 110[degrees]. At such
extremes, the blood starts to coagulate. In the past two decades,
dozens of users around the world have died this way.

There are long-term dangers too. By forcing serotonin out, MDMA
resculpts the brain cells that release the chemical. The changes to
these cells could be permanent. Johns Hopkins neurotoxicologist
George Ricaurte has shown that serotonin levels are significantly
lower in animals that have been given about the same amount of MDMA as
you would find in just one ecstasy pill.

In November, Ricaurte recorded for the first time the effects of
ecstasy on the human brain. He gave memory tests to people who said
they had last used ecstasy two weeks before, and he compared their
results with those of a control group of people who said they had
never taken e. The ecstasy users fared worse on the tests. Computer
images that give detailed snapshots of brain activity also showed that
e users have fewer serotonin receptors in their brains than nonusers,
even two weeks after their last exposure. On the strength of these
studies as well as a large number of animal studies, Ricaurte has
hypothesized that the damage is irreversible.

Ricaurte’s work has received much attention, owing largely to the
government’s well-intentioned efforts to warn kids away from ecstasy.
But his work isn’t conclusive. The major problem is that his research
subjects had used all kinds of drugs, not just ecstasy. (And there
was no way to tell that the ecstasy they had taken was pure MDMA.) And
critics say even if MDMA does cause the changes to the brain that
Ricaurte has documented, those changes may carry no functional
consequences. “None of the subjects that Ricaurte studied had any
evidence of brain or psychological dysfunction,” says cuny’s Morgan.
“His findings should not be dismissed, but they may simply mean that
we have a whole lot of plasticity–that we can do without serotonin
and be O.K. We have a lot of unanswered questions.”

Ricaurte told TIME that “the vast majority of people who have
experimented with MDMA appear normal, and there’s no obvious
indication that something is amiss.” Ricaurte says we may discover in
10 or 20 years that those appearances are horribly wrong, but others
are more sanguine about MDMA’s risks, given its benefits. For more
than 15 years, Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies, has been the world’s most
enthusiastic proponent of therapeutic MDMA use. He believes that the
compound has a special ability to help people make sense of themselves
and the world, that taking MDMA can lead people to inner truths.
Independently wealthy, he uses his organization to promote his views
and to “study ways to take drugs to open the unconscious.”

Doblin first tried MDMA in 1982, when it was still legal and when the
phrase “open the unconscious” didn’t sound quite so gooey. At that
time, MDMA had a small following among avant-garde psychotherapists,
who gave it to blindfolded patients in quiet offices and then asked
them to discuss traumas. Many of the therapists had heard about MDMA
from the published work of former Dow chemist Shulgin. According to
Shulgin (who is often wrongly credited with discovering MDMA), another
therapist to whom he gave the drug in turn named it Adam and
introduced it to more than 4,000 people.

Among these patients were a few entrepreneurs, folks who thought MDMA
felt too good to be confined to a doctor’s office. One who was based
in Texas (and who has kept his identity a secret) hired a chemist,
opened an MDMA lab and promptly renamed the drug ecstasy, a more
marketable term than Adam or “empathy” (his first choice, since it
better describes the effects). He began selling it to fashionable
bars and clubs in Dallas, where bartenders sold it along with
cocktails; patrons charged the $20 pills, plus $1.33 tax, on their
American Express cards.

Manufacturers at the time flaunted the legality of the drug, promoting
it as lacking the hallucinatory effects of LSD and the addictive
properties of coke and heroin. The U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration was caught by surprise by the new drug not long after
it had been embarrassed by the spread of crack. The administration
quickly used new discretionary powers to outlaw MDMA, pointing to the
private labs and club use as evidence of abuse. dea officials also
cited rudimentary studies showing that ecstasy users had vomited and
experienced blood-pressure fluctuations.

Most therapeutic use quickly stopped. But Doblin’s group has funded
important MDMA studies, including Ricaurte’s first work on the drug.
Sue Stevens, the woman who took it in 1997 with her husband Shane–he
has since died of kidney cancer–learned about the drug from a mutual
friend of hers and Doblin’s. She believes e helped Shane find the
right attitude to fight his illness, and she helps Doblin advocate for
limited legal use. Soon his association will help fund the first
approved study of MDMA in psychotherapy, involving 30 victims of rape
in Spain diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. In this
country, the FDA has approved only one study. In 1995 Dr. Charles
Grob, a ucla psychiatrist, used it as a pain reliever for end-stage
cancer patients. In the first phase of the study, he concluded the
drug is safe if used in controlled situations under careful
monitoring. The body is much less likely to overheat in such a
setting. Grob believes MDMA’s changes to brain cells are accelerated
and perhaps triggered entirely by overheating.

In 1998, emergency rooms participating in the Drug Abuse Warning
Network reported receiving 1,135 mentions of ecstasy during
admissions, compared with just 626 in 1997. If ecstasy is so benign,
what’s happening to these people? The two most common short-term side
effects of MDMA–both of which remain rare in the aggregate–are
overheating and something even harder to quantify, psychological trauma.

A few users have mentally broken down on ecstasy, unprepared for its
powerful psychological effects. A schoolteacher in the Bay Area who
had taken ecstasy in the past and loved it says she took it again a
year ago and began to recall, in horrible detail, an episode of sexual
abuse. She became severely depressed for three months and had to seek
psychiatric treatment. She will never take ecstasy again.

Ecstasy’s aftermath can also include a depressive hangover, a down day
that users sometimes call Terrible Tuesdays. “You know the black mood
is chemical, related to the serotonin,” says “Adrienne,” 26, a
fashion-company executive who has used ecstasy almost weekly for the
past five years. “But the world still seems bleak.” Some users,
especially kids trying to avoid the pressures of growing up, begin to
use ecstasy too often–every day in rare cases. In one extreme case,
“Cara,” an 18-year-old Miami woman who attends Narcotics Anonymous,
says she lost 50 lbs. after constantly taking ecstasy. She began to
steal and deal e to pay for rolls.

Another downside: because users feel empathetic, ecstasy can lower
sexual inhibitions. Men generally cannot get erections when high on
e, but they are often ferociously randy when its effects begin to
fade. Dr. Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist at Columbia University,
has found that men in New York City who use ecstasy are 2.8 times more
likely to have unprotected sex.

Still, the majority of people who end up in the e.r. after taking
ecstasy are almost certainly not taking MDMA but something
masquerading under its name. No one knows for sure what they’re
taking, since emergency rooms don’t always test blood to confirm the
drug identified by users. But one group that does test e for purity
is DanceSafe, a prorave organization based in Berkeley, Calif., and
largely funded by a software millionaire, Bob Wallace (Microsoft’s
employee No. 9). DanceSafe sets up tables at raves, where users can
get information about drugs and also have ecstasy pills tested. (The
organization works with police so that ravers who produce pills for
testing won’t be arrested.) A DanceSafe worker shaves off a sliver of
the tablet and drops a solution onto it; if it doesn’t turn black
quickly, it’s not MDMA.

The organization has found that as much as 20% of the so-called
ecstasy sold at raves contains something other than MDMA. DanceSafe
also tests pills for anonymous users who send in samples from around
the nation; it has found that 40% of those pills are fake. Last fall,
DanceSafe workers attended a “massive”–more than 5,000 people–rave
in Oakland, Calif. Nine people were taken from the rave in
ambulances, but DanceSafe confirmed that eight of the nine had taken
pills that weren’t MDMA.

The most common adulterants in such pills are aspirin, caffeine and
other over-the-counters. (Contrary to lore, fake e virtually never
contains heroin, which is not cost-effective in oral form.) But the
most insidious adulterant–what all eight of the Oakland ravers
took–is DXM (dextromethorphan), a cheap cough suppressant that causes
hallucinations in the 130-mg dose usually found in fake e (13 times
the amount in a dose of Robitussin). Because DXM inhibits sweating,
it easily causes heatstroke. Another dangerous adulterant is PMA
(paramethoxyamphetamine), an illegal drug that in May killed two
Chicago-area teenagers who took it thinking they were dropping e. PMA
is a vastly more potent hallucinogenic and hyperthermic drug than MDMA.

Most users don’t have access to DanceSafe, which operates in only
eight cities. But as demand has grown, the incentive to manufacture
fake e has also escalated, especially for one-time raves full of teens
who won’t see the dealer again. Established dealers, by contrast,
operate under the opposite incentive. A Miami dealer who goes by the
name “Top Dog” told TIME he obtains MDMA test kits from a connection
on the police force. “If [the pills] are no good,” he says, customers
“won’t want to buy from you anymore.” It’s business sense: Top Dog can
earn $300,000 a year on e sales.

As writer Joshua Wolf Shenk has pointed out, we tend to have opposing
views about drugs: they can kill or cure; the addiction will enslave
you, or the new perceptions will free you. Aldous Huxley typified
this duality with his two most famous books, Brave New World–about a
people in thrall to a drug called soma–and The Doors of
Perception–an autobiographical work in which Huxley begins to see the
world in a brilliant new light after taking mescaline.

Ecstasy can occasionally enslave and occasionally offer transcendence.
Usually, it does neither. For Adrienne, the Midwestern woman who has
been a frequent user for the past five years, ecstasy is a key part of
life. “E makes shirtless, disgusting men, a club with broken
bathrooms, a deejay that plays crap and vomiting into a trash can the
best night of your life,” she says with a laugh. “It has done two
things in my life,” she reflects. “I had always been aloof or insecure
or snobby, however you want to put it. And I took it and realized,
you know what, we’re all here; we’re all dancing; we’re not so
different. I allowed myself to get closer to people. Everything was
more positive. But my life also became, quickly, all about the next
time I would do it…You feel at ease with yourself and right with the
world, and that’s a feeling you want to duplicate–every single week.”

******************************************************************************

SAMPLE LETTER

To the editor of Time:

Thank you for presenting an even-handed look at Ecstasy and the
controversy surrounding it. Too many reports on illegal drugs take the
drug warriors’ words as Gospel truth, even though they are naturally
biased with motivations other than the distribution of accurate
information.

The crusading politicians who are calling for a harsher crackdown on
Ecstasy are somewhat akin to medieval doctors. When those primitive
physicians noticed their patients becoming weaker and more pale, they
doubled the number of leeches they were using as treatment. In a
similar way, drug warriors refuse to realize that getting tougher
cannot cure the symptoms caused by getting tough in the first place.
Problems linked to Ecstasy, like deadly adulterants and more dangerous
substitute drugs passed off as the real thing, are the result of
prohibition. More stringent prohibition will not solve the problems.
Instead, harsher laws will mean higher profit margins and a higher
incentive for dealers to sell anything that uninformed users will
believe is Ecstasy. To paraphrase a famous observation about
misconceptions: It’s the black market economy, stupid.

Stephen Young

IMPORTANT: Always include your address and telephone
number

Please note: If you choose to use this letter as a model please modify it
at least somewhat so that the paper does not receive numerous copies of the
same letter and so that the original author receives credit for his/her work.
—————————————————————————-

ADDITIONAL INFO to help you in your letter writing
efforts

3 Tips for Letter Writers http://www.mapinc.org/3tips.htm

Letter Writers Style Guide http://www.mapinc.org/style.htm

****************************************************************************

TO SUBSCRIBE, DONATE, VOLUNTEER TO HELP, OR UPDATE YOUR EMAIL SEE

http://www.drugsense.org/hurry.htm

TO UNSUBSCRIBE SEE http://www.drugsense.org/unsub.htm

***************************************************************************

Prepared by Stephen Young – http://home.att.net/~theyoungfamily Focus
Alert Specialist

Date: Tue, 23 May 2000
Subject: Florida Prohibitionists Artificially Inflate Drug Death Figures

DrugSense FOCUS Alert #172 May 23, 2000

Florida Prohibitionists Artificially Inflate Drug Death Figures

——-
PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
——-

DrugSense FOCUS Alert #172 May 23, 2000

In an attempt to maintain some credibility, a few anti-drug
strategists have tried to establish measurable goals. For instance,
the governor Florida recently announced that his office would cut
illegal drug use in the state by 50 percent in five years.

However, even the most committed drug warriors know by now that
filling prisons, spreading absurd anti-drug propaganda and shredding
the Constitution aren’t effective. In fact those tactics have helped
to boost reports of illegal drug use throughout the 1990s. So what’s a
prohibitionist to do? In Florida, the state drug czar’s office has
been inflating the number of deaths attributed to illegal drug use,
presumably so the office can justify its outrageous budget now and
show a dramatic decline in such deaths in a few years. As revealed in
a report from the Orlando Sentinel (below), several deaths that had
nothing to do with “designer drugs” have been attributed to “designer
drug” use.

The Sentinel reports that Florida drug czar Jim McDonough, displaying
the arrogance of a real czar, reacted to proof of mistakes in drug
death records by asking “why a reporter would question shortcomings in
the research instead of helping his staff fight drug abuse.” Please
write a letter to the Orlando Sentinel to say promoting bad data and
escalating the drug war will only encourage drug abuse, not fight it.

Thanks for your effort and support.

WRITE A LETTER TODAY

It’s not what others do it’s what YOU do

***************************************************************************

PLEASE SEND US A COPY OF YOUR LETTER OR TELL US WHAT YOU DID ( Letter,
Phone, fax etc.)

Please post a copy your letter or report your action to the sent
letter list ([email protected]) if you are subscribed, or by
E-mailing a copy directly to [email protected] Your letter will then
be forwarded to the list with so others can learn from your efforts
and be motivated to follow suit

This is VERY IMPORTANT as it is the only way we have of gauging our
impact and effectiveness.

**************************************************************************

CONTACT INFO

Source: Orlando Sentinel (FL)
Contact: [email protected]

***************************************************************************

ARTICLE

URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n675/a02.html
Newshawk: Sledhead
Pubdate: Sun, 21 May 2000
Source: Orlando Sentinel (FL)
Copyright: 2000 Orlando Sentinel
Contact: [email protected]
Address: 633 N.Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801
Website: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/
Forum: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/interact/messageboards/
Author: Henry Pierson Curtis
Bookmark: additional articles on Ecstasy may be found at
http://www.mapinc.org/mdma.htm

BAD RESEARCH CLOUDS STATE DEATH REPORTS

Angry, grieving. ‘My son does not belong on that list’ of
designer-drug-related deaths, says Joel Waters. Mitchell Waters, 15,
died of a heart ailment but was taking a prescription that contained a
drug on the list.

Talking about drug deaths. Jim McDonough, the state’s chief drug
fighter, tells a summit in February in Tallahassee attended by Sen.
Toni Jennings (left) and Rep. John Thrasher about club-drug deaths.
His numbers have since been questioned.

Pearl Mastros, 80, died in a nursing home.

Mitchell Waters, 15, died playing basketball.

Tavani Smith, 4, died in a hospital.

Each of these Central Floridians died of known causes. Yet they and
many others like them were portrayed by the state as victims of
designer-drug abuse.

An analysis by The Orlando Sentinel found glaring mistakes in research
by the Office of Drug Control in its campaign to spotlight the dangers
of so-called “rave” drugs.

Its official tally of rave-drug deaths reached 254. But blaming that
many deaths on the club scene was grossly misleading. The state’s
research included dozens of errors.

Lumped together with the deaths of hard-partying teens, the state
counted:

Terminal cancer patients who committed suicide.

Senior citizens who took painkillers under doctors’ supervision in
hospitals and nursing homes.

A 58-year-old St. Petersburg man who died after a
heart-bypass.

Middle-aged abusers of common street drugs.

A Miami crib death.

In Central Florida alone, a computer-assisted Sentinel review found 25
of the 60 local deaths counted by the state had no ties to club drugs.
Another 10 deaths already had been counted as heroin-related.

In total, more than half the deaths were from some other cause, and in
some cases, it was clear their inclusion was absurd.

How the state came to identify pre-schoolers and grandmothers as
victims of a drug culture known for pierced tongues and all-night
dancing does not have a simple answer.

Since 1994, Orlando has had a growing problem with club drugs — GHB,
Rohypnol, MDMA and others. At “house parties” and in more than a
dozen clubs around town, teens and young adults gather to listen to
music and dance. And get high.

Based on the Sentinel’s analysis, the death count across Central
Florida is 25 — a tragic statistic, but less than half what the state
claims. The drug office has begun removing cases from the list since
the Sentinel raised questions.

Despite increasing efforts to fight it, the abuse thrives across the
state. Today, the designer-drug craze is the latest hot topic in the
drug war.

Florida has jumped into the fight in a big way. Last summer, state
officials staged Operation Heat Rave, a statewide raid on clubs. Then
last winter, Gov. Jeb Bush’s staff of drug experts began searching
from Key West to Pensacola for proof of the deadly epidemic stalking
nightclubs and the rave scene.

Jim McDonough, the state drug-fighting chief, unveiled the results of
that study at a drug summit earlier this year, using the findings to
warn lawmakers of the dangers ahead, despite progress in his first
year as head of the drug office.

With Bush, Senate President Toni Jennings, R-Orlando, and House
Speaker John Thrasher, R-Orange Park, on the stage behind him, he
cited the work as “a very thorough, autopsy-by-autopsy review.”
McDonough told the standing-room-only crowd at the Capitol that club
drugs were killing many more youngsters than anyone had suspected.

Since then, McDonough has defended the work. He asked why a reporter
would question shortcomings in the research instead of helping his
staff fight drug abuse.

“If we made a mistake, we want to correct the mistake,” he said.
“There’s no attempt here to put out bad data. We are trying to get
the facts. We have discovered that we have a club-drug problem in
this state that is immense, and we want to do something about it.”

The Office of Drug Control acknowledges some of its errors. Two dozen
deaths of elderly men and women as old as 84 were deleted from the
list after the Sentinel questioned the findings. In some of those
cases, records showed that the medical examiners involved had urged
the state’s analysts not to count them as drug deaths.

And there are other glaring mistakes.

“My son does not belong on that list,” said Joel Waters of east Orange
County. His 15-year-old son, Mitchell, collapsed while playing
basketball at school last year. An undiagnosed heart ailment caused
his death.

But the teenager had taken Adderall, a drug prescribed by his doctor
to treat an attention-deficit disorder. It contained amphetamine, a
drug on the list. No one in Tallahassee inquired about his cause of
death before labeling the 15-year-old honor student as a victim of
illegal-drug abuse.

“If they’re working to get extra numbers to get extra money, they’re
working in the wrong direction,” said Waters, a construction
contractor. “I worked for the government. Statistics are something
people manipulate.”

These days, Florida’s drug fight is an enormous effort.

Bush created the Office of Drug Control in 1999 to coordinate
prevention, treatment and enforcement efforts, announcing his goal of
cutting drug abuse in Florida in half by 2004. It coincides with the
national drug strategy to cut abuse countrywide by the same amount.

A key element of the strategy was to make the new office
“research-based, measurable and accountable for performance.” To head
the program, Bush brought in McDonough, a former U.S. Army colonel
who served as head of strategy for the Office of National Drug Control
Policy from 1996 to 1999. He supervises Florida’s $540 million
campaign and is credited with energizing drug-fighting efforts here.

On Dec. 2, almost a year after McDonough’s arrival, the National
Institute on Drug Abuse in Washington, D.C., issued a nationwide alert
about the increasing abuse of designer drugs.

It turned the club scene into the drug war’s latest thing. Ten days
later, McDonough’s staff contacted the state’s 22 medical examiners,
saying it wanted to create a list of all designer-drug-related deaths.
Staff members wanted the information in time for a statewide drug
summit on Feb. 11.

The drug office asked the state Medical Examiners Commission to send
reports on every death from 1997 through 1999 that tested positive for
any of 20 listed drugs. The request caught the medical examiners
unprepared. There is no uniform system for tracking these drugs.

The Office of Drug Control, interviews and records show, would take
responsibility for deciding which deaths were designer-drug-related.
The list included such common rave drugs as MDMA, an amphetamine-based
hallucinogen; and GHB, a sedative once sold legally in health-food
stores.

But it also listed chemicals such as fentanyl, a painkiller, and
ketamine, an anesthetic. Both appear occasionally on the rave scene.

But they also are commonly used in hospitals and veterinary clinics.
From the outset, the state’s definition of designer drugs struck
medical examiners as unusually broad. It seemed to some that the
Office of Drug Control was asking for too much, too quickly and
without knowing how to analyze it.

“Some of those drugs on their list of 20 designer drugs are not
designer drugs,” said Dr. Shashi Gore, chief medical examiner of
Orange and Osceola counties. “Ketamine is not a designer drug. Pure
amphetamine is not a designer drug. Nitrous oxide — come on! It’s a
drug of abuse, but not a designer drug.”

Consider the case of Tavani J. Smith, one of the deaths McDonough
told legislators that he had personally reviewed.

No spikey-haired party animal, Tavani was a 4-year-old boy who loved
the Power Rangers and cold milk. He woke up on Feb. 17, 1999,
complaining of a headache that would persist all day. He arrived at
the emergency room of Orlando Regional Medical Center at 9:08 p.m.
after his mother consulted her son’s doctor.

Nurses gave the boy several drugs to sedate him so a doctor could do a
spinal tap to test for meningitis. One of those was ketamine.

At 1:25 a.m., Tavani stopped breathing. Autopsy reports show he died
from “probable adverse reaction to ketamine/brevital
administration.”

But the drug-control staff classified the child as a poly-drug abuser
who died from an overdose of ketamine.

“This is crazy, very crazy. They need to go back to school,” the
youngster’s grandmother said. “Tavani was a baby. How could they do
that? That’s crazy.”

Steve Lauer, chief of staff and creator of the designer-drug list,
acknowledged that he hadn’t known that ketamine was used in hospitals.

Asked about that and other mistakes, Lauer said, “I’m not a doctor.
I’m a layman. I have a large number of these. I simply took what
they gave me.”

Lauer said he should not have included previously counted heroin
deaths. In some cases, Lauer said he forgot about the advice from the
Medical Examiners Commission not to count deaths of elderly men and
women. And the details in other cases clearly should have raised questions.

Among them: a 58-year-old man who died the day he left a hospital
after a heart operation, a 52-year-old nursing-home patient who fell
and hit his head, and a 74-year-old cancer patient who died in a
Miami-Dade County hospital from an accidental overdose of morphine.

McDonough said he was too busy overseeing the drug-fighting effort to
discuss cases like that of Rose Pope, 82, who died in St. Petersburgh
eight days after being hit by a car.

The Office of Drug Control blamed medical examiners for the mistaken
inclusion of elderly victims on the list. But the examiners’ staffers
say the drug experts in Tallahassee got exactly what they asked for.

“I spent weeks trying to educate them on what they were really looking
for. . . . I talked until I was blue in the face,” said Larry
Bedore, director of operations for Dr. Joan Wood, chief medical
examiner of Pasco and Pinellas counties and head of the state Medical
Examiners Commission.

One-hundred-fifty pages of memos, draft policies and other
correspondence between the commission and the Office of Drug Control
show that medical examiners had tried to limit the number of drugs to
be tracked.

That might have helped to prevent the counting of victims such as
Francois Cineus, a 6-month-old Miami boy who died from sudden infant
death syndrome but who had tested positive for ketamine.

There were other mistakes not quite as obvious as infants and senior
citizens. The original list also included deaths involving drugs that
have been around since the 1940s and don’t fit what drug investigators
consider the “party” drug scene.

Locally, for example, the state counted seven amphetamine-related
deaths of middle-aged men, including that of a 42-year-old Lockheed
Martin missile engineer, a 41-year-old man who shot himself after
losing his job and a 37-year-old pedestrian killed by a hit-and-run
driver.

Gore, the Orange-Osceola medical examiner, said none of those cases
should have been counted as designer-drug-related deaths.

“I think it’s very inappropriate. They should have consulted us for
sure,” Gore said. “They need somebody who really knows what’s happening.”

The reality is that the drug-abuse crisis is complex. People in
different age groups and in different walks of life take different
drugs. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy to combatting the
problem. That requires a sophisticated breakdown of the problem.

For example, amphetamine and a related drug, methamphetamine, can be
combined with other chemicals to make the designer drug Ecstasy. But,
by themselves, they attract a different crowd of users.

“The typical meth user is a completely different stereotype from the
typical party-drug user,” said Guy Hargreaves, a special agent with
the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. “There really is a major
distinction.”

Methamphetamine users in Florida range from teenagers to working men
and women in their 50s and 60s. They are predominantly poor, rural
whites or Mexican-Americans, agents said. Few, if any, have ties to
what the Office of Drug Control considers the rave or club scene,
agents said.

“The kids I’m talking about wouldn’t know a rave if one crawled up
their leg and bit them,” said DEA Special Agent Tom Feeney, head of a
High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area methamphetamine task force in
Tampa.

“They call it, ‘Poor Man’s Cocaine.’ ”

Designer and party drugs attract a much more affluent group of users.
Most tend to be non-Hispanic, middle class and between the ages of 15
and 25, according to drug agents working for the DEA, Florida
Department of Law Enforcement and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
The state’s list, however, included 93 deaths of people 35 or older.

Another complication is that these drug deaths are rarely as simple as
someone who sniffed or swallowed one drug. Most of Florida’s cases
involve users who mixed a variety of drugs and alcohol.

And many deaths involve car wrecks or other accidents.

Drug-treatment specialists say the flaws in the research are so
significant that they could hurt efforts to convince the public about
the deadliness of designer drugs.

“Questionable data on the nature of the problem will tend to put all
data in question,” said Jim Hall, executive director of Up Front Drug
Information Center in Miami and a researcher in trends for the
National Institute of Drug Abuse. “That’s certainly a concern we have
. . . There’s a tendency not to believe any of that government drug
data.”

Hall’s colleagues working for drug-treatment programs in Tampa, St.
Petersburg, Orlando, Jacksonville, Tallahassee and west Florida voiced
similar concerns. Provide misleading or false information to
teenagers — the most at-risk group — and they’ll never trust you,
they said.

******************************************************************************

SAMPLE LETTER

To the editor:

I was fascinated by the article “Bad research clouds state death
reports,” (May 21). The facts are disturbing, but even more shocking
is what’s left unsaid: The tortured statistics aren’t a mistake.

The state czar requested bad data and he received bad data. As medical
examiners tried to point out, broadly defining the parameters of the
death reports forwarded to the czar’s office would definitely inflate
the numbers. Fortunately, the plan’s flaws were exposed by the
Sentinel. The czar now looks, at best, incompetent.

Why risk looking that way if there isn’t a good payoff? There are good
reasons for the czar to make “designer drug” deaths look more common
than they really are. More deaths make the massive taxpayer funds
spent on the drug war seem necessary. Better yet is the potential
long-term gain. In a few years, the czar’s number crunchers can say,
oops, we made a mistake, we shouldn’t be recording some of these
deaths as being caused by designer drugs. And, bingo, the goal of
reduced drug deaths is attained – on paper, at least. Even if the
actual numbers go up, the initial bad data makes it look like the zero
tolerance tactics of the drug prohibition are succeeding. The drug
warriors know they will fail, but armed with this knowledge they now
try to define success in terms of planned failure. It might be comical
if it weren’t causing so much destruction.

Stephen Young

IMPORTANT: Always include your address and telephone
number

Please note: If you choose to use this letter as a model please modify it
at least somewhat so that the paper does not receive numerous copies of the
same letter and so that the original author receives credit for his/her work.
—————————————————————————-

ADDITIONAL INFO to help you in your letter writing
efforts

3 Tips for Letter Writers http://www.mapinc.org/3tips.htm

Letter Writers Style Guide http://www.mapinc.org/style.htm

****************************************************************************

TO SUBSCRIBE, DONATE, VOLUNTEER TO HELP, OR UPDATE YOUR EMAIL SEE

http://www.drugsense.org/hurry.htm

TO UNSUBSCRIBE SEE http://www.drugsense.org/unsub.htm

***************************************************************************

Prepared by Stephen Young – http://home.att.net/~theyoungfamily Focus
Alert Specialist

Date: Wed, 10 May 2000
Subject: USA Today: Drug War Draws More Girls To Heroin

DrugSense FOCUS Alert #172 May 10, 2000

USA Today: Drug War Draws More Girls To Heroin

——-
PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
——-

DrugSense FOCUS Alert #172 May 10, 2000

IMPORTANT NOTE: USA Today has circulation of more than 2 million
readers. The largest in the U.S. A published LTE of 250 words in this
publication has an ad value of more than $7,500.00. Please Just DO It!
Write Away.

Is the drug war supposed to save children from drugs? If it is, it’s
failing again. USA Today is reporting increasing rates of heroin use
among young girls. The support given for this assertion is mostly
anecdotal, but the story does note that government surveys indicate
increased use of heroin by young people in recent years, as well as
increased emergency room visits related to heroin for women in general.

Not surprisingly, prohibitionists interviewed for the article
recommend more tough measures to fight heroin. Some of the experts
also offer “solutions” that are kinder and gentler, though not likely
to be more effective, like an advertising campaign featuring the theme
“girl power.” Unfortunately, no one quoted in the story points out how
the basic drug war principles help to encourage drug problems among
young people. But, the information is there for those who look between
the lines. Careful readers are reminded of the allure of forbidden
fruit and the success of drug cartels in raising quality and lowering
prices.

Please write a letter to USA Today to say that the same old drug war
tactics are increasing drug problems, not decreasing them, for girls
and boys of every age.

Thanks for your effort and support.

WRITE A LETTER TODAY

It’s not what others do it’s what YOU do

***************************************************************************

PLEASE SEND US A COPY OF YOUR LETTER OR TELL US WHAT YOU DID ( Letter,
Phone, fax etc.)

Please post a copy your letter or report your action to the sent
letter list ([email protected]) if you are subscribed, or by
E-mailing a copy directly to [email protected] Your letter will then
be forwarded to the list with so others can learn from your efforts
and be motivated to follow suit

This is VERY IMPORTANT as it is the only way we have of gauging our
impact and effectiveness.

**************************************************************************

CONTACT INFO

Source: USA Today (US)
Contact: [email protected]

***************************************************************************

ARTICLE

Pubdate: Tue, 09 May 2000
Source: USA Today (US)
Copyright: 2000 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Page: 1A – Cover Story
Contact: [email protected]
Address: 1000 Wilson Blvd., Arlington VA 22229
Fax: (703) 247-3108
Website: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nfront.htm
Author: Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY

HEROIN’S RESURGENCE CLOSES DRUG’S TRADITIONAL GENDER GAP
Teenage Girls Are Increasingly Falling Prey To Narcotic In Purer, ‘More
Mainstream,’ Sniffable Form

Simona Troisi was a high school freshman on Long Island, at 14 already
a user of marijuana and LSD, when she gave $40 to a friend to score
some cocaine in New York City. The friend returned with a powder that
gave Troisi a sickening high when she snorted it.

”I don’t even know what it was,” Troisi says. ”I just kept doing
it because I had it.”

The strange powder was heroin, and within a few months, Troisi’s
recreational drug habit became a destructive lifestyle. She landed in
a drug rehabilitation program after being charged with selling heroin
to an undercover police officer. She had turned to dealing to help
finance her appetite for tiny, $10 bags of the drug.

Now 20 and nine months into rehab, Troisi symbolizes how thousands of
girls across the USA have fueled a dramatic resurgence of heroin use
among teenagers, particularly in suburban and rural areas. Not since
the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a typical dose was much less
potent and almost always injected, has heroin been so hip among
middle-class teens.

Heroin’s re-emergence comes at a time when girls — once far less
likely than boys to drink, smoke marijuana or use harder drugs such as
heroin — now appear to be keeping pace with them, says Mark Weber,
spokesman for the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration.

Weber’s agency, after finding that existing drug prevention programs
helped reduce drug use only among boys, recently helped create an
advertising campaign called ”Girl Power” to deliver anti-drug
messages specifically to girls.

A television commercial now airing features Olympic figure skating
champion Tara Lipinski and Brandi Chastain, a member of the 1999 U.S.
Women’s World Cup soccer team, urging girls not to ”blow it” by
using drugs. The agency also has begun an unprecedented effort to
collect statistics on girls’ drug use.

The new surge in heroin use made national news with the overdose
deaths of more than a dozen teenagers in Plano, Texas, and suburban
Orlando in 1996. Since then, hospital emergency rooms on Long Island,
N.Y., and in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Philadelphia suburbs and
several other middle-class areas have been hit by clusters of teens on
heroin.

”The picture is frightening,” says Mitchell Rosenthal, a
psychiatrist and president of a chain of drug treatment centers who
will testify before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics
Control today about the emerging heroin problem in the suburbs.
”We’ve got a lot of suburban kids at risk. I don’t think the modern
affluent parent thinks about heroin being a danger in Scarsdale or
Beverly Hills.”

One of four teenagers scheduled to testify today is Kathryn Logan, 19,
of San Juan Capistrano in southern California. At 9, Logan stole sips
of wine from unfinished glasses. At 13, she rifled through medicine
cabinets for prescription drugs she could chop up and sniff. She
packed the powder into ballpoint pen casings so she could get high
during class. At 15, she snorted heroin and cocaine and smoked crack.

”I felt more normal when I was on drugs,” says Logan, who developed
bulimia, had an abortion and tried to commit suicide. ”I felt being
sober was too boring.” To pay for her habit, she stole money from her
parents and at one point pawned her grandmother’s diamond ring for
$25.

Even so, she kept up her grades, made the junior varsity tennis team
and tried out for cheer leading. But she felt she didn’t fit in at
school, where she thought the people were ”rich and stuck up.” Her
father, a contractor, and her mother, a flight attendant, didn’t seem
to notice her drug use. ”I was always making up excuses. I had
everything under control, the whole world under control. It was hard,
let me tell you,” says Logan, who entered rehab 79 days ago to avoid
going to jail on alcohol and marijuana possession charges. ”My
parents were clueless. I think they were in total denial that I was
doing drugs until I told them about it.”

Heroin Considered ‘Super Cool’

Heroin use remains relatively rare among teens overall. A study by
the University of Michigan last year estimated that about 2% of youths
ages 12-17 had tried it. However, that was more than double the rate
of seven years earlier. The same study indicated that 2.3% of
eighth-graders in the USA, about 83,160 youths, had used heroin.

Analysts continue to examine the reasons behind the surge. There are
the usual factors: teen angst, peer pressure, boredom, the attraction
of something dangerous for teens with money to spend. But analysts
say it’s also clear that new, highly potent forms of heroin from drug
cartels in Colombia and Mexico have been key to attracting new users
— particularly girls.

For years, most heroin had to be injected directly into a user’s
bloodstream to be effective. Girls typically prefer to sniff or smoke
their drugs rather than inject them, so heroin was out of vogue,
experts say. But now, with more potent heroin available as a powder
in small bags or gel capsules, users can get high without injecting.
That has made it more palatable to girls. ”Young girls don’t like
injecting regularly. It leaves marks. With the increase in purity of
heroin, it made it smokable,” Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., says. As
co-chairman of the Senate narcotics caucus, Biden issues regular
reports on drug abuse.

”We are seeing a wider range of users,” says H. Westley Clark, a
psychiatrist and director of the federal Center for Substance Abuse
Treatment in Washington, D.C. ”We have been seeing younger people
use. It has been fairly dramatic. These drugs are becoming equal
opportunity drugs. There is no gender bias.”

Lynn Ponton, a San Francisco-area psychiatrist, says that just last
week a 17-year-old girl she is counseling tested positive for heroin
in a routine drug screening.

”Traditional gender roles associated with risk-taking are not holding
… for drug abuse,” says Ponton, who wrote The Romance of Risk, a
book about adolescent risk-taking. ”Once (a drug is) available and
hasn’t been used for a long time, it’s deemed cool by the teenagers.
Heroin is still considered a super-cool drug, and it has high risk
associated with it. It’s probably the mystique of the drug.”

Like the stimulant and hallucinogen Ecstasy, another favorite drug of
the moment, heroin plays to girls’ insecurities. Users lose their
appetite, and so lose weight. The ”heroin girl” look has been
glamorized recently, from ashen, wafer-thin runway models to anthems
by grunge bands. All this has recast heroin in a more favorable light
for this generation of youths. Troisi, who is 5 feet 5 and weighed 80
pounds when she entered drug treatment, says she never associated
heroin with images of needle-toting junkies from the 1960s and ’70s.

”Think of all the heroin-chic pictures that have been in the culture
for a number of years,” Rosenthal says. ”Advertising campaigns show
gaunt men and women. The stigma of heroin appears to have faded.”

Heroin, a narcotic derived from the opium poppy, was developed in the
1880s as a pain reliever and substitute for highly addictive morphine.
Scientists soon found that heroin is even more addictive. It was made
illegal in the United States in 1914. Heroin is produced mainly in
Southeast Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mexico and Colombia.

For street sales, heroin is mixed, or ”cut,” with other ingredients,
such as quinine or sugar. A hit of heroin produces a rush of euphoria
followed by several hours of relaxation and wooziness. Twenty years
ago, a milligram dose with 3.6% pure heroin (and cut with 96.4% other
ingredients) cost about $3.90, says Richard Fiano, director of
operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Now, the average
milligram is 41.6% pure and costs about $1. Some Colombian heroin the
DEA seized recently was 98% pure, Fiano says.

Colombian drug lords used existing cocaine distribution networks to
introduce the purer heroin to the USA, Fiano says. ”They have a
very, very good marketing strategy,” he says. ”They’ve come out
with a new product line. They even have packaged it with brand names,
just like buying a pack of cigarettes. They even gave out free samples.”

Emergency-Room Visits Rise

The strategy appears to be working; heroin users are younger than
ever. Surveys by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration indicate the average age of first-time users plummeted
from about 27.4 years in 1988 to 17.6 in 1997, the youngest average
since 1969.

Emergency-room doctors reported in 1997 and 1998 that heroin is
involved in four to six visits out of 100,000 by youths ages 12 to 17,
up from one in 100,000 in 1990. For young adults 18 to 25, 41
emergency room visits in 100,000 involved heroin, up from 19 in 1991.
Among women in general, the numbers have doubled in a decade.

Biden would like to direct more federal money to drug treatment for
adolescents and law enforcement efforts in Colombia. Sen. Charles
Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate narcotics caucus, says that
even if the USA directs more money toward Colombia, the focus should
be on sending teens a clear anti-drug message, similar to the Reagan
administration’s ”Just Say No” campaign.

Troisi says a steady stream of information about the risks of
different drugs might have steered her away from heroin. She and her
friends had no idea how seductive and addictive the drug could be, she
says. She adds that she had no trouble finding heroin in her affluent
hometown, Selden, N.Y.

”I’m not saying that heroin is the normal thing, but it is going more
mainstream,” she says. ”When I first started, I was one of the
first females, but I’ve seen more and more. I’ve seen them come into
detox.” In Selden, about 45 miles from New York City, there isn’t a
whole lot for teens to do, and becoming a drug user wasn’t too
different from finding a spot in an after-school club, she says. ”It
seemed like this underground society,” says Troisi, who says she grew
up in a stable home with three brothers, including one who was high
school valedictorian. Her father is a high school teacher. ”Boredom
played a big part of it. A lot of my friends got involved in drugs
real young. I kept away from it for a while, but I was real lonely.
When I started using heroin, I just kept going back to it. I felt
like I’d never feel comfortable with myself without it.”

Like many girls who slide into addiction, Troisi wound up taking
heroin the way she initially avoided: by injection. That way, Troisi,
who sometimes spent more than $100 a day on drugs, needed less heroin
to get high.

By the time she was 15, Troisi says, she loathed getting out of bed
without a heroin jolt. ”I used to sleep with a bag of it in my bra
so I would have it first thing, so I could get out of bed and brush my
teeth,” she says. Troisi, who after nine months of treatment now
weighs a healthier 110 pounds, thinks she will get better. What she
calls the ”zombie” feeling has faded. ”One day, I woke up and I
felt good,” she says. ”I eat now. And I go running, five miles a
day sometimes. I feel like it’s a new world. I still go through
moods, but I know how to deal with those moods. I think I have a chance.”

******************************************************************************

SAMPLE LETTER

To the editor:

After decades of zero tolerance law enforcement America is
experiencing a resurgence in heroin use which crosses gender lines.
How will politicians respond? Implement needle exchange programs to
stop the spread of HIV perhaps? Legalize marijuana to separate the
hard and soft drug markets and thereby close the black market gateway
to heroin? Not likely! No doubt tough-on-drugs politicians will
seize the opportunity to call for increased drug war funding, despite
the obvious failure of past interdiction efforts.

Temporarily limiting the amount of heroin on the streets might do more
harm than good. By decreasing supply while demand remains constant,
America’s fledgling addicts will soon find the price of heroin
soaring. Those already hooked will inevitably step up criminal
activity in order to feed their habits. While males are more prone to
violent crime, female addicts may fall victim to prostitution. The
resulting nationwide crime wave will have more to do with application
of drug laws then the medical condition the addicts suffer from. Just
as alcohol prohibition failed, the drug war has failed to prevent drug
use, but it has fostered a great deal of unnecessary crime and violence.

Am I suggesting that heroin be legalized and sold in convenience
stores? Contrary to what zero tolerance proponents would have
Americans believe, there is a middle ground between all out
legalization and drug prohibition. By registering heroin addicts and
providing them with standardized doses in a treatment setting, the
public health problems associated with heroin use could very well be
eliminated. More important, organized crime would lose an important
client base. This would render illegal heroin trafficking
unprofitable and spare future generations the horror of heroin addiction.

Robert Sharpe

IMPORTANT: Always include your address and telephone
number

Please note: If you choose to use this letter as a model please modify it
at least somewhat so that the paper does not receive numerous copies of the
same letter and so that the original author receives credit for his/her work.
—————————————————————————-

ADDITIONAL INFO to help you in your letter writing
efforts

3 Tips for Letter Writers http://www.mapinc.org/3tips.htm

Letter Writers Style Guide http://www.mapinc.org/style.htm

****************************************************************************

TO SUBSCRIBE, DONATE, VOLUNTEER TO HELP, OR UPDATE YOUR EMAIL SEE

http://www.drugsense.org/hurry.htm

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***************************************************************************

Prepared by Stephen Young – http://home.att.net/~theyoungfamily Focus
Alert Specialist

Date: Wed, 03 May 2000
Subject: New York Times: Drug War Poisons Communities

DrugSense FOCUS Alert # 171 May 3, 2000

New York Times: Drug War Poisons Communities

——-
PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
——-

DrugSense FOCUS Alert # 171 May 3, 2000

Drug warriors sometimes try to justify prohibition by comparing drugs
to poison and suggesting that they are attempting to keep “poison” out
of communities. Not only does it fail as a metaphor (since the
ultimate effect of the drug war is to make this “poison” one of the
world’s most profitable commodities), it is ironic that the drug war
itself is spreading real poison into the places where people live.

The New York Times this week reported on the environmental devastation
caused by pesticide that is supposed to be eradicating illegal drug
crops in Colombia. While crop spraying is often touted as a method
stop drugs, the destruction caused to humans and their habitats is
rarely acknowledged. This excellent article (below) exposes the
situation, but it also clearly illustrates how little drug warriors
really care about human suffering.

An American embassy official claimed, “Being sprayed on certainly does
not make people sick,” though the reporter found ample evidence to the
contrary. Please write a letter to the Times or any of the other
newspapers where this story was carried to express horror at another
toxic strategy from the drug war.

Thanks for your effort and support.

WRITE A LETTER TODAY

If not YOU who? If not NOW when?

***************************************************************************

PLEASE SEND US A COPY OF YOUR LETTER OR TELL US WHAT YOU DID ( Letter,
Phone, fax etc.)

Please post a copy your letter or report your action to the sent
letter list ([email protected]) if you are subscribed, or by
E-mailing a copy directly to [email protected] Your letter will then
be forwarded to the list with so others can learn from your efforts
and be motivated to follow suit

This is VERY IMPORTANT as it is the only way we have of gauging our
impact and effectiveness.

**************************************************************************

CONTACT INFO

Source: New York Times (NY)
Contact: [email protected]

EXTRA CREDIT

Please send the letter to other newspapers where the same story has
appeared, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the
Register-Guard.

Title: Colombia: Colombians Say Drug Spraying Creating Health Crisis
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Contact: [email protected]

Title: Colombia: Drug War Blamed For Hurting Villagers
Source: Register-Guard, The (OR)
Contact: [email protected]

***************************************************************************

ARTICLE

Colombia: To Colombians, Drug War Is A Toxic Foe
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n578/a06.html
Newshawk: M & M Family
Pubdate: Mon, 01 May 2000
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company
Contact: [email protected]
Address: 229 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036
Fax: (212) 556-3622
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Forum: http://www10.nytimes.com/comment/
Author: Larry Rohter

TO COLOMBIANS, DRUG WAR IS A TOXIC FOE

IOBLANCO DE SOTARA, Colombia — The children and their teachers were
in the schoolyard, they say, playing soccer and basketball and waiting
for classes to begin when the crop-duster appeared. At first they
waved, but as the plane drew closer and a gray mist began to stream
from its wings, alarmed teachers rushed the pupils to their classrooms.

Over the next two weeks, a fleet of counter narcotics planes taking
part in an American-sponsored program to eradicate heroin poppy
cultivation returned here repeatedly. Time and time again, residents
charge, the government planes also sprayed buildings and fields that
were not supposed to be targets, damaging residents’ health and crops.

“The pilot was flying low, so there is no way he could not have seen
those children,” said Nidia Majin, principal of the La Floresta rural
elementary school, whose 70 pupils were sprayed that Monday morning
last June. “We had no way to give them first aid, so I sent them
home. But they had to cross fields and streams that had also been
contaminated, so some of them got sick.”

In fact, say leaders of this remote Yanacona Indian village high in
the Andes, dozens of other residents also became ill during the
spraying campaign, complaining of nausea, dizziness, vomiting, rashes,
blurred vision and ear and stomach aches. They say the spraying also
damaged legitimate crops, undermining government efforts to support
residents who have abandoned poppy growing.

Such incidents are not limited to this village of 5,000, say critics
in Colombia and the United States, but have occurred in numerous parts
of Colombia and are bound to increase if the fumigation program is
intensified, as the Clinton administration is proposing as part of a
$1.6 billion emergency aid package to Colombia.

Critics say they frequently receive reports of mistakes and abuses by
the planes’ Colombian pilots that both the American and Colombian
governments choose to ignore.

State Department officials deny that indiscriminate spraying takes
place, with an American Embassy official in Bogota describing the
residents’ claims of illnesses as “scientifically impossible.”

But to local leaders here the situation brought on by the spraying
remains one of crisis. “The fumigation was done in an indiscriminate
and irresponsible manner, and it did not achieve its objective,” said
Ivan Alberto Chicangana, who was the mayor when the spraying occurred.

“The damage done to the physical and economic well-being of this
community has been serious,” he said, “and is going to be very
difficult for us to overcome.”

He and other local leaders say that people were sick for several weeks
after the spraying, and in interviews a few residents complained of
lasting symptoms. Three fish farms with more than 25,000 rainbow
trout were destroyed, residents said, and numerous farm animals,
mostly chickens and guinea pigs, died, while others, including some
cows and horses, fell ill.

In addition, fields of beans, onions, garlic, potatoes, corn and other
traditional crops were sprayed, leaving plants to wither and die. As
a result, community leaders here say, crop-substitution projects
sponsored by the Colombian government have been irremediably damaged
and their participants left impoverished.

The spraying around this particular village has since stopped,
residents say, though they fear that it could resume at any time, and
it continues in neighboring areas, like nearby Guachicono, and
year-round elsewhere in Colombia.

Peasants in the coca-growing region of Caqueta, southeast of here,
last year complained to a reporter that spray planes had devastated
the crops they had planted after abandoning coca, and similar reports
have emerged from Guaviare, another province to the east.

Indeed, American-financed aerial spraying campaigns like the one here
have been the principal means by which the Colombian government has
sought to reduce coca- and opium-poppy cultivation for nearly a
decade. The Colombian government fleet has grown to include 65
airplanes and helicopters, which fly every day, weather permitting,
from three bases. Last year, the spraying effort resulted in the
fumigation of 104,000 acres of coca and 20,000 acres of opium poppy.

Yet despite such efforts, which have been backed by more than $150
million in American aid, cocaine and heroin production in Colombia has
more than doubled since 1995.

In an effort to reverse that trend and weaken left-wing guerrilla and
right-wing paramilitary groups that are profiting from the drug trade
and threatening the country’s stability, the Clinton administration is
now urging Congress to approve a new aid package, which calls for
increased spending on drug eradication as well as a gigantic increase
for crop-substitution programs, to $127 million from $5 million.

Critics, like Elsa Nivia, director of the Colombian affiliate of the
advocacy organization Pesticide Action Network, see the eradication
effort as dangerous and misguided. “These pilots don’t care if they
are fumigating over schools, houses, grazing areas, or sources of
water,” she said in an interview at the group’s headquarters in Cali.

“Furthermore,” she added, “spraying only exacerbates the drug problem
by destabilizing communities that are trying to get out of illicit
crops and grow legal alternatives.”

Those who have been directly affected by the spraying effort here also
argue that fumigation is counterproductive. In this cloud-shrouded
region of waterfalls, rushing rivers, dense forests and deep mountain
gorges, poppy cultivation was voluntarily reduced by half between 1997
and 1999, to 250 acres, said Mr. Chicangana, the former mayor.

He said it was well on its way to being eliminated altogether when the
spraying began.

“We were collaborating, and now people feel betrayed by the state,” he
lamented.

“The fumigation disturbs us a bit,” said Juan Hugo Torres, an official
of Plante, the Colombian government agency supervising
crop-substitution efforts, who works with farmers here. “You are
building trust with people, they have hopes, and then the spraying
does away with all of that.”

In an interview in Washington, R. Rand Beers, the American assistant
secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement
affairs, said aerial spraying flights are strictly monitored and
targets chosen carefully.

The fumigation program is designed so that pilots “shouldn’t be
anywhere close to alternative development projects,” he said, since
“officials in the air and on the ground should be equipped with
geographic positioning devices that pinpoint where those activities
are taking place.”

“If that happened, the pilot who flew that mission should be
disciplined,” Mr. Beers said in reference to the specific accusations
made by residents here. “That shouldn’t be happening.”

But the area fumigated here is wind-swept mountain terrain where
illicit crops and their legal alternatives grow side by side, making
accurate spraying difficult. And in some other places, pilots may be
forced to fly higher than might be advisable, for fear of being shot
at by the guerrillas, whose war is fueled by the profits of the drug
trade.

As for the complaints of illness, the American Embassy official who
supervises the spraying program said in an interview in Bogota that
glyphosate, the active ingredient in the pesticide used here, is “less
toxic than table salt or aspirin.” Calling it “the most studied
herbicide in the world,” he said it was proven to be harmless to human
and animal life and called the villagers’ account “scientifically
impossible.”

“Being sprayed on certainly does not make people sick,” said the
official, “because it is not toxic to human beings.”

Glyphosate “does not translocate to water” and “leaves no soil
residue,” he added, so “if they are saying otherwise, to be very
honest with you, they are lying, and we can prove that
scientifically.”

But in an out-of-court settlement in New York state in 1996, Monsanto,
a leading manufacturer of glyphosate-based herbicides, though not
necessarily identical to those used here, agreed to withdraw claims
that the product is “safe, nontoxic, harmless or free from risk.” The
company signed a statement agreeing that its “absolute claims that
Roundup ‘will not wash or leach in the soil’ is not accurate” because
glyphosate “may move through some types of soil under some conditions
after application.”

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has approved
glyphosate for most commercial uses. But the E.P.A.’s own
recertification study published in 1993 noted that “in California,
where physicians are required to report pesticide poisonings,
glyphosate was ranked third out of the 25 leading causes of illness or
injury due to pesticides” over a five-year period in the 1980’s,
primarily causing eye and skin irritation.

In addition, labels on glyphosate products like Roundup sold in the
United States advise users to “avoid direct application to any body of
water.” Directions also warn users that they should “not apply this
product in a way that will contact workers or other persons, either
directly or through drift” and caution that “only protected handlers
may be in the area during application.”

The doctor in charge of the local clinic here, Ivan Hernandez,
recently was transferred and could not be reached for comment about
the impact of the spraying on the health of residents. Gisela Moreno,
a nurse’s aide, refused to speak to a visiting reporter, saying, “We
have been instructed not to talk to anyone about what happened here.”
When asked the origin of the order, she replied: “From above, from
higher authorities.”

Here in Rioblanco de Sotara, half a dozen local people say they felt
so sick after the spraying that they undertook a 55-mile bus trip to
San Jose Hospital in Popayan, the capital of Cauca Province, for
medical care. There, they were attended by Dr. Nelson Palechor
Obando, who said he treated them for the same battery of symptoms that
more than two dozen residents described to a reporter independently in
recent interviews.

“They complained to me of dizziness, nausea and pain in the muscles
and joints of their limbs, and some also had skin rashes,” he said.
“We do not have the scientific means here to prove they suffered
pesticide poisoning, but the symptoms they displayed were certainly
consistent with that condition.”

Because this is an area of desperate poverty where most people eke out
a living from subsistence agriculture, there is no stigma attached to
growing heroin poppies, and those who have planted the crop freely
admit it. Yet even those who claim never to have cultivated poppies
say that their fields were also sprayed and their crops destroyed.

“They fumigated everywhere, with no effort made to distinguish between
potatoes and poppies,” complained Oscar Ceron, a 32-year-old farmer.
“We could even hear their radio transmissions on the FM band, with the
ground command referring to us in a vulgar fashion.”

Other farmers said that the air currents constantly swirling down from
the 14,885-foot Sotara volcano, on whose flank this town sits, blew
the herbicide over fields planted with legal crops.

“A gust of wind can carry the poison off to adjacent fields, so that
they end up more badly damaged than the field that was the original
target, which sometimes is left completely intact,” explained Fernando
Hormiga.

In the United States, glyphosate users are specifically warned not to
spray by air “when winds are gusty or under any other condition that
favors drift.” Usage instructions also say that “appropriate buffer
zones must be maintained” to avoid contaminating surrounding areas.

Once word got out about the illnesses that followed the spraying here,
prices for milk, cheese and other products that are a mainstay of the
local economy dropped by more than half. “The rumors are that the
land is contaminated, so we no longer get orders from outside, and the
middlemen can now name their own price,” said Fabian Omen, a farmer
and town councilman.

Worse still, government and private creditors are nonetheless
demanding that the loans made for crop-substitution projects like the
fish farms must still be repaid, even though the enterprises
themselves have been destroyed.

Asked about the lack of an integrated policy that implies, Alba Lucia
Otero, the Plante director for Cauca Province, expressed
frustration.

“The state is a single entity, but we work on one side while those
doing the fumigation work on another,” she said. “There should be
coordination, but they take their decision at the central level, and
we are not consulted.”

******************************************************************************

SAMPLE LETTER

To the editor:

Thank you for printing the story “To Colombians, Drug War Is A Toxic
Foe,” (May 1) and exposing yet another terrible consequence of the
drug war.

While it’s clear that dumping pesticides on any community is a bad
idea, the description of a Colombian elementary school being sprayed
with poison while classes were in session is heart breaking. The cruel
extremists who run the drug war often claim that they are trying to
eradicate drugs to save children, but here is yet another example of
children being hurt while illegal drugs become more available every
day.

If chemical warfare was conducted over American cities, I’d like to
think our citizens would have stood up and demanded an end to the
whole rotten enterprise immediately. The question remains, though, of
whether the powerful institutions that run the drug war are ever going
to acknowledge the misery they are causing.

Stephen Young

IMPORTANT: Always include your address and telephone
number

Please note: If you choose to use this letter as a model please modify it
at least somewhat so that the paper does not receive numerous copies of the
same letter and so that the original author receives credit for his/her work.
—————————————————————————-

ADDITIONAL INFO to help you in your letter writing
efforts

3 Tips for Letter Writers http://www.mapinc.org/3tips.htm

Letter Writers Style Guide http://www.mapinc.org/style.htm

****************************************************************************

TO SUBSCRIBE, DONATE, VOLUNTEER TO HELP, OR UPDATE YOUR EMAIL SEE

http://www.drugsense.org/hurry.htm

TO UNSUBSCRIBE SEE http://www.drugsense.org/unsub.htm

***************************************************************************

Prepared by Stephen Young – http://home.att.net/~theyoungfamily Focus
Alert Specialist

Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000
Subject: 60 Minutes II An All Time Low On Ecstasy Sensationalism And

DrugSense FOCUS Alert # 170 April 27, 2000

60 Minutes II an All Time Low on Ecstasy Sensationalism and
Inaccuracy

——-
PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
——-

DrugSense FOCUS Alert # 170 April 27, 2000

The 60 Minutes II show producers need to be told that their unbalanced
presentation of the harms of MDMA and their total ignoring of its
therapeutic potential is poor journalism. Their hysterical
exaggeration of the dangers of MDMA (it is supposedly likely to
produce a generation of depressed people) is counterproductive in
terms of reducing excessive use of MDMA abuse since the message will
be discounted as unbelievable.

The supposed 40 deaths in Florida due to MDMA was taken as a fact yet
the evidence supporting these claims has never been made public so
that it could be critically reviewed. The show failed to explain that
the statistic of 1100 emergency room visits due to MDMA is from the
Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) system, which links visits to
specific drugs even if the drugs did not cause the visit. All that is
needed is for the person who went to the ER or any of their friends to
have claimed the person consumed MDMA. Blood tests confirming the
mentioned drug are not required so ER visits could due to fake MDMA
are lumped together with visit related to genuine MDMA.

When the 60 Minutes II producers called MAPS to gather information for
their show, my initial impression was positive. I was told they wanted
to look at all aspects of MDMA, therapeutic use as well as rave use,
and they wanted to do a balanced treatment of the neurotoxicity issue.
I started to get a bad feeling when it became clear that none of the
people I recommended who could talk about therapeutic use were
contacted, nor were any experts who would offer a less than hysterical
presentation about neurotoxicity.

The program should at least have given a moment of air time to a
doctor or researcher who doesn’t believe the evidence supports an
alarmist conclusion about neurotoxicity, as well as someone who could
speak to its therapeutic potential.

The 60 Minutes producers should be help accountable for a presentation
that was put together without even an attempt at basic journalistic
balance.

Please write a letter to 60 Minutes II expressing your views or
concerns using the contact information below.

Thanks for your effort and support.

WRITE A LETTER TODAY

If not YOU who? If not NOW When?

***************************************************************************

PLEASE SEND US A COPY OF YOUR LETTER OR TELL US WHAT YOU DID ( Letter,
Phone, fax etc.)

Please post a copy your letter or report your action to the sent
letter list ([email protected]) if you are subscribed, or by
E-mailing a copy directly to [email protected] Your letter will then
be forwarded to the list with so others can learn from your efforts
and be motivated to follow suit

This is VERY IMPORTANT as it is the only way we have of gauging our
impact and effectiveness.

**************************************************************************

CONTACT INFO

Online form to CBS http://cbsnews.cbs.com/feedback/frameset/0,1712,412,00.html

Email address [email protected]

Please send your letter to BOTH.

NOTE: Those who missed the 60 Minutes II piece you can review a text
version at:

http://cbsnews.cbs.com/now/story/0,1597,188049-412,00.shtml

***************************************************************************
EXTRA CREDIT

USA Today also had a blatantly unbalanced piece on MDMA on April 19.
While this is a bit stale for letter writing a LTE correcting
inaccurate reporting is always a good thing.

Read the article at: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n518/a08.html

Write a letter and send it to

USA Today [email protected]

****************************************************************************
SAMPLE LETTER

Dear 60 Minutes II

Regarding your segment on MDMA:

The supposed 40 deaths in Florida due to MDMA was taken as a fact yet
the evidence supporting these claims has never been made public so
that it could be critically reviewed. The show failed to explain that
the statistic of 1100 emergency room visits due to MDMA is from the
Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) system, which links visits to
specific drugs even if the drugs did not cause the visit. All that is
needed is for the person who went to the ER or any of their friends to
have claimed the person consumed MDMA. Blood tests confirming the
mentioned drug are not required so ER visits could be due to fake MDMA
are lumped together with visit related to genuine MDMA.

When the 60 Minutes II producers called MAPS to gather information for
their show, my initial impression was positive. I was told they wanted
to look at all aspects of MDMA, therapeutic use as well as rave use,
and they wanted to do a balanced treatment of the neurotoxicity issue.
I started to get a bad feeling when it became clear that none of the
people I recommended who could talk about therapeutic use were
contacted, nor were any experts who would offer a less than hysterical
presentation about neurotoxicity.

The program should at least have given a moment of air time to a
doctor or researcher who doesn’t believe the evidence supports an
alarmist conclusion about neurotoxicity, as well as someone who could
speak to its therapeutic potential.

The 60 Minutes producers should be held accountable for a presentation
that was put together without even an attempt at basic journalistic
balance.

Rick Doblin Executive Director Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

IMPORTANT: Always include your address and telephone
number

Please note: If you choose to use this letter as a model please modify it
at least somewhat so that the paper does not receive numerous copies of the
same letter and so that the original author receives credit for his/her work.
—————————————————————————-

ADDITIONAL INFO to help you in your letter writing
efforts

3 Tips for Letter Writers http://www.mapinc.org/3tips.htm

Letter Writers Style Guide http://www.mapinc.org/style.htm

****************************************************************************

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Prepared by Stephen Young – http://home.att.net/~theyoungfamily Focus
Alert Specialist

Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000
Subject: More Drug Tests And Forced Treatment Are Not The Answer

DrugSense FOCUS Alert # 169 April 14, 2000

More Drug Tests And Forced Treatment Are Not The Answer

——-
PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
——-

NOTE: Please forgive the duplication. The contact info was incorrect
in the original alert. Please send your LTEs to the Wall Street
Journal _NOT_not the Boston Globe. Contact info below.

DrugSense FOCUS Alert # 169 April 14, 2000

As the failure of the drug war becomes impossible to ignore, even many
drug warriors understand the tactics of its supporters are failing.
John Q. Wilson, the Pepperdine professor who occasionally tries to
give the drug war a veneer of academic and moral credibility, is at
least honest enough to see that sending more resources to Colombia is
not going to affect the level of drug use inside the US.
Unfortunately, as he writes in the Wall Street Journal this week,
Wilson believes that more drug testing and more coerced treatment for
illegal drug users will be a wonderful success while “legalization”
would be a disaster.

To make his case he uses facts selectively. While suggesting the
Netherlands’ more liberal policy of dealing with marijuana has caused
an increase in marijuana use, he ignores the fact that rates of
marijuana and hard drug use are lower for Dutch kids than American
kids.

Worse than his abuse of the facts is his attempt to dehumanize drug
users by calling them “barbarians … incapable of being improved by
free and equal discussion.” Wilson has spouted similar justifications
for totalitarianism for more than a decade, which makes it clear he is
incapable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Please write
a letter to editors at the Wall Street Journal to identify the real
barbarian.

Thanks for your effort and support.

WRITE A LETTER TODAY

If not YOU who? If not NOW When?

***************************************************************************

PLEASE SEND US A COPY OF YOUR LETTER OR TELL US WHAT YOU DID ( Letter,
Phone, fax etc.)

Please post a copy your letter or report your action to the sent
letter list ([email protected]) if you are subscribed, or by
E-mailing a copy directly to [email protected] Your letter will then
be forwarded to the list with so others can learn from your efforts
and be motivated to follow suit

This is VERY IMPORTANT as it is the only way we have of gauging our
impact and effectiveness.

**************************************************************************

CONTACT INFO

Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Contact: [email protected]

***************************************************************************

ARTICLE

Pubdate: Thu, 13 Apr 2000
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Section: A Page: 20
Contact: [email protected]
FAX: (212) 416-2658
Address: 200 Liberty Street, New York, NY 10281
Website: http://www.wsj.com/
Author: James Q. Wilson
Note: Mr. Wilson is a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University
and author of “The Moral Sense,” available in paperback from Free Press.

A NEW STRATEGY FOR THE WAR ON DRUGS

Neither Legalizing Drugs, Nor Trying To Block Supply, Is Likely To Work.
There Is A Third Way: Reduce Demand Through Manditory Testing.

The current Senate deliberation over aid to Colombia aimed at fighting
narcotics reminds us that there are two debates over how the
government ought to deal with dangerous drugs. The first is about
their illegality and the second is about their control. People who
wish to legalize drugs and those who wish to curtail their supply
believe that their methods will reduce crime. Both these views are
mistaken, but there is a third way. Advocates of legalization think
that both buyers and sellers would benefit. People who can buy drugs
freely and at something like free market prices would no longer have
to steal to afford cocaine or heroin; dealers would no longer have to
use violence and corruption to maintain their market share. Though
drugs may harm people, reducing this harm would be a medical problem
not a criminal justice one. Crime would drop sharply.

Prices Would Fall

But there is an error in this calculation. Legalizing drugs means
letting the price fall to its competitive rate (plus taxes and
advertising costs). That market price would probably be somewhere
between one third and 1/20th of the illegal price. And more than the
market price would fall. As Harvard’s Mark Moore has pointed out, the
“risk price”–that is, all the hazards associated with buying drugs,
from being arrested to being ripped off–would also fall, and this
decline might be more important than the lower purchase price.

Under a legal regime, the consumption of low priced, low risk drugs
would increase dramatically. We do not know by how much, but the
little evidence we have suggests a sharp rise. Until 1968 Britain
allowed doctors to prescribe heroin. Some doctors cheated, and their
medically unnecessary prescriptions helped increase the number of
known heroin addicts by a factor of 40. As a result, the government
abandoned the prescription policy in favor of administering heroin in
clinics and later replacing heroin with methadone.

When the Netherlands ceased enforcing laws against the purchase or
possession of marijuana, the result was a sharp increase in its use.
Cocaine and heroin create much greater dependency, and so the increase
in their use would probably be even greater.

The average user would probably commit fewer crimes if these drugs
were sold legally. But the total number of users would increase
sharply. A large fraction of these new users would be unable to keep
a steady job. Unless we were prepared to support them with welfare
payments, crime would be one of their main sources of income. That
is, the number of drug related crimes per user might fall even as the
total number of drug related crimes increased. Add to the list of
harms more deaths from overdose, more babies born to addicted mothers,
more accidents by drug influenced automobile drivers and fewer people
able to hold jobs or act as competent parents.

Treating such people would become far more difficult. As psychiatrist
Sally Satel has written on this page, many drug users will not enter
and stay in treatment unless they are compelled to do so. Phoenix
House, the largest national residential drug treatment program, rarely
admits patients who admit they have a problem and need help. The
great majority are coerced by somebody–a judge, probation officer or
school official–into attending. Phoenix House CEO Mitchell Rosenthal
opposes legalization, and for good reason. Legalization means less
coercion, and that means more addicts and addicts who are harder to
treat.

Douglas Anglin, drawing on experiences in California and elsewhere,
has shown that people compelled to stay in treatment do at least as
well as those who volunteer for it, and they tend (of necessity) to
stay in the program longer. If we legalize drugs, the chances of
treatment making a difference are greatly reduced. And as for drug
use prevention,. forget it. Try telling your children not to use a
legal substance.

But people who want to keep drugs illegal have problems of their own.
The major thrust of government spending has been to reduce the supply
of drugs by cutting their production overseas, intercepting their
transfer into the U.S. and arresting dealers. Because of severe
criminal penalties, especially on handlers of crack cocaine, our
prisons have experienced a huge increase in persons sentenced on drug
charges. In the early 1980s, about 1/12th of all prison inmates were
in for drug convictions; now well over one third are.

No one can be certain how imprisoning drug suppliers affects drug use,
but we do know that an arrested drug dealer is easily replaced.
Moreover, the government can never seize more than a small fraction of
the drugs entering the country, a fraction that is easily replaced.

Emphasizing supply over treatment is dangerous. Not only do we spend
huge sums on it; not only do we drag a reluctant U.S. military into
the campaign; we also heighten corruption and violence in countries
such as Colombia and Mexico. The essential fact is this: Demand will
produce supply.

We can do much more to reduce demand. Some four million Americans are
currently on probation or parole. From tests done on them when they
are jailed, we know that half or more had a drug problem when
arrested. Though a lot of drug users otherwise obey the law (or at
least avoid getting arrested), probationers and parolees constitute
the hard core of dangerous addicts. Reducing their demand for drugs
ought to be our highest priority. Mark Kleiman of UCLA has suggested
a program of “testing and control”: Probationers and parolees would be
required to take frequent drug tests–say, twice weekly–as a
condition of remaining on the street. These tests are inexpensive and
show immediate results. If you failed the test, you would spend more
time in jail; if you passed it, you would remain free. This approach
would be an inducement for people to enter and stay in treatment.

This would require some big changes in how we handle offenders.
Police, probation and parole officers would be responsible for
conducting these tests, and more officers would have to be hired.
Probation and parole authorities would have to be willing to sanction
a test failure by immediate incarceration, initially for a short
period (possibly a weekend), and then for longer periods if the
initial failure were repeated. Treatment programs at little or no cost
to the user would have to be available not only in every prison, but
for every drug dependent probationer and parolee. These things are
not easily done. Almost every state claims to have an intensive
community supervision program, but few offenders are involved in them,
the frequency with which they are contacted is low, and most were
released from super vision without undergoing any punishment for
violating its conditions.

But there is some hope. Our experience with drug courts suggests that
the procedural problems can be overcome. In such courts, several
hundred of which now exist, special judges oversee drug dependent
offenders, insisting that they work to overcome their habits. While
under drug court supervision, offenders reduce drug consumption and,
at least for a while after leaving the court, offenders are less
likely to be arrested. Our goal ought to be to extend meaningful
community supervision to all probationers and parolees, especially
those who have a serious drug or alcohol problem. Efforts to test Mr.
Kleiman’s proposals are under way in Connecticut and Maryland.

If this demand reduction strategy works, it can be expanded. Drug
tests can be given to people who apply for government benefits, such
as welfare and public housing. Some critics will think this is an
objectionable intrusion. But giving benefits without conditions
weakens the character building responsibility of society.

Prevent Harm to Others

John Stuart Mill, the great libertarian thinker, argued that the only
justifiable reason for restricting human liberty is to prevent harm to
others. Serious drug abuse does harm others. We could, of course,
limit government action to remedying those harms without addressing
their causes, but that is an uphill struggle, especially when the
harms fall on unborn children. Fetal drug syndrome imposes large
costs on infants who have had no voice in choosing their fate.

Even Mill was clear that full liberty cannot be given to children or
barbarians. By “barbarians” he meant people who are incapable of
being improved by free and equal discussion. The life of a serious
drug addict–the life of someone driven by drug dependency to
prostitution and crime–is the life of a barbarian.'”

******************************************************************************

SAMPLE LETTER

To the Editor:
James Q. Wilson’s recommendation that present drug policy be retained
and modified by increased drug testing and compulsory treatment (A
New Strategy for the War on Drugs, April 13) – is best seen as an
unwitting example of the vicious thinking which spawned our
catastrophic drug war; not as a basis for any rationale public policy.

Space won’t permit a full listing of Wilson’s sins against both logic
and history; the first is his assumption that the major purpose of any
drug policy is reducing crime. In truth, crime wasn’t associated with
drug use until America initiated drug prohibition. Before 1915 users
weren’t criminals and addicts didn’t have to steal.

Another erroneous assumption is his equation of drug use with
addiction in attempting to justify forcing those who test positive
into “treatment.” Most repeat users of any agent do not become
addicts; they either continue sporadic recreational use for the
balance of their lives or give it up completely; much like the
situation with (legal) alcohol. Even where daily compulsive use is
acknowledged to be harmful to health, our society hasn’t seen fit to
force (legal) alcoholics and nicotine addicts into treatment.

In his last paragraph, Wilson reveals the full dimensions of his
inhumanity and arrogance. By his definition, all “addicts” (users) are
“barbarians,” thus they don’t deserve full liberty. This is neither
sociology nor responsible policy; it’s the cant of the bogus religion
of repression intended to grace a brave new zero-tolerance world.

No, thanks.

Tom O’Connell MD

IMPORTANT: Always include your address and telephone
number

Please note: If you choose to use this letter as a model please modify it
at least somewhat so that the paper does not receive numerous copies of the
same letter and so that the original author receives credit for his/her work.
—————————————————————————-

ADDITIONAL INFO to help you in your letter writing
efforts

3 Tips for Letter Writers http://www.mapinc.org/3tips.htm

Letter Writers Style Guide http://www.mapinc.org/style.htm

****************************************************************************

TO SUBSCRIBE, DONATE, VOLUNTEER TO HELP, OR UPDATE YOUR EMAIL SEE

http://www.drugsense.org/hurry.htm

TO UNSUBSCRIBE SEE http://www.drugsense.org/unsub.htm

***************************************************************************

Prepared by Stephen Young – http://home.att.net/~theyoungfamily Focus
Alert Specialist