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City Council members each took turns bashing Citizens for a Safer Denver’s ballot initiative to make marijuana the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. The City Council unanimously agreed that the measure either sends the wrong message to the community or will be unenforceable. Voters will decide on the measure this November. [Denver Daily News]

A group that is calling for the Denver Police Department to make marijuana its lowest enforcement priority yesterday called for the City Council to hold a public hearing concerning a bill that would renew the city’s partnership with Coors Brewing Company.
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“Once and for all, the Council needs to explain why it is necessary to punish adults for using marijuana in order to send the right message to children, yet somehow it’s no problem to have our city officially partner with an alcohol company to promote alcohol use to all who attend these events, including children,” said Mason Tvert, executive director of Citizens for a Safer Denver.

Good question, Mason. City Council President Michael Hancock, a vehement marijuana opponent, explains:

"It's not that we’re promoting the alcohol as much as we’re promoting the lesser burden on the taxpayer by receiving financial resources."

Well, that just makes so much sense. Oddly, however, Hancock's own argument becomes unintelligible to him when framed in the context of marijuana. See, Michael, it's not that we're promoting marijuana as much as we're promoting the lesser burden on everyone by not waging a brutal stupid war on each other everyday.

The rank hypocrisy of opposition to marijuana reform is seldom revealed with such brilliant transparency. The defective mental processes at work here are truly a marvel of modern psychology.

The country needs somebody qualified to help whip our butts into shape. That somebody would have the power to command, influence and draw resources from various aspects of the government to help us get in better shape.

This person, with our help, would lay out a comprehensive plan to help fight childhood obesity and, on a grander scale, obesity in general.

The United States needs an obesity czar, akin to John P. Walters, the director of the Office of the National Drug Control Policy — our drug czar.

Anti-drug activist Debbie Fowler became a vocal supporter of student drug testing after her son Adam died from a heroin overdose:

Just a few weeks ago, Fowler testified at a congressional hearing for the Office of National Drug Control policy.

"I speak for them ... for funding of the president funding student drug testing programs," Fowler said. "I've done quite a few things for them." [Tribune-Democrat]

Certainly, Debbie Fowler would have liked to know about her son's heroin use before it took his life. Her motivations are very easy to understand. Unfortunately, she appears not to realize that drug testing encourages the use of the most dangerous drugs.

Schools rely almost exclusively on cheap urine tests, which can only detect cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine within a couple days of ingestion. Students know they can use these drugs on a Friday evening and test clean on Monday, so a random testing program is not effective at curbing use of these drugs. Unfortunately, the effect is sometimes quite the opposite.

Marijuana, the most widely used illicit drug, remains detectable for up to a month. Thus the proliferation of random student drug testing necessarily creates awareness among young people about which drugs are "safe" if you're worried about being tested. The switch from marijuana to stronger less-detectable drugs is a very real consequence of student drug testing, which has yet to be acknowledged by drug testing proponents.

I know that this problem is real because I've seen it first hand. In high school, I witnessed classmates asking around for drugs other than marijuana, precisely because they were being tested. Alcohol was the most popular marijuana substitute, but others surfaced as well. "You'll pass your drug test," became a selling point for substances other than marijuana.

This is just the truth about drug testing and how it effects the decisions young people make. Feel free to ignore me, or dismiss my judgments as the prejudiced fulminations of a pro-drug zealot. But drug testing, for very simple scientific reasons, has become a gateway to experimentation with more dangerous, less-detectible drugs. If anyone in the drug prevention community is wondering why student drug testing programs keep being proven not to reduce youth drug use, maybe you'll start thinking about these sorts of things.

Our Executive Director David Borden and NORML's Senior Policy Analyst Paul Armentano have coauthored an updated version of Dave's DWC editorial, "Why Do People the Government Says Don't Exist Keep Writing Me?"

Check it out over at Huffington Post. It's quite good.

You know, it's funny how drug policy reformers keep getting accused of exploiting sick people in the medical marijuana debate, yet when patients write to us, it is always to thank us for our efforts. Somehow I doubt the Office of National Drug Control Policy gets many letters from medical marijuana users thanking them for opposing the evil marijuana lobby that tries to exploit them by making their medicine legal.

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain on Sunday said the U.S. should step up its war on drugs as part of efforts to secure the country's borders. He said that's because Americans are to blame for "creating the demand" for illegal drugs that come into the country and give too much power to drug cartels that terrorize border areas. "We are creating the demand. We are creating the demand for these drugs coming across our border, which maybe means that we should go back more trying to make some progress and in telling Americans, particularly young Americans, that the use of drugs is a terrible thing for them to do," he said. The Arizona senator spoke during an appearance at a central Iowa farm where he devoted much of the conversation with a few dozen supporters to foreign relations and immigration.