The long-awaited decision on medical marijuana dispensaries was announced with the Department of Health selecting three applicants, the maximum permitted under state law. They are: Summit Medical Compassion Center in Warwick, The Thomas C. Slater Compassion Center in Providence, and Greenleaf Compassionate Care Center in Portsmouth.

The Seattle Times editorial board reiterates its support for Senate Bill 5073, to expand the protection for medical marijuana users and their suppliers.

MEDIA ADVISORY: March 15, 2011

Marijuana Reform Hearings at State House Tomorrow

The Health Department is expected to announce today the selection of up to three applicants to open the first medical marijuana dispensaries in Rhode Island. Health Department spokeswoman Annemarie Beardsworth did not offer a specific time today when the decision would be finalized and released to the public. The decision was originally set for a week ago, but the department said that it needed additional time to reach its decision.

Lately, a few British politicians have revived the idea of dispensing taxpayer-funded heroin. Spurred by successful trials in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, the idea that governments can reduce both addiction and street crime — and maybe bleed black markets dry — by managing drug distribution has gained momentum. "It is time to replace our failed war on drugs with a strict system of legal regulation," a British MP named Bob Ainsworth said at the end of last year. "We must take the trade away from organized criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists."

Owsley "Bear" Stanley's long, strange trip has ended. The counterculture icon who was a major LSD producer in the 1960s and was celebrated in song by The Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix, has died in a car crash in Australia.

*DRUG TRUTH NETWORK PROGRAMS, Mar 13 to Mar 20, 2011*

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 11, 2011

And the spillover continues: The bloody prohibition war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives has spread to the Lone Star state's agriculture, where drug traffickers are targeting farmers' livelihoods. Texas farmers and ranchers say confrontations with Mexican drug trafficking organizations are quietly adding up. Several growers and ranchers say their jobs started becoming more dangerous about two years ago.

Bolivian president Evo Morales has accused the United States and the United Nations of conspiring to defame his government in two drug reports. He said criticism over Bolivia's handling of the war on drugs were part of a strategy to falsely link his government to drug trafficking. Morales said the US was trying to force him to invite American anti-narcotics agents back into Bolivia.

ACLU lawyers are fighting Delaware Valley School District's drug-testing policy in court on behalf of two students. The ACLU believes the district's policy violates a 2003 Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling, Theodore vs. Delaware Valley School District. That decision required schools to justify suspicionless drug testing programs with evidence of a widespread drug problem among students, unless the school could show additional evidence that the group of students undergoing testing had a high rate of drug use.

Daniel Akst, a columnist for Newsday, opines on the success of Portugal's comprehensive drug policy reforms. He concludes the American war on drugs is a costly failure on a larger scale than was Prohibition, with ramifications far beyond U.S. borders. He says we'll never eliminate drugs for the simple reason that too many people like them. But it's time to figure out a way to decriminalize narcotics, at the very least, even while firmly discouraging their use.

Events and quotes of note from this week's drug policy events of years past.

Drug Policy Alliance

A GVSU student shot in the chest by a deputy during a marijuana raid is suing the deputy who fired the shot. In March 2009, Derek Copp was living in an off-campus apartment he shared with a roommate, who was the target of a drug investigation. The federal lawsuit claims "gross negligence and willfull recklessness" in how the raid was conducted. Copp and his lawyers are asking a judge to make changes in how Ottawa County deputies use firearms and conduct searches.

After a decade of waging a hard-fought battle with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which repeatedly denied his application for the production of medical marijuana, Dr. Lyle E. Craker, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, said he would call it quits, resigning his fight in bitter defeat. The ACLU released its final brief on Craker's case, which calls on the DEA to grant research permits for the production of medical cannabis. They flatly state that cannabis medicines have not yet cleared the Food and Drug Administration because of the DEA's pernicious politics and tight monopoly on the granting of production licenses.

The cash-strapped city of Los Angeles is trying to create a new source of revenue by asking voters to tax medical marijuana dispensaries. Measure M, if approved, would allow to the city to collect $50 out of each $1,000 in "gross reimbursements" that dispensaries receive from their patients. That could generate $10 million a year, which the city can use to pay for basic services such police, libraries and street repairs. "This is something we cannot say 'no' to," Councilwoman Janice Hahn said.

A shoot-out between rival drug trafficking organizations left 18 people dead in Mexico's Tamaulipas state, amid a surge in deadly drug prohibition violence. The state has been the scene of horrifying killings, including last August, when a mass grave containing the bodies of 72 people, believed to be Central American migrants, was found on a local ranch.

Nonprofit medical marijuana dispensaries could soon be supplying patients in Illinois, if state Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie, is successful in his latest push to get the long-awaited measure through the state legislature. Lang said that he plans to place tighter restrictions on the amount of medical marijuana distributed to patients and take out the grow-your-own provisions that opponents railed against during the last General Assembly. If he is successful, the bill could be out of committee and on the state House floor late this week.

In the last few weeks, more than a dozen taxi drivers and passengers have been murdered in the resort city of Acapulco. A 2008 survey reported that 120 of the 200 taxi drivers in the city of Chetumal, Mexcio, reported to have been threatened with violence against their families if they refused to deliver drugs on behalf of the local drug trafficking organization.

Thousands of people have vanished without a trace – some caught up in prohibition violence, others for no reason anyone can fathom. Relatives remain in agonized limbo. The disappearances are a disturbing echo of a tactic employed by dictatorships in the so-called dirty wars that plagued parts of Latin America in the last half of the 20th century.

The northeast has historically been a hotbed for marijuana use — with five of the six New England states self-reporting some of the highest percentages of marijuana consumption in the nation. But recently New England has also become a regional leader in marijuana law reform. Lawmakers in every New England state are now debating marijuana law reform legislation. Paul Armentano of NORML offers a closer look at what is happening.

Hitmen are killing human rights workers across Ciudad Juárez -- the city in Mexico most affected by drug prohibition violence -- in brazen attacks that activists say authorities are unable and unwilling to halt.

Police have tied the October beheading of a man in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler to a Mexican drug trafficking organization. "They stabbed him, we believe to death, and then severed his head. There was a lot of blood," Chandler police Sgt. Joe Favazzo said.

Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation, opines that public officials and drug lords are the biggest beneficiaries of the drug war. He says what police don’t realize (or maybe some of them do) is that the only way to shut down the drug lords, immediately, is to end the drug war by legalizing drugs. Continuing to wage the drug war only ensures that the drug lords will continue supplying drugs and that the cops will continue making busts, and that both groups will continue making beaucoup bucks off the war, which is really what the drug war is all about.

Drug prohibition is responsible for a phenomenal amount of government corruption across the globe. Retired-general Rene Sanabria, the former head of Bolivia's main anti-narcotics unit serving as a top intelligence adviser to the country's Interior Minister Sacha Llorenti, pled not guilty in a Miami federal court on charges of conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the U.S., in a scandal that has rocked the government of Evo Morales. Felipe Caceres, Bolivia's top antidrug official said Mr. Sanabria's security unit "was riddled" with corruption, and that 15 other police officials were in the process of being detained for complicity in the drug-smuggling operation.

President Felipe Calderón will meet in Washington tomorrow with President Barack Obama in an attempt to repair relations at a time when spiraling drug prohibition violence in Mexico has frayed ties between the two allies. Mr. Calderón's visit, announced last week, also comes after a spate of ill-timed comments by U.S. officials about Mexico's drug prohibition violence. Among them are that Mexican drug trafficking organizations could be allied with Islamic terrorists and that drug traffickers could overthrow the Mexican state, forcing the U.S. to send troops. Such statements have enraged Mexican officials, who are notoriously sensitive to any suggestion of U.S. interference in national affairs. "I don't recall this kind of bad blood in a long time," said Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister.

Jim Waters, vice president of policy and communications for the Bluegrass Institute, opines that, unable to secure the votes to pass the original proposal, which makes cold, allergy and sinus products containing pseudoephedrine controlled substances requiring a prescription for purchase, supporters of Kentucky's Senate Bill 45 are now floating what they label a compromise: exempt gel caps. Waters says this new tactic by logically challenged politicians reveals the same intellectual denseness demonstrated all along in this fight. He says that this will do nothing to curb meth production in Kentucky, and that it could even do less by giving citizens a false sense of security that something effective was being done to stop the meth problem.

Benny Avni opines that Felipe Calderon's war on the drug trafficking organizations created by prohibition is costing a lot in American money and Mexican blood -- and he's losing. Avni says the ultimate solution is legalization, which would lower profits and take violence out of the drug trade -- just as the end of Prohibition reduced America's gang problem. But, instead, Washington muddles on with an expensive and extremely deadly conceit -- pretending that all we need to do is pour some money on the problem, and Mexico's federal government will somehow eventually prevail.

Timothy Garon, a musician who was denied a liver transplant because he used marijuana with medical approval under Washington state law to ease the symptoms of advanced hepatitis C, died. Dr. Brad Roter, the physician who authorized Garon to use medical marijuana to alleviate for nausea and abdominal pain and to stimulate his appetite, said he did not know it would be such a hurdle if Garon were to need a transplant.

Jim Carlson, the owner of a head shop, says a new federal ban on the sale of five chemicals used to make synthetic marijuana won't make much difference - he'll just stock brands that use other, still-legal substances. Carlson said that with about 210 similar chemicals available, the manufacturers will try to keep one step ahead of the government. "Unfortunately he is correct," said Barbara Carreno, a DEA spokeswoman in Washington, who confirmed Tuesday that many suppliers are offering retailers products with new chemicals. "There are many of these substances and we chose five common ones because we don't have the resources to study all of them."

Half of the cities in Mexico have registered at least one drug prohibition murder since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006. Of the country’s 2,456 municipalities, 1,147 registered at least one murder committed by drug trafficking organizations between December 2006 and the end of 2010. A total of 15,273 people died in prohibition violence in Mexico last year, and more than 34,000 people have died since Calderon declared war on the country’s drug trafficking organizations shortly after taking office.

A synthetic form of marijuana is widely used at the U.S. Naval Academy because it cannot be detected in routine drug tests, according to several former midshipmen. Since its introduction at the academy last year, synthetic marijuana has become popular among rank-and-file midshipmen and on the football and wrestling teams. Some isolated corners of the historic Annapolis campus have become well-known gathering spots for smoking it.

A bill to legalize marijuana was quietly introduced last week. Sponsored by Amherst Democrat Ellen Story, the bill could reap thousands of dollars for the state in tax revenue. "Reps come up to me and say thank you so much for doing this Ellen. I support you, but I can't be public about it. Legislators are afraid of being seen as soft on drugs," Story says.

In yet another example of drug prohibition corrupting top officials, the former head of Bolivia's counter-narcotics police, Rene Sanabria, has been arrested in Panama and sent to the U.S. to face charges he ran a cocaine trafficking ring.

Ken Wolski, RN, MPA, executive director of the Coalition for Medical Marijuana-New Jersey Inc., opines that Gov. Christie is solely to blame for the unconscionable delay in access to medical marijuana in New Jersey. The governor has insisted on unworkable and unconstitutional restrictions to the medical marijuana program. These restrictions have outraged patients, advocates and the entire New Jersey Legislature.

Drug prohibition violence left at least 28 people dead across Mexico over the weekend, including 14 killed by gunmen in bars in the country's north.

The Wall Street Journal's Mary Anastasia O'Grady opines that it is not unreasonable to suggest that if the U.S. was facing rates of bloodshed similar to Mexico, Washington would be forced to reconsider the wisdom of its prohibitionist approach to drug policy. But the suffering is south of the border, out of sight and out of mind for Americans and, therefore, our politicians. Meanwhile, a multi-billion dollar U.S. bureaucracy dedicated to fighting this war has little incentive to see it won or change course.

After a small marijuana raid at a home three years ago, police left behind a bright yellow sticker, plastered to a window for any passer-by to see that read "SAY NO TO DRUGS: BUSTED — Middletown Police Department." The charges against one of the residents, Deana Perry, were later dropped. Perry has gone to federal court, claiming the act of applying the sticker violated her constitutional rights. One of her lawyers, Dennis E. Boyle, said that Perry wants the police to be barred from labeling people as drug dealers before they have had their day in court.

A Kentucky Senate committee has approved legislation aimed at reducing the state’s fast-rising prison population by bolstering drug treatment and alternative sentences for non-violent offenders. The bill cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee without opposition. Supporters say the bill would produce net savings of $147 million over 10 years.

A Hong Kong court sentenced Philippinian Rep. Ronald Singson to a year and a half in jail for trafficking cocaine. Singson got a lighter sentence from Wanchai District Court Judge Joseph Yau after he pleaded guilty to the charge of drug trafficking while insisting that he did not intend to sell the drugs he brought with him to Hong Kong. In Manila, Rep. Erico Aumentado, chairperson of the House Ethics and Privileges Committee, said there will be "no immediate sanction" imposed on Singson despite his sentence.

In yet another example of drug prohibition enforcement bumbling a Philadelphia Police officer shot and killed a dog at a West Philadelphia residence he mistook for the target of a drug raid. No word yet on how much drugs, if any, were seized in the raid.

A high school student kept off campus for using medical marijuana has received an apology from the district's lawyer and is back in school. The student has a rare disease called Myoclonus Diaphragmatic Flutter, and it causes him to have seizure such as spasms in his diaphram. At the beginning of every attack, he takes a 10 mg medical marijuana throat lozenge. The student's family wants to take legal action and are in talks with an attorney from Denver to make it legal for nurses to administer medical marijuana on campus.

While conducting a marijuana raid a Columbus officer accidentally shot another officer when his gun discharged while exiting a police vehicle.

It's bill-dropping season in the nation's capitals, and California lawmakers are pushing hard on the medical marijuana front.

You might not think a 65-year-old retired deputy sheriff would take to the Internet to ask the president of the United States to consider legalizing drugs, but that's just what MacKenzie Allen did recently. The answer he got from President Obama in YouTube's "Your Interview with the President" contest pleasantly surprised him. Obama responded by saying that legalizing drugs is "an entirely legitimate topic for debate."

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE            February 23, 2011

Frustration over the failed drug prohibition war in Mexico continues to mount. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has rejected accusations that a lack of coordination in Mexico is undermining the fight against drug trafficking organizations, saying rivalry within U.S. intelligence agencies is to blame. The Mexican leader said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement do not coordinate with each other on security matters, and said the agencies were rivals.