DRUG WAR BRIEFS

Preston Peet from drugwar.com is another tireless advocate for reform with an eagle eye for drug war news. He posts this Alternet review of interesting clips. The lead item is on yet another high school drug sweep in Rhode Island, that turned up no drugs, but caused some consternation among the parents.

East Greenwich officers, accompanied by eight or nine drug-sniffing dogs, entered the building at 8:45 a.m. Shortly thereafter, all entrances to the building were locked and an announcement went out over the school's speaker system advising students and faculty to remain in their classrooms. Then, for roughly 20 minutes, the dogs combed the hallways, noses perked for the scent of drugs.

They found none.

The local chief prohibitionist spun this as a success story for drug intervention.

This was a demonstration of the fact that a lot of things are going right," said Robert L. Houghtaling.

But not everyone agreed with that assessment.

...one parent complained that "the students and the faculty have been made to feel unsafe by the very people ... whose duty it is to make the public safe!"

Couldn't have said it better myself. Moving on, another federal judge effectively called my Commonwealth's federal prosecutors lazy and misdirected.

US District Judge Mark L. Wolf, in an unusually frank discussion with reporters, said his fundamental problem is with the type of cases being brought by federal prosecutors under US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan "and the fact that they are being brought, in my view, at the expense of important federal cases that it would take a lot of hard work to develop."

I love it when they talk like that from the bench. And speaking of the courts, in case you somehow missed the news, the wise jurists on the 9th Circuit did limit the ban on hemp products one would hope at least in partly in recognition of the fact that hemp is one of the most nutritionally complete food sources on the planet.

I can't wait until hemp food bars start showing up at the local grocery next to the granola bars.