Drugs

In Virginia, marijuana possession is a misdemeanor but hashish oil possession is a felony. How is that possible, when hashish oil comes from marijuana and when the Virginia Code does not define hashish oil?

After all the dizzying strides that the marijuana industry has made in Colorado and other states where marijuana has become lawful, and continued efforts to legalize domestic hemp production, the Trump administration's marijuana policies may make federal litigation all the more necessary and extensive to...

In Virginia, if a criminal misdemeanor statute lists no possible jail time, then the offense actually is a Class 1 misdemeanor, carrying up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500. Va. Code § 18.2-12.

Unrepresented criminal defendants do all sorts of harmful things to themselves when they appear for their trial date without a lawyer. One recent situation took the cake.

If one or more people want to be foolhardy enough to use or share methamphetamine, why do we need to waste limited police resources and government money on finding and nabbing them, rather than letting them suffer their own consequences of using the drug, until...

It always is all the more an honor when a NORML chapter invites me to speak at one of their gatherings. My most recent such speaking engagement was at the Northern Virginia NORML's August 9 meeting in Arlington, Virginia. There, my talk on marijuana reform...

Drug detection is about chemistry, and even prosecutors' chemists -- with a never-ending stream and often backlog of alleged drugs to test while still testifying in court -- can get drug testing wrong, particularly with being challenged by mental and physical exhaustion with their heavy...

When police find suspected illegal drugs on or near a suspect, they field test the substance as part of the determination of whether to arrest the suspect(s), to search further, or to seek a search warrant.

Virginia has a sad state of affairs that allows magistrates -- who are not required to be law school graduates unless they are a chief magistrate -- to review and approve search warrant applications. Virginia non-chief magistrates only need to have bachelors degrees.

It was bad enough that 2000 federal highway legislation shoved mandatory criminalization of driving with a 0.08 blood alcohol level down the states’ throats under the penalty of otherwise losing federal highway funding. Now we have a slippery slope of governments trying to criminalize threshold...