Drugs
Federal spending bill bars Justice Department’s trying to prevent states from implementing medical marijuana laws
The recently-passed federal spending bill bars the United States Justice Department from trying to prevent states from implementing medical marijuana laws. However, this does not automatically mean that the Justice Department will not continue to raid and prosecute non-governmental entities that grow and sell marijuana ostensibly for...
Beware unreliable handheld breath tests for marijuana impairment
Law enforcement and tough-on-crime politicians rely too heavily on testing for alcohol to determine whether one has violated the drinking and driving laws, rather than to return to the sensible days when breath and blood testing (with breath testing already being highly flawed) was but...
Fighting the prosecutor’s “experts” on intent to distribute drugs
Where I practice law, the potential incarceration penalties and collateral stigma are stiffer for a conviction of possession with intent to distribute illegal drugs ("PWID"), versus for a drug possession conviction, with the PWID penalties being as stiff as for actual drug distribution. Often, prosecutors...
Non-U.S. citizens: To request a marijuana lab test, or not? How else to prove weight?
Criminal convictions and sentences can be fraught with immigration land mines for non-United States citizens, and also with land mines for United States citizens wishing to travel abroad. For instance, and counterintuitively, a drug paraphernalia conviction can be more of an immigration kiss of death...
The risk of federal financial aid loss from a drug conviction
My 2007 blogposting on the above-referenced topic merits updating, as follows: The financial aid analysis must include a review of the federal financial aid statute, at 20 U.S.C. § 1091(r), which says in relevant part: A student who is convicted of any offense under any Federal or State law...
Marijuana will tremendously benefit plenty of veterans. Why does the federal government deny access to it?
Support our troops is a common refrain —- urging such support regardless of one’s views of the military’s policies and actions — particularly when soldiers are at war. However, eighteen to twenty year olds are treated as responsble enough to carry and shoot weapons in...
The DEA adds four synthetic cannabinoids to its banned list
Why do people smoke fake marijuana — sometimes called K2 or spice — versus the real and safer McCoy served up from mother nature? To pass employers’ urine drug tests? To avoid being detected as easily as cops can detect marijuana’s unique stink when smoked?...
Jimmy Carter’s first drug czar on the shift from treating to criminalizing drugs
Thanks to my colleague who posted this fascinating 2000 interview with Jimmy Carter’s first drug czar, Peter Bourne, who claims: – With Reagan came a major federal law shift — supported by people at the DEA — from heavily focusing on treatment for illegal drugs...
When police do not arrest at a HempFest – That future is now in Washington state
Imagine a hemp festival where the music is playing, many in the crowd are smoking marijuana, the police are not interfering with their marijuana enjoyment, and the police are even handing out free bags of munchies (albeit with a label inviting a visit to a...
Obama pays lipservice about the injustice of the drug war. What will he deliver?
Why has Barack Obama, through Attorney General Holder, waited over four years after he was first elected to admit as much as Holder did yesterday (verbatim here, at the ABA conference) (which was not enough of an admission, as it stands) about the injustice of the...
