Lots of links worth exploring and little time to blog about each, so as sometimes happens, here's a nice long list. Click away, and have a great weekend.

1) Our very own Bill Piper, director of national affairs, is quoted in a pretty good USA Today article on drugged driving. (USA Today for $.50: buy every time you fly. USA Today for $.75: buy when you fly on someone else's dime.)

2) Jules Siegel, at times of Playboy, the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, has a good post at the NarcoSphere on the drug war and the left. Al Giordano has a good reply that veers to attack a host of groups, including "economic 'libertarians' who, knowing that rich folk don't get prosecuted for drugs in the U.S., go on voting for the guys who will lock up the poor and the non-white while giving tax-breaks to the wealthy potheads and appointing pro-tyranny judges." Sigh. I tried.

3) John Walters talks about sex.

4) Echoing Afghani and South American farmers, cannabis growers in one Indian city are demanding compensation and jobs after their government came in and destroyed their livelihoods, reports Kerala News.

5) A political science major at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, writing in the school's Manitou Messenger, comes out for medical-marijuana initiatives under consideration by voters in Oregon and Montana but against the marijuana-decrim initiative before voters in Alaska. So far, two commenters have opposed his stance on the Alaska measure. (An aside: Betty White's character on the Golden Girls, Rose, was from a Minnesota city named St. Olaf. Click here to play Rose's St. Olaf Games and here to reminisce about the show.)

6) You'll find good drug-policy posts at Vice Squad, Last One Speaks, Grits for Breakfast, decrimwatch, and (last but certainly not least) Drug WarRant.

It takes some pretty big ones to do this.

Advice on kids and drugs from yesterday's Dear Abby advice column.

Dear Abby:

I am employed by a national company to tutor high school students, one-on-one.

For various reasons, I suspect that one of my students -- with whom I meet every one or two weeks -- may be smoking pot.

From a professional perspective, I feel this is none of my business. From a personal perspective, and as a parent myself, I am agonizing over whether I should bring my suspicions to the attention of his parent.

If I were his parent, I would certainly want to know.

Then again, my suspicions could be wrong. What is the ethical thing to do?

Unsure in Concord, Calif.

Your student's welfare IS your business. It's refreshing to know that someone is debating the "ethical" thing to do these days. If media reports are accurate, they lead us to believe that ethics have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Before approaching your student's parent, talk to the boy about your concerns. His problem may be something other than pot. At least give him a chance to explain. However, if your suspicions persist, by all means tell his parent what you have told me. You'll be doing both of them a favor.

As a former tutor who worked with students I was sure were using drugs, I found the question and answer illuminating. It is indeed good that the tutor cared enough to ask the question, and that their first instinct was not to immediately rat out the kid to 1) the parents or 2) worse, the police.

Thinking of one high schooler I worked with, I did not bring up the issue with either him or the parents. Why? The kid -- a high-school junior -- had a couple of marijuana-leaf posters in his room, where his parents frequently entered. Right or wrong -- and I'm not claiming I'm right here -- I felt that his parents either knew about any pot use or didn't care enough to ask. Anyway, just my take on one student and drugs.

The Dear Abby post is here. Her ten-year-old appeal to legalize drugs is here.

Keith Stroup's goodbye letter, which has been kicking around for some time now and which I've already probably linked to at least once, is now making an appearance in High Times. Speaking of NORML, here's an excerpt from their newsletter:

Psytopia is an ALL-INCLUSIVE event in Jamaica on August 17th to the 22nd at Hedonism III and Breezer's Runaway Bay. The event will run 24/7 consisting of 14 bands, 21 Speakers, and 14 DJ's. Already there is an amazing line-up of talented speakers and musicians from around the globe and the list just keeps on growing. The best part is that 100% of the profits from this event will be donated to 5 charities. This year's charities are;

NORML http://www.norml.org

M.A.P.S. http://www.maps.org

Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors http://www.cosm.org

The Drug Policy Alliance http://www.drugpolicy.org

The Albert Hofmann Foundation http://www.hofmann.org

Jamaica, huh? News to me. But I'm looking forward to blogging about it from the beach. Read more about it -- and buy your tickets (one for you, one for me) -- here.

ONDCP has posted a new booklet on student-drug testing. "What You Need to Know About Starting a Student Drug Testing Program" is a pretty straightforward guide to implementing testing in schools. It's the kind of document that, if you read it, will only reinforce your existing ideas on drug testing. Against it? Read this and you'll still be an opponent. For it? Nothing to dissuade you here. On second thought, maybe there's something -- if you're open to a little critical analysis -- to make you change your mind.

Assessing your program's effectiveness

One important measure of success for a student drug-testing program is whether drug use at your school declines over time. Launching the program is only part of the process. It is essential that you also monitor the program closely and regularly by conducting surveys, watching for signs of progress...

So less drug use is the essential measure of progress, huh? And the program should be closely monitored? Fine by me. But who should do the assessing? According to ONDCP, "outside agencies" are one option:

[Q]uantitative data -- including the results of student surveys compared to your baseline data and the percentage of positive test results found each year during the course of your program -- will allow you to more definitively gauge your program's success. In some cases, schools have hired outside evaluators to review the progress of their programs.

Well slap my ass and call me Shirley! Could ONDCP be any more hypocritical? They've already been shown on numerous occasions to have failed and/or evaded their own measuring tools. For instance:

Drug Czar Cancels Misleading "Drugs & Terrorism" Ad Campaign: ONDCP Also to Stop Annual Evaluation that has Shown Anti-Drug Ads to be Ineffective

"Fuzzy Math" in New ONDCP Report

Facts on the Drug Czar's Accounting Fraud

Testing the Wrong Policy on Students

Read the offending text at the ONDCP website here, and get the whole report here.

In an interview broadcast on KGW-TV, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry gave a backhanded endorsement to state medical marijuana initiatives.

The federal government shouldn't interfere with medical marijuana and assisted suicide laws crafted and approved by Oregonians, Kerry said. These laws have come under legal challenge by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"Individual states have the right to make a decision until the federal government has made an alternative one, and we don't have the information to make that, period," Kerry said.

Worth noting:

• Oregon has a medical marijuana ballot initiative this fall, and Kerry didn't speak specifically to it.


• George W. Bush said essentially the same thing in 2000.

By now you know the Drug Policy Alliance cannot promote, support, attack or oppose candidates for federal office.

By now you also know nobody in the drug policy reform movement would shed many tears if Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) happened to lose his seat in the House of Representatives. Souder's committee appointment gives him wide latitude in prosecuting the "war on drugs," and it was his brilliant idea to take loans away from only those convicted of drug offenses... while allowing rapists and murderers to continue to get them.

Souder's in a relatively safe Indiana district. But any attempt to give him a bit of a contest or to debate his record would be welcome. Doesn't look like there will be a contest or a debate this year.

The Indianapolis Star reports that Souder's opponent, a first-time candidate named Maria Starra, literally walked out of their one debate because of stage fright.

In the first attempt to record the debate, Parra did not make it through her opening statement before leaving the set.

Officials asked observers to leave the room, and the taping began again.

Both made it through their opening statements, but when Parra was given a minute to respond to a question, she left her seat, saying, "I can't do this. I just can't do this. I'm sorry."

The debate was canceled, and probably won't be rescheduled.

Public speaking ain't easy, and I sympathize with Ms. Parra's predicament. But the idea that the number one drug warrior in Congress gets a free ride is just plain sad.

"This is the biggest expansion that I have ever been a part of," John Walters said.

Got your attention? Well, this story caught mine even though it's actually about a different John Walters. A township board not far from my wife's hometown is spending $2.9 million in tax breaks to create 12 jobs at a business that already exists. That's more than $20,000 per job for the next 12 years. Can you say corporate welfare, boys and girls?

A coalition led by Pooh, the Polar ice-cream-bar bear, that effeminate bear from the Snuggle commercials, the Berenstain Bears, Smokey the Bear and other prominent bears met this week to discuss the growing catastrophe of substance abuse in the bear community. The meeting comes on the heels of a series of news accounts which have led the country to believe bears are on the precipice of ruin from alcohol and drug abuse. Some recent headlines:

*Bear drinks 36 cans of favorite beer

*Thirsty bear finds stolen beer

*Reefer madness: Grizzly with penchant for human treats captured and marked

As if to amplify the problem, the pot-consuming bear in the latter story turns out to be just five years old!

As happens, the nihilistic news media has seized on this small set of isolated incidents in order to amplify them for the purpose of whipping the news-buying public into a frenzy. Not to be left behind, government and industry have stepped in to lend the illusion of support. Beer giant Coors, the brand of choice of many bears -- along with Rainier -- has started a $1 million fund to improve bear habitat. The administration of George W. Bear has promised hundreds of dollars for alcohol and drug treatment and pushed for $23 million in new funds to incarcerate drunken bears and another $23 million to launch a nationwide program to test all school-age black and brown bears for the presence of drugs and alcohol. (For some reason, polar bears are exempted.)

"The period right before hibernation is really the highest risk period for abuse in the bear community," said hunny czar John Walters, who had previously claimed that spring, summer, autumn, the mating season, the rainy season, and the annual salmon runs were the highest-risk periods for abuse. "Now is the time for papa and mama bears to exercise strong control over their cubs. Know what's in your cub's den, who they're going down to the river with. We've found that when you push back against the problem of drugs -- and by you I mean a heavily armed us -- then we'll tell you we need more money to fight the problem."

An Australian judge found a 70-year-old defendant guilty today of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl. But he didn't just find the defendant guilty.

"You have been described before me as an aged hippie," he told the man, who listened through earphones in the Supreme Court dock.

"It seems that too many aged hippies choose to wear rose-coloured glasses," Justice Teague said. "They choose not to see the wreckage caused by marijuana which is so often the evidence before sentencing judges."

Well, it seems to me that too many idiotic judges blame crimes on culture, drugs and anything but the actual culprit: the people who commit them. Nothing more. Nothing less.

More here from The Age.

The National African American Drug Policy Coalition (NAADPC) used a meeting at the National Press Club yesterday (I wish I'd known about this before it happened) to launch a five-year campaign for reform. The group's heavyweight leadership includes retired Washington, DC superior court judge Arthur Burnett and drug-policy pioneer and former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke. Group members include the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Executives, Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, National Bar Association and National Association of Black Psychologists.

On the local level, the group is targeting seven pilot cities: Baltimore; Washington; Chicago; Seattle; Huntsville, Ala.; Flint, Mich.; and another city to be named in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Smaller advisory groups will work to influence local judges and to lobby legislators.

"The drug courts are fine, but they are only dealing with an infinitesimal amount of people," said Burnett, a judge of 31 years, who helped advocate for drug courts years ago. "They don't have all the resources to deal with all the people who really need help. One of our big missions is to educate legislative bodies for more intensive and more elaborate treatment. To do that, they need more money."

Beyond reforming decades-old drug laws, Burnett wants to see black professionals play a larger role mentoring children in communities and keeping them out of the streets - and away from drugs.

Read more about the group here in the Baltimore Sun (subscription).

Tavis Smiley interviewed Judge Burnett and Clyde Bailey Sr. of NAADPC on his NPR show yesterday. Listen here.

[Update: Reader Trent (of Proximal Tubule fame) points out that Smiley missed the boat on the origins of the modern drug war -- blaming its genesis on Pres. Reagan. Trent traces it back to LBJ, one of our worst presidents, while I generally consider it the fault of Nixon, another of our worst presidents, who moved in the right direction in some ways and off the deep end in others.]

Check out this tour coming to a town near you: High Times magazine editor Steven Hager debating his buddy -- former DEA agent Robert Stutman. Last night, they filled a hall in Ellensburg, Wa. where they took sides in the drug war:

Hager and Stutman, who began the evening with video introductions of their lives, profess to be "very close personal friends," as they tour college campuses all over the nation. It was clear they had performed the debate many times before.

"Steve and I disagree on this issue," Stutman said. "But you'll never see us attack each other personally."

Hager presented his reasoning for legalization, emphasizing the usefulness of marijuana as a medicine with less side effects than prescription drugs and as a crop that was once used to create more than 20,000 different products.

Stutman responded with the lack of medical reports on the use of marijuana as a medicine, and on Europe's lack of interest in cultivating and utilizing hemp as a crop, even though it is a legal option there.

Though Hager said the use of marijuana was an important part of his spirituality and he should have religious freedom, Stutman said Hager and his friends only wanted to get high.

But since Stutman is friends with Hager, does that mean the former DEA counts himself among the I-just-want-to-get-high crowd? Just wondering.

Whole story, in the Daily Record, is here.

Interpolis, the Dutch insurer, says it plans to begin offering coverage to illegal cannabis growers who supply marijuana and hashish to the country's quasi-legal coffeeshops.

"If I have tomato growers as clients, why am I not allowed to insure cannabis growers?" [Interpolis director Alof] Wiechmann asked rhetorically. He also noted that Interpolis included several coffeeshops among its client base.

Wiechmann said his company was primarily concerned about safety issues. Illegal cannabis operations, often hidden in the attics of old houses, are a notorious fire hazard.

Cannabis growers often tamper with electrical systems to steal power for the strong lamps needed to help cultivate the illegal crops. Faulty or old wiring can and often does spark fires.

Sounds like harm-reduction-meets-the-free-market to me. More here on the proposal from the very cool Expatica. And read more about Interpolis here.

The mushrooming list of blogs monitoring the drug war from the Land of Lincoln (Drug WarRant, Vice Squad) includes -- as we've mentioned before -- the very good decrimwatch, which you'll see has been added to the links at left.

decrimwatch pointed out yesterday the court struggles of South Korean actress Kim Bu-seon, who smokes pot to ease glaucoma and a heart condition, to legalize its use. The former soft-porn star, who has five marijuana-possession arrests to her name, has garnered support from at least one rock star in the country. (No big surprise there.) But her efforts have important backers, reports The Korea Times.

"Scientifically, marijuana is just marijuana, a plant, as ginseng is just ginseng. It is neither a narcotic nor an addictive drug according to international agreements," Jeon Kyoung-soo, president of the Drug-Related Criminology Institute of Korea told The Korea Times.

From this point of view, Jeon said current law governing narcotics may be unconstitutional, as the actress Kim Pu-son insists.

Here's wishing Kim, star of such classics of film as 3 Memebrs, Decadence 37'2, Woman is a Fitful Wind and Prostitute's Fee, every success in her efforts.

(Note: Translating "Sex, drugs and rock & roll" into Korean and back into English using Babelfish yields "Characteristic, medicine and rock & list".)

A follow-up on the Alaska Lieutenant Governor's intervention into that state's marijuana ballot initiative process. Turns out supporters of Proposition 2 are now suing the Lite Gov.

I come from a state where one lieutenant governor resigned midterm, complaining of not having enough to do, and another tried to become a radio host before actually leaving to go work in academia. Heck, our state constitution didn't even have a replacement mechanism. So I understand that the pressures of the job can seem underwhelming at times. Lieutenant governors need to take on programs and policies all the time to stay busy and stay relevant. But the Prop. 2 supporters are suggesting that Loren Leman may have forsaken his one true responsibility (outside, of course, of being a hardbeat away from the governor's office):

"It's clear to us that he has crossed the line of neutrality, and if he has not directly violated his office, he most certainly has violated the spirit of his elected office," Hinterberger said.

No pamphlet statement on an initiative has ever before been prepared by the lieutenant governor's office and no side has ever been notified that they had that right, the lawsuit said.

"The only significant duty of the lieutenant governor is to run impartial elections and he can't even get that right," Hinterberger said.

Ouch.

Click here. Sox will win, and it will be good for the drug-policy-reform movement. I don't yet know why. Just trust me.

Updating this post last week, Scott from Grits for Breakfast headed out to Palestine, Tx. to look into a massive drug bust there. What'd he find?

First, all 72 defendants are black -- every last mother's son and daughter of them. In Tulia only 39 of the 46 were black. In Palestine, they've made it unanimous. While I wasn't given a complete list, a DA's employee showed me the full list while he was copying by hand the names he would give me. I had enough time to read down the race/gender column on both pages twice, just to make sure -- the list said B/M or B/F on every last one, including the names that weren't checked as releasable to me.

Second, many of the defendants have no significant criminal record. Although an assistant district attorney (who it turns out, went to my high school in Tyler) assured me that "these are people we see in and out of the system all the time," and that "we know these people," that wasn't true for the majority for whom we checked criminal records. More detail on that later from [Texas Observer reporter] Dave Mann.

Third, the records were still sealed, even for those already in custody!, including both the indictments and search warrant affidavits (which are supposed to public after they're executed except in "sneak and peek" searches by federal spooks). Neither the DA nor the drug task force would reveal information about the three residences and other property they claim to have seized. The DA's office promised to mail copies of all the indictments later this week, but it will probably take another trip or an open records request to get the other stuff.

There's lots more great analysis of this increasingly sickening case at Grits.

Drinking more than one cup of coffee a day can inflame the heart, a new Greek study claims.

Dr Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said people with high blood pressure are advised to reduce their intake of coffee.

But he said the increased risk revealed in the study was "modest" and unlikely by to raise the risk of heart disease significantly.

He added: "Cutting down on coffee is less likely to help people protect their heart health than other measures, such as taking regular exercise and eating a healthy, balanced diet."

And Zoe Wheeldon from the British Coffee Association, said: "While this new study is very interesting it should be taken in context and the overwhelming scientific evidence shows that coffee drinking in moderation, four to five cups per day, is perfectly safe for the general population and may confer health benefits."

I could find out tomorrow that coffee causes sudden death and it wouldn't make me drink any less than the 5-6 cups I do each day. Still, thankfully, this study -- like others before it -- seems like no cause for alarm. More here from the BBC.

The Derbyshire Drug Market Project, a three-year experiment centered around Derbyshire, England designed to combat drug use through a combination of tougher enforcement and drug treatment failed miserably, reports C4 News.

The number of dealers, the supply of heroin and the crime rate were all unaffected.

Oops. Professor Howard Parker, a Manchester University researcher hired to analyze the data, doesn't see much hope in urban or rural drug crackdowns.

However hard you blitz a town with enforcement, you can't close the supply of heroin and crack. A lot of people on the inside know that already but the drugs strategy kind of implies that we should be able to disrupt these markets in a significant way, and I think what we've realised is that we knew you couldn't do it in cities, and now we realise that you can't even do it in country towns.

The data cited are pretty astonishing:

• There are 10 thousand heroin/crack users in the county at any one time
• Their average heroin bill is around 10,000 [pounds] a year
• The retail heroin market's worth an estimated 82 million [pounds] a year
• The crack market is between 14-29 million [pounds] a year
• The estimated total annual income from the class A drug market in Derbyshire alone is around 100 million [pounds] a year

Read more from the Scottish and British governments on the Derbyshire Drug Market Project, and a mindless BBC piece on the results.

[Thanks to Danny for the tip.]

So it wasn't heroin after all. Earlier this week the Moscow News quoted Russian officials who claimed the terrorists who attacked a school in Beslan last month were hopped up on heroin and morphine. I said "no way." Not to say "I told you so" but, well, hey, I told you so. On Monday, I wrote:

I noticed a couple of red flags fly up in this article immediately. First, the article claims authorities found "high levels of heroin and morphine in most of the militants," but heroin turns into morphine in the body, so it's impossible to discern between the two. Second, tying alleged withdrawal symptoms to a refusal on the part of the terrorists to feed hostages is baffling absent any substantiation. Finally, the characterization of the terrorists as possessing superhuman abilities and remaining "very alert and capable of performing military tasks" while purportedly high on opioid "levels exceeding a deadly dose" is ridiculous. Opiates are known for causing dizziness, immobility, exhaustion, and a state of disassociation from the world around you -- superpowers aren't on the list.

Yesterday the Moscow News reversed itself with help from other Russian officials:

But Senator Alexander Torshin, who heads the Beslan investigation committee, told Ekho Moskvy radio Tuesday that heroin was not enough to produce that kind of behavior in the hostage-takers, and that they must have used new kinds of drugs.

In particular, Torshin cited the militants' ability to continue fighting despite being badly wounded and presumably in great pain.

"We got a response from the general prosecutor's office, which said the substance used was heroin," Torshin told the radio station. "But I'm not satisfied with the response, because we know pretty much about the effects of heroin, and about the effects of other narcotics."

"I think something absolutely new was used there," he added, speaking of the terrorists who reportedly ingested unknown substances during the siege.

So it's not heroin but "something absolutely new" that made the terrorists superhuman. Right. A new drug. The Russians have basically substituted one ridiculous theory with an even more ridiculous one, casting aside their own alleged blood-test evidence that all 31 attackers had heroin and/or morphine in their systems.

I will now repeat my comments from the earlier post: "There's no reason to believe anything the Russian government says about anything, nor is there any real press freedom in the backsliding country."

(Of course, getting one thing right doesn't make me infallable. As a reader points out, I also managed to spell the name of the city of Beslan in my original post as Breslan. Must have been thinking of this guy.)

The Moscow News article is here.

Several well-meaning community college students in Pennsylvania signed what they thought was a petition to legalize marijuana, only to find out later that they were actually registering to vote as Republicans.

"This is just very disheartening," said Plymouth resident Jennifer Fugo, a 24-year-old continuing education student who describes herself as a "victim of voter registration manipulation."

"Everyone is encouraging young people to register and vote and then they experience something like this," Fugo said Monday. "This is just outrageous."

I know the Alliance has Republican supporters. We've even placed full-page ads trying to attract more, and our executive director wrote a couple of great pieces for a top conservative magazine. Drug policy reform is officially a nonpartisan issue.

But the Republicans obviously knew they don't have a lot of marijuana legalizers in their midst, and that's why they chose this particular group for their voter fraud drive. And that's why this is the most subversive thing I've heard in a long time. It's akin to cruising colleges with "petitions to allow logging in national forests" that turn out to be Democrat voter registration forms.

Also, advice to college students out there in swing states: Put down the joint before you pick up that pen to sign something you haven't read.

Update: Apparently something similar is going on in Florida as well.

Update II: And strange things, courtesy of colleague Melissa, are afoot in Ohio.

Baylen's ailin' and left me to mind the store. A cornucopia of marijuana-related articles awaits our faithful readers this morning.

• Alaska's lieutenant governor overstepped his bounds and had his chief of staff write a statement opposing that state's marijuana ballot initiative for the official voter guide. The Lite Gov is supposed to be nonpartisan on ballot initiatives.


• A congressional candidate in Southern Virginia is running on a platform that includes marijuana decriminalization. His name? Al Weed. His story? Here.


• A Russian state senator suggests exporting marijuana to the Netherlands to save her region's troubled economy. In other news, Russian TV stations use really big microphone flags.


• ABC News has a good roundup of the different state medical marijuana initiatives voters will face this fall.

And finally, fun with sponsored links. A Google search for "marijuana" this morning revealed paid ads for what seems like a PBS-sponsored, thoughtful teen discussion board on the subject, along with one of those "please give us your email address in exchange for fabulous prizes" sites the restaurant industry has apparently decided to target to people who are interested in marijuana.

New York City will play host to two excellent book events this week. The first, tonight at the Whitney, will showcase the work of Anthony Papa, who took up painting in prison and is now also an author of the new book 15 To Life, as well as a tireless drug-policy-reform leader. A bit of background on Papa:

In 1985, Anthony Papa owned a radio repair business in the Bronx. He had a young daughter and bowled in a league in Yonkers. When one of his teammates asked if he wanted to make a quick $500 by delivering an envelope, Papa agreed. That single mistake cost him twelve years in Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison for 2,300 convicts on the banks of the Hudson River.

Although Papa had never been in trouble with the law, he was sentenced under New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws that mandate a 15-year-to-life sentence for selling two or possessing more than four ounces of a controlled substance.

"After spending 12 years in jail it would have been understandable if Tony never wanted to think about the Rockefeller Drug Laws again, but instead he went on to team up with Randy Credico and founded one of the most powerful and inspirational organizations in the country working to reform New York's racist drug laws," says Alliance communications director Tony Newman. "I am so proud of Tony Papa and everything he has done, and his book launch is going to be the hottest party in town!"

Learn more at Papa's book, art, and life at his website.

If you don't already have tickets to tonight's invite-only Papa event, you're out of luck. But not for long. Because a new book by High Times's Preston Peet -- Under the Influence -- will be feted on Thursday. Here's the info:

So, you're invited to an East Village book bash -- no stuffy readings, buy the damn book and read it yourself once you repossess your faculties -- to celebrate publication of Disinformation's latest well-schooled rant: Under the Influence: The Disinformation Guide to Drugs.

That's you and whatever emoluments you have at hand, Thursday, October 21, 9pm to 4am at swank-deluxe Uncle Ming's, in the heart of it all at 225 Avenue B (that's at 13th St. for you schmoes). Yeah, it's free. The drinks ain't, but they're cheap.

There will be go-go dancers and DJs. Peet's book contains writings by the likes of Dan Forbes, Jacob Sullum, Paul Krassner; Daniel Pinchbeck, Rick Doblin, Cynthia Cotts, Ethan Nadelmann, Mike Gray, Lonny Shavelson, Steven Wishnia, and others.

[Note: Thanks to Dan Forbes, who I inexplicably left off the initial author list, for the heads up.]

[Peet appeared on Dean Becker's Cultural Baggage recently. Listen here.]

Enjoy the elbow rubbing and culture (while not being subjected to the Yankess inevitable string of four losses)!

Russian government officials, having failed their country miserably during last month's tragic terrorist attack on a school in the city of Beslan, are working feverishly to lay blame on all the usual suspects. Having settled comfortably on the number of attackers of Arab origin (two, five, nine or ten, or ten), the government has now turned the spotlight on drugs.

The results of a forensic analysis showed that 31 Islamist militants who seized a school in Beslan last month and killed at least 330 people were drug addicts, a law enforcement official told Russian news agencies.

Blood tests showed high levels of heroin and morphine in most of the militants, who were killed when federal forces and angry parents stormed the school at the end of a three-day hostage drama.

The tests "indicate that they were long-term drug addicts and had been using drugs permanently while preparing for the terrorist attack," Nikolai Shepel, deputy prosecutor general of Russia's southern federal district, was quoted as saying by Interfax.

"Some of the terrorists had levels exceeding a deadly dose, which indicates they had gotten used to the substance, and were using it regularly while preparing for the attack," the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

Some of the terrorists were also suffering from withdrawal symptoms during the siege, as their supply of hard drugs ran out. The militants refused to give food or water to the children they were holding hostage for a period of nearly three days.

Alexander Torshin, who heads the parliamentary committee investigating the Beslan tragedy, told Interfax that the terrorists were insensitive to pain and fought on even after being shot several times. He said their use of drugs had made them immune to pain.

The test results confirmed reports of witnesses and survivors who said they saw the terrorists, who did not eat anything during the siege, taking substances. Witnesses, however, said the militants were also very alert and capable of performing military tasks.

There's no reason to believe anything the Russian government says about anything, nor is there any real press freedom in the backsliding country. I noticed a couple of red flags fly up in this article immediately. First, the article claims authorities found "high levels of heroin and morphine in most of the militants," but heroin turns into morphine in the body, so it's impossible to discern between the two. Second, tying alleged withdrawl symptoms to a refusal on the part of the terrorists to feed hostages is baffling absent any substantiation. Finally, the characterization of the terrorists as possessing superhuman abilities and remaining "very alert and capable of performing military tasks" while purportedly high on opioid "levels exceeding a deadly dose" is ridiculous. Opiates are known for causing dizziness, immobility, exhaustion, and a state disassociation from the world around you -- superpowers aren't on the list.

So there's no way to tell if these Russian government claims are in fact true. Regardless, drug-using terrorists are not novel, and the idea that drugs had anything to do with their horrific, murderous actions -- as the article clearly implies -- is absurd.

More about the drugs-and-terrorism link, in the Moscow News, is here. If you have a moment, read this chilling list of the victims of the Beslan attack here.

Those who attempted to downplay the horrible, racist 1999 drug bust in Tulia, Tx. -- in which nearly 15% percent of the town's African American residents were falsely arrested for drug crimes by a corrupt cop -- must be dusting off their tired excuses again. (It's an anomoly, They really were guilty, The cop was just doing his job, etc.)

Scott at Grits for Breakfast, a great new blog on the drug war coming to you straight outta Texas -- which has already earned a prestigious spot in the links section at left -- points to what could be an even more reprehensible drug bust eight hours away in Palestine, Tx. This time, the Feds are involved.

Most of what's wrong with drug task forces may be summed up by examining a recent, massive drug bust in Anderson County, TX by the Dogwood Trails task force that netted 72 defendants -- 56 charged in state court and 16 in federal court. Here's the DoJ press release bragging about it. That number dwarfs the 46 arrested in Tulia. It's so many they can't even fit them all in the county jail.

I grew up two counties over from Anderson in Tyler, TX, and can relate to readers that Anderson is quite a rural place. The notion that 72 crack dealers live there simply is absurd -- there's barely enough population density to support seven of them. (The blog Drug War Rant calculates that the entire Anderson County crack market, judging by federal statistics, totals about 165 people!)

Definitely check out the analyses by Grits and Pete.

In other news, it seems that the two candidates for sheriff in Palestine are classic law-and-order guys. One is calling for more drug arrests, the other is calling for building a bigger jail. Wonderful.

Finally, it's only a matter of time before this same thing happens in nearby Conroe, Tx. and, probably, in other cities and towns around the Lone Star State.

California's three-strikes law is the harshest in the nation. The law is responsible for handing down life sentences to a person convicted of having $2 worth of drugs, another who was caught with .04 grams of cocaine, another who stole $2.69 worth of batteries, another who stole a car's spare tire, and other ridiculously minor offenses.

Proposition 66, which will appear on the state's November 2 ballot, would help return the three-strikes law to the original intent meant by those who drafted it: locking up violent career criminals.

There's good news to report on the measure's likelihood of success. First, two-thirds of state voters support the measure. Second, it looks like the state's politically powerful prison officers' union -- many of whom could lose their jobs if the prison population declines because of a Prop 66 victory -- is having so much trouble finding support that it might be ready to admit defeat.

The state's correctional officers' union may be throwing in the towel on Proposition 66, conceding victory for the measure to weaken the "three strikes" sentencing law. With about two weeks left before the Nov. 2 election, the measure is enjoying support from two-thirds of likely voters, and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has been unwilling to put up the kind of money opponents need to run a television advertising campaign. Nor has it been able to find any other deep pockets to finance the opposition, including those belonging to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

If you live in California, your vote at the ballot box this November can help make sure your state stops arbitrarily throwing away the key on nonviolent offenders -- and in so doing save yourself and other taxpayers a pot of gold.

Read more coverage here, courtesy of the Sacramento Bee.