Oy!

President Obama capped a three-day visit to Latin America on Saturday by urging the region’s leaders to fight the drug war not with more guns or military aid but with greater investment in infrastructure, education and energy.

Two things:

1) The cocaine cowboys don’t care about infrastructure. They have the billions to build their own tunnels and landing fields.

They are ruthless, murdering animals who execute entire families if it suits their purpose. Even if you ask them not to, pretty please with sugar on top. [gruesome photo here]

2) Obama went on discuss the importance of trade. But his party held up ratification of the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement President Bush for years. It wasn’t until 2011 that the deal was signed.

Michael Bloomberg defended his new policy that will limit pain killers in city run emergency rooms.

“Oh then maybe there won’t be enough painkillers for the poor who use the emergency rooms as their primary care doctor,’” the mayor said on his weekly radio show with John Gambling.

“Number one, there’s no evidence of that.

How could there be? The policy is brand new.

Number two, supposing it is really true so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. The other side of the coin is people are dying and there’s nothing perfect… There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer and it’s always the same group [claiming], ‘Everybody is heartless.’ Come on, this is a very big problem.”

By that reasoning, his gun control measures are foolish because they attempt to make perfect (no gun deaths) by imposing laws. And those very laws may actually cause more innocent people to die at the hands of criminals.

That’s not just heartless, it is stupid.

That’s ABC’s headline. Ha ha ha.

Barack, onetime leader of his “Choom Gang” (his sole executive experience prior to POTUS), seems to have suddenly discovered federalism.

President Obama says recreational users of marijuana in states that have legalized the substance should not be a “top priority” of federal law enforcement officials prosecuting the war on drugs.

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Obama said of pot users in Colorado and Washington during an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Barbara Walters.

“It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal,” he said, invoking the same approach taken toward users of medicinal marijuana in 18 states where it’s legal.

I agree about pot.

But what are his DOJ’s top priorities? Digging into Jon Corzine’s business failure? Corruption within his own government?

No, not Coca-Cola.

A female politician has been arrested in Brazil – for allegedly handing out cocaine with her election leaflets.

Carme Cristina Lima, 32, was running to be a city councillor in Itacoatiara, in the northern state of Amazonas.

Police became suspicious when they saw a crowd allegedly gathering around Ms Lima’s car on the morning of the election day.

Officers searched her car and allegedly found hundreds of packets of cocaine attached to the candidate’s leaflets with instructions on how to vote for her.

Gawd, this is stunningly bad. The Houston Chronicle reports:

The phone rang before sunrise. It woke Craig Patty, owner of a tiny North Texas trucking company, to vexing news about Truck 793 – a big red semi supposedly getting repairs in Houston.

“Your driver was shot in your truck,” said the caller, a business colleague. “Your truck was loaded with marijuana. He was shot eight times while sitting in the cab. Do you know anything about your driver hauling marijuana?”

“What did you say?” Patty recalled asking. “Could you please repeat that?”

The truck, it turned out, had been everywhere but in the repair shop.

Commandeered by one of his drivers, who was secretly working with federal agents, the truck had been hauling marijuana from the border as part of an undercover operation. And without Patty’s knowledge, the Drug Enforcement Administration was paying his driver, Lawrence Chapa, to use the truck to bust traffickers.

At least 17 hours before that early morning phone call, Chapa was shot dead in front of more than a dozen law enforcement officers – all of them taken by surprise by hijackers trying to steal the red Kenworth T600 truck and its load of pot.

In the confusion of the attack in northwest Harris County, compounded by officers in the operation not all knowing each other, a Houston policeman shot and wounded a Harris County sheriff’s deputy.

Still waiting

But eight months later, Patty still can’t get recompense from the U.S. government’s decision to use his truck and employee without his permission.

His company, which hauls sand as part of hydraulic fracturing operations for oil and gas (more…)

LA Times columnist David Lazarus finds another instance of  “corporate greed.” He never fails.

Darby Ziegler stopped by her local Walgreens drugstore in Huntington Beach the other day to refill a prescription. She got her meds — and some surprising news.

Beginning Jan. 1, Walgreens will no longer fill prescriptions for Anthem Blue Cross members, meaning that they’ll have to switch to another drugstore if they want their insurance to keep covering their meds.

“My husband and I have been going to this Walgreens for 10 or 12 years,” said Ziegler, 43. “They don’t even have to look us up on the computer. They know us. We have a personal relationship.”

Yes, she could take her business to CVS or some other pharmacy if she had to. But Ziegler said this would be less convenient than going to her nearby Walgreens. She also resents being told where to shop.

“It’s just like all the rate increases for our insurance,” Ziegler said. “All they care about are profits.”

In this case, though, it’s not the insurance giant calling the shots. Instead, it’s Anthem’s pharmacy benefit manager, a St. Louis company called Express Scripts Inc.

My family is covered by Anthem Blue Cross. Our co-pay for meds is $15.

If I buy directly via Express Scripts, I receive a 90-day supply versus 30 days from one of the local pharmacies. I order via phone or the web and they mail my meds to me.

They’re efficient and cheap.

But if I wanted to pay three times as much at Walgreens come January, I won’t be able to.

Oh, the humanity!

I’m an admirer of Ken Kesey’s novels. And at one time, I thought he was about the coolest guy out there.

So I read about a documentary about The Merry Prankster’s legendary cross country trip with keen interest. The filmmakers had lots of scratched and crummy home movies to work with.

“It didn’t help that they were doing drugs, in terms of getting the shots to last more than a few seconds,” says Ms. Ellwood, co-director of “Magic Trip” a documentary comprised of the footage, to be released Aug. 5.

Much of the footage was scratched from being run through projectors at Prankster-hosted parties. Once the film was restored—a project undertaken by UCLA with grants from Martin Scorsese’s foundation and the History Channel—the filmmakers combed through the footage in an attempt to sync the audio and 16 mm film. They hired a lip reader, who helped mark “sync points” with the audio, like a long sequence featuring driver Neal Cassady on a signature stream-of-consciousness riff.

So they stitched together a film from the messy bits.

A bigger challenge was trying to find an overarching theme for the disparate scenes. “It looks like a bunch of people having a lot of fun and getting messed up. How do you give that a deeper meaning?” Ms. Ellwood recalls thinking. Mr. Kesey answered that question, in a segment that the Pranksters shot at Yellowstone National Park. Viewing a sign that says “Beware of Bear,” Mr. Kesey said that this used to mean “be aware of the bear,” but now meant “be afraid of the bear.”

The directors realized that the entire journey could be viewed as a reaction to the fear that gripped the nation in 1964, following the assassination of President Kennedy and amid ongoing threat of nuclear war.

Huh? They dropped acid and had a rolling party because of JFK and the nuclear threat?

Oh, please.

Authorities have determined a man who was stabbed and beheaded in a suburban Phoenix apartment was killed for stealing drugs from a Mexican cartel, in a gruesome example of drug cartel violence spilling over the border.

Martin Alejandro Cota-Monroy, 38, stole 400 pounds of marijuana and some meth from a drug cartel while telling the cartel that the drugs had been seized by the Border Patrol, according to a Chandler police report released Wednesday.

The cartel found out Cota-Monroy had actually stolen the drugs and hired men to kidnap and kill him in Nogales, Mexico. But Cota-Monroy was able to talk his way out of being killed, saying he’d pay back the money and use his house for collateral, the report says.

But the house wasn’t Cota-Monroy’s and he fled to the Phoenix area, leading the cartel to hire assassins to go to Arizona, befriend Cota-Monroy and kill him.

Amy Stewart, author and owner of an antiquarian book store in Humboldt County, California, received an envelope with eight ounces of primo weed, a local crop.

The growers — and apparently mail order merchants — had exceeded the weight limit and used her store as a return address.

At first we couldn’t believe our luck. Rare book dealers are in the business of buying low and selling high, but never had we had the opportunity to take that phrase quite so literally. Anyone else might have been inclined to keep the package for personal use, but we’re shopkeepers facing a busy holiday season. We can’t afford to let the next few weeks drift away in a cloud of smoke.

Being retailers, we weren’t immune to the temptation to sell our windfall. One of our regular customers walked in just after we’d opened the package; he offered us enough cash to cover our rent through the end of the year. But although medical marijuana laws and a tolerant attitude by law enforcement make the drug practically legal here, we weren’t quite ready to take the next step and start dealing from behind the counter.

Strangely enough, though, the idea that a bookstore could keep itself in business by selling marijuana might explain why someone chose to put our return address on the package to begin with.

Two months ago, a local weekly, The Arcata Eye, asked if it could run an excerpt from a novel I had written a few years ago in which digital books had become so popular that bookstores everywhere were forced to shut their doors. Only one remained open: a creaky old antiquarian bookstore in northern California much like my own. The shop, finding itself in the national spotlight, could no longer hide the fact that it had been selling something other than books for years.

Soon the story about the bookstore that tucks marijuana between the pages of old books appeared in The Eye; it was part of a fictionalized series about life in cannabis country that ran as the state debated the failed referendum, Proposition 19, which would have allowed licensed retailers to sell marijuana to people over 21 for recreational use.

So the pot merchants chose her address as either an homage or inside joke.

We called the police and asked them to come pick it up. This is a laughable move in Humboldt — it was difficult to persuade the officer to bother making the trip down to the store at all — but we realized that we needed to establish some sort of plausible deniability before a drug-sniffing dog got a whiff of another package with our address on it.

Big Brother lives.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania recently filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of a couple whose newborn baby was kidnapped by Lawrence County Children and Youth Services (LCCYS) because her mother recklessly consumed an “everything” bagel from Dunkin’ Donuts the day before the birth.

Jameson Hospital, where Isabella Rodriguez was born on April 27, has a policy of testing expectant mothers’ urine for illegal drugs and reporting positive results to LCCYS, even without any additional evidence that the baby is in danger of neglect or abuse. LCCYS, in turn, has a policy of seizing such babies from their homes based on nothing more than the test result.

Unfortunately for Isabella’s parents, Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez, Jameson sets the cutoff level for its opiate test so low that it can be triggered by poppy seeds, which is why two caseworkers and two Neshannock Township police officers visited their home the day after baby and mother returned from the hospital. LCCYS seized the three-day-old girl and put her in foster care for five days before conceding it had made a mistake.

Leo Banks

Listening to the national uproar, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Arizona has marched into the civil rights apocalypse with its new state law cracking down on illegal immigrants.

Last Friday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB1070, making it a crime to be in the state illegally and requiring cops, where “reasonable suspicion” exists, to determine a person’s legal status.

Rev. Al Sharpton is promising to come to Arizona to march, the New York Times says that the state has gone “off the deep end,” and the Nazi references are flying. Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony likened SB1070 to “German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques.”

Riding the noise for political advantage, President Obama is summoning his Justice Department to look into the matter, saying that the law would “undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.”

But 70 percent of Arizona residents support the law, according to Rasmussen.

What’s going on here? Do we know something the rest of the country doesn’t?

Actually, we do. Context is everything, and it’d be nice if the national media provided some, rather than simply slamming Arizona as a redneck haven filled with nativists and bubbas with a hankering for racial profiling.

An estimated 500,000 illegal aliens live in Arizona, and many are decent folks, to be sure. But the border is still wide open, and many more are coming. Last year in Border Patrol’s 262-mile-wide Tucson Sector, agents arrested 241,000 illegal aliens, a drop of more than 130,000 from 2007.

It sounds great until you understand that gotaways outnumber arrests by three to one.

Does the country realize this, or have the people bought Janet Napolitano’s political fairy tale that border security has been “transformed” from where we were in 2007?

As Obama lectures Arizona, citizens here await his decision on an urgent request to send three thousand National Guard troops to the border. Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl (more…)

First of a three-part series in the LA Times about retailing black tar heroin in the US.

Immigrants from an obscure corner of Mexico are changing heroin use in many parts of America.

Farm boys from a tiny county that once depended on sugar cane have perfected an ingenious business model for selling a semi-processed form of Mexican heroin known as black tar.

Using convenient delivery by car and aggressive marketing, they have moved into cities and small towns across the United States, often creating demand for heroin where there was little or none. In many of those places, authorities report increases in overdoses and deaths.

Immigrants from Xalisco in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit, Mexico, they have brought an audacious entrepreneurial spirit to the heroin trade. Their success stems from both their product, which is cheaper and more potent than Colombian heroin, and their business model, which places a premium on customer convenience and satisfaction.

Users need not venture into dangerous neighborhoods for their fix. Instead, they phone in their orders and drivers take the drug to them. Crew bosses sometimes call users after a delivery to check on the quality of service. They encourage users to bring in new customers, rewarding them with free heroin if they do.

David Ferrell in the LA Weekly writes “Weed Takes Root”

These are not your run-of-the-mill potheads jammed into the long, narrow classroom at Oaksterdam University, a tiny campus with no sign to betray its location on busy San Vicente Boulevard south of the Beverly Center. A serious vibe fills the loftlike space, where rows of desks are arranged like church pews under exposed ducts. No one clowns around or even smiles much. Instead, eyes fix intently on a screen at the front of the darkened room.

Projected there is a photograph of a healthy marijuana plant under an array of lights. Tonight’s subject, Cannabis 101: growing the weed in indoor gardens. It’s delicate alchemy, as most of these students, who range in age from their early 20s to nearly 60, already know. During the 13-week semester, many tend and keep notes on their own clandestine nurseries in bedrooms and garages scattered around Los Angeles.

Encouraged by instructors, and by the prospects of staking out ground-floor positions in the emerging world of “cannabusinesses,” they cultivate popular varieties of bud while experimenting with soils, temperatures and light sources.

From the rear of the room, a baritone voice pipes up — a student remarking on the crystalline texture of the leaves when the plants are raised under light-emitting diodes.

“With the LEDs, it just looks way frostier than anything under the high-pressure sodium,” he says.

Details get technical, as in any science class, but the larger lesson is clear to see. Here, as in many other places across America, the future of cannabis is being sown — and, make no mistake, it is a future high on promise.

The Left snickers at the idea of evil, but here it is in bold relief.

The young marine received the highest military honors that the Mexican state could offer. Killed during a raid that ended the life of a notorious drug lord, the marine was buried a hero, ushered to his grave by an honor guard of commandos in camouflage, his mother awarded a folded flag.

Hours later, the grieving mother, the marine’s sister, his brother and an aunt were mowed down by gunmen in a revenge attack that sent a chilling message to the Mexican military combating drug traffickers.

The slaughter of Melquisedet Angulo Cordova’s family early Tuesday horrified Mexicans seemingly inured to a drug-war brutality that has claimed more than 15,000 lives in three years of spectacular violence. The killing, especially, of a mother seemed to violate the most basic code of conduct that even coldblooded hit men and traffickers obeyed.

And then there are coldblooded regimes that murder their citizens in the streets.

Doc Ellis was something of a loose cannon.

Tip: don’t set up your pot farm 25 feet from a police station.

Credit police canines, of sorts, for the arrest of three men Wednesday in connection with a warehouse crammed with 850 pot plants.

Twenty-five feet behind the LAPD’s Topanga Station.

The afternoon bust was made a week after an LAPD Gang Impact Team whiffed evidence coming from the building at at 8411 Canoga Ave.

“Our gang officers were in the parking lot. The air was still. The breeze was right. They could smell growing pot,” said Los Angeles police Lt. Stephen M. Carmona, commander of detectives at the Topanga station.

“They came over, did a closer search, did some sniffing around, so to speak.”

On Wednesday evening, detectives mingled with other officers inside a crime scene taped off in the alley behind the station.

Not 25 feet from an 8-foot wall along the cop shop was an industrial warehouse that Carmona said contained 850 marijuana plants of different sizes.

LA Times show what happens with half measures. Pot should be either legal and regulated or illegal.

Reporting from Hayfork, Calif. — Education has long been preached as a way to keep kids away from drugs. It’s the walk to school that has Supt. Tom Barnett worried.

This hardscrabble Northern California town has become a hotbed for medical marijuana farming. Kids stroll much of the year past pungent plants flourishing in gardens and alleys. The red-and-black clad Timberjacks football team moved its halftime huddle on a recent Friday night to avoid the odor of marijuana smoke wafting over the gridiron from nearby houses. Some students talk openly of farming pot after graduation, about the only opportunity in this depressed timber town.

“It’s not a subculture here,” said Barnett, who heads the Mountain Valley Unified School District. “Marijuana is drying in their houses. It’s falling out of their pockets.”

Los Angeles isn’t the only place struggling with repercussions unleashed by its permissive medical marijuana laws. Here in Trinity County, cannabis cultivation is upending the rural culture and economy of one of the state’s most hard-luck regions.

Drawn by the sunny, cool climate — and a local ordinance permissive of medical marijuana farming and possession — big-city refugees have brought a decidedly urban edge to hamlets such as Hayfork, about 60 miles west of Redding.

This town has no stoplights. No home mail delivery. Nearly a quarter of its 1,900 residents are poor. But that hasn’t stopped outsiders from bidding up the price of real estate with sun-soaked southern exposures, all the better to cultivate plants that can grow 12 feet high or taller.

The sheriff’s office estimates 10,000 plants are growing in a single remote subdivision known as Trinity Pines. Lots on its southwest-facing slope sell for as much as $50,000, up from about $3,500 five years ago, according to Steven Hanover, an area real estate broker.

Fall harvest season brings strangers with dreadlocks and cash boxes. Some farmers guard their crops with electric fences, razor wire and snarling dogs. Hikers have been threatened at gunpoint for wandering too close to where they aren’t wanted.

“It’s just torn the fabric of our society,” said Judy Stewart, a 69-year-old retiree who has lived in Trinity County for more than 50 years. “It’s pitted people against one another.”

Obama does something sensible.

Federal drug agents won’t pursue pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers in states that allow medical marijuana, under new legal guidelines to be issued Monday by the Obama administration.

Two Justice Department officials described the new policy to The Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law.

The guidelines to be issued by the department do, however, make it clear that agents will go after people whose marijuana distribution goes beyond what is permitted under state law or use medical marijuana as a cover for other crimes, the officials said.

The new policy is a significant departure from the Bush administration, which insisted it would continue to enforce federal anti-pot laws regardless of state codes.

Don’t forget the Clinton administration, which threatened doctors with loss of their prescribing authority to even discuss medical marijuana with patients.

…scientists at the University of Minnesota have identified the genes in cannabis that allow the plant to produce THC. Finding the genes opens the path to either create drug-free hemp plants for industrial purposes, or to develop plants with much higher concentrations of the psychotropic chemical.

Hmm.

The evil food industry could breed special stoner potato chips where the more you eat, the hungrier you get.

Or perhaps there really will be a reason to smoke banana peels.

His AG announced that the feds will no longer raid pot dispensaries in states where pot is legal. This right for a couple of reasons:

• states should have the right to determine their own drug laws
• pot is relatively harmless and is certainly less destructive than alcohol
• it’s a waste of public funds to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate pot users
• the “war on drugs” should be renamed the “Gangster Full Employment Act” for creating profit opportunities for thugs. This decision is a step in the right direction.

Michael Phelps doesn’t seem to be in much hot water with his sponsors despite being photographed inhaling from a marijuana pipe. From apparel company Speedo to luxury Swiss watchmaker Omega, several sponsors are standing by the 23-year-old swimming phenom — at least for now — and have accepted his public apology. Other big companies, like Visa Inc., Subway and Kellogg Co., aren’t talking yet.

Experts say if Phelps doesn’t stick to the straight and narrow, he could hurt his chances at future endorsements. And there’s no guarantee he won’t be dropped quietly once the furor dies down.

Gerard Vanderleun:

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for a little toke every now and then. Somewhere legal, like, man, say in Amsterdam. Not that I see, smell, or smoke the “Devil’s weed wherein lurks murder, insanity, death” frequently, if at all, any more. I don’t look for it, but if some smouldering spliff comes my way, well….

All the same as a (reformed) card-carrying member of the original Berkeley/Haight Hippies, I have had my share of smoke so powerful it could, as we once said, cause “the baby Jesus to open your mind and shut your mouth.” I have been in rooms in Paris where the leaders of the Columbia student protests of 1968 stuffed up all the windows and doors of a cheap hotel room and lit an entire kilo on fire. And then we all stood in the smoke until it drove us out of the room. I’ve known people who smuggled 5 keys of Afghan hash into the country disguised as a carved wooden table.

We worked on that one with a cabinet-maker’s plane for about six months. I’ve done radio shows where the fans would mail us joints to make the music that much more interesting. I’ve sat on a floor with a man so stoned and yet so adept that he took about twenty papers and rolled, perfectly, an entire orange right down to the twisted ends. I’ve been to the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. Twice. I can’t even talk about the entire front garden of weed that we accidently planted in Venice, California. It grew to about six feet tall before anybody got straight enough to notice it wasn’t “calendula.” We hung the plants head down in the garage for a month waiting for them to dry. We spent a lot of time in that garage. We wired it for sound.

…then you need not read this story.

A once clandestine counterculture pot-smoking “holiday” observed each April 20 has crossed into the mainstream this year with public gatherings that will attract thousands of participants and marketing campaigns that tout a trio of marijuana-themed movies.

As anti-drug activists chafe, the so-called “420” (pronounced “four-twenty”) celebrations “are taking on a life of their own,” said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws, who has been working on marijuana issues for 17 years.

I am often baffled by the resistance of conservatives to drug-policy reform, but encouraged by the willingness of many to reassess their views once they have heard the evidence. Conservatives who oppose the expansion of federal power cannot look approvingly on the growth of the federal drug-enforcement bureaucracy and federal efforts to coerce states into adopting federally formulated drug policies.

Those who focus on the victimization of Americans by predatory criminals can hardly support our massive diversion of law-enforcement resources to apprehending and imprisoning nonviolent vice merchants and consumers. Those concerned with over-regulation can hardly countenance our current handling of methadone, our refusal to allow over-the-counter sale of sterile syringes, our prohibition of medical marijuana.

IBD:

When a great American company offers a medicine that lengthens the lives of hundreds of millions of people, you might think politicians would say thank you. Instead they say: How dare you advertise it.

Pfizer has just been pressured by Congress into dropping its main ad campaign for the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor, arguably the most popular medicine in the world and with very good reason.

Lipitor can lower the deadly artery-clogging substance by as much as 60% and, when combined with regular exercise and a low-fat diet, prevents heart attacks and sudden deaths.

Companies who do so much for so many deserve plaudits. But liberal politicians never rest in their search for corporate villains, and so they have demonized the pharmaceutical industry, just as they have an oil and gas industry that spends billions developing new technologies to reach crude and natural gas deposits that were inaccessible only a few years ago.

Just as Congress’ big shots have no appreciation for how “Big Oil” can cut our dependence on oil-rich enemy countries, they’re equally ungrateful for how “Big Pharma” cures and manages disease.

In his research on productivity and health care for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Columbia business professor Frank R. Lichtenberg found a direct connection between new drug approvals and rapidly increased longevity.

Lichtenberg reckons the average new drug approval adds a total of 1.2 million years to the lives of current and future generations. With it costing the pharmaceutical industry about $500 million to bring a new drug to market, Lichtenberg extrapolated that the “cost per life-year gained is $424″ — just a fraction of the economic value of a single year of a person’s life of $150,000, cited by Lichtenberg based on calculations by University of Chicago economics professors Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel.

Drug manufacturers such as Pfizer have been performing such incalculably valuable services to Americans and the rest of the world for generations.

It may have been the disorganized Alexander Fleming who won the Nobel Prize for accidentally discovering penicillin in 1928. But he actually failed to recognize its importance and abandoned his discovery. Pfizer, with its expertise in fermentation, mass produced the new wonder drug in response to an appeal from the U.S. government, saving multitudes of Allied forces in World War II.

Vending machines have long been used to hawk everything from Skittles and sandwiches to juice and java, but now one is being used to offer a new product: medical marijuana.

Not just anyone can pop some coins in and get some bud. The machine, developed by Los Angeles medical-marijuana dispensary owner Vincent Mehdizadeh, gives up to an ounce of pot per week only to preapproved patients.

The specialized machine installed Monday at Herbal Nutrition Center – a medical-marijuana dispensary on La Cienega Boulevard – requires fingerprint identification as well as a special prepaid card.

“I wanted to take steps to benefit the industry,” said Mehdizadeh, who owns two dispensaries. “We have legitimate patients that need us.”

Indeed. Our most counter-productive laws are drug prohibition laws, especially against pot. Criminalizing weed that might ease someone’s pain just because someone else might get a giggle from it is cruel.

Still, this entrepreneur might want to rebrand his five kinds of marijuana:

…Platinum Kush, Fire O.G., Bubba Kush, Purple Kush and Wild Cherry.

Doesn’t sound like medicine. Someone pass the Screaming Yellow Zonkers.

John Tierney:

I recommend a couple of articles chronicling the unintended consequences of the war on drugs. One, by Ethan Nadelmann, is a global look at the damage done by prohibitionist policies. The other, by Radley Balko, is a look at a doctor convicted for prescribing opioids — and this case is in some ways more troubling than the Hurwitz case that I’ve been writing about.

Dr. Nadelmann’s article is the cover story of Foreign Policy magazine, which summarizes the article’s findings with large lettters on the cover: “Legalize It: Why It’s Time to Just Say No to Prohibition.” Dr. Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, shows how America has exported its preoccupation with drugs to the rest of the world, harming other countries and financing terrorists that pose a threat to America. (Not that this narco-financed threat seems to matter much in Washington. After 9/11, Americans were told that we had to revise our assumptions about the world — and about little things like civil liberties — but the drug prohibitionists in Washington don’t seem to have revised their thinking one whit.)

And use the opium for medical purposes.

A British company is trying to recruit farmers to grow opium poppies to meet the urgent need to stockpile more supplies of diamorphine should its production be disrupted by an outbreak of pandemic flu. At the same time British troops are fighting and dying in Afghanistan to disrupt the Taleban’s control of the soaring opium harvest that has made Afghanistan overwhelmingly the source of heroin now flooding into Britain and Western Europe.

The failure to halt this deadly trade is one of the factors fuelling the violence, impoverishing the debt-burdened farmers and entrenching the warlords and Taleban fighters in a swath of southern Afghanistan. It is, surely, also a terrible indictment of policy-makers in Kabul, in Nato capitals and in the United Nations who could transform the poppy harvest from a scourge to a blessing but have failed to do so.

Afghanistan is now awash with opium. Production has risen by around 15 per cent since 2006, with some 457,000 acres under cultivation compared with last year’s total of 408,000, according to US data. More than 92 per cent of all heroin sold in Europe originates in Afghanistan, and the proportion is still rising. Helmand province alone, where British forces are deployed against Taleban fighters, accounts for a third of the crop.