2000: A Year in the Life of Marijuana Prohibition

As an activist/writer reporting on the drug war, I have had several dozen articles published since 1997 on the subject of U.S. drug policy, with an emphasis on marijuana prohibition.

"One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could." -Richard Cowan, former head of NORML, now editor of www.marijuananews.com

Estimated U.S. deaths in year 2000 attributed to: tobacco: 430,000; alcohol: 125,000; prescription drugs: 100,000; doctors' errors: 100,000; suicide: 30,000; murder: 18,000; aspirin: 2,000; marijuana: 0 Number of Americans arrested since 1970 on marijuana-related charges: over 13 million.

January 18, 2000 -- Atlanta, GA (AP) -- Louis E. Covar Jr., 51, a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident on July 4, 1967, who says he uses marijuana to relieve the pain from muscle spasms in his neck, is sentenced to seven years in prison after being accused of selling marijuana out of his home. Judge J. Carlisle Overstreet sent Covar to prison after investigators found marijuana in his home. "We feel strongly he was selling out of his house," Richmond County DA Danny Craig said. Covar denied the charges, insisting the small amount was for his personal medicinal use. According to the Department of Corrections, the special care Covar will need will cost $258.33 a day- or more than $660,000 if he serves his full seven years. A typical prisoner costs taxpayers $47.63 per day.

February 9 -- Arizona -- Deborah Lynn Quinn, 39, born with no arms or legs, is sentenced to one year in an Arizona prison for marijuana possession, violating probation on a previous drug offense- attempted sale of 4 grams of marijuana to a police informant for $20. Quinn will require around the clock care for feeding, bathing, and hygiene.

Terry L. Stewart, Arizona Corrections Director, expressed his frustration: "I simply cannot understand how a judge can sentence a disabled woman to prison who presents absolutely no escape risk, no physical danger to the public, and who will be an extremely difficult and expensive person to care for ($345/day), without exploring any alternative sentence measures such as intensive probation."

February 15 -- The United States' prison and jail population surpasses two million people. Prisons are one of the fastest-growing expenses of government, costing about $100,000 to build a single prison cell and about $24,000 per year for each prisoner. 1.3 million US inmates are currently serving time for "non-violent offenses." One-quarter of the world's prisoners are now incarcerated in the "land of the free."

February 23 -- The Hawaii Medical Association comes out formally against the pending state medical marijuana initiative. Heidi Singh, director of legislative and government affairs for the Hawaii Medical Association, said more studies should be done on medical marijuana, and that "physicians cannot in good faith recommend a drug therapy without clinical evidence to back it up."

February 28 -- Madrid, Spain (UPI) The chemical in marijuana that produces a "high" shows promise as a weapon against deadly brain tumors, say Spanish researchers in early research. In the study on rats a research team from Complutense University and Autonoma University in Madrid found that one of marijuana's active ingredients, THC, killed tumor cells in advanced cases of glioma, a quick-killing cancer for which there is currently no effective treatment. Spanish scientists found that THC pumped into the tumors cleared the cancer in more than a third of the test rats. The drug also prolonged the life of another third by up to 40 days but was ineffective in the rest. The cancer did not come back in any of the survivors. Researchers are not sure why, but Guzman's team says THC caused a buildup of a fat molecule called ceramide, which provoked a death spiral in the cancer cells.