Don't miss New York Times Columnist Bob Herbert's Where Fear Rules the Street about the violence in South Central LA.

It's too bad that the Los Angeles City Council turned down Mayor James Hahn and Police Chief Bill Bratton's request for funds to hire additional officers.

The debate has centered on the allocation of $30 million, which Hahn felt should be used immediately to hire officers. The council majority believed it should go to provide insurance should the economy fail to recover as expected. The council says it will review the possibility of adding officers in January.

How many more kids will have been killed by then? While ordinarily we don't believe that hiring additional cops is an answer to the crime problem (versus spending money on prevention, education and treatment,) LA is a special circumstance. South Central is out of control, the murder rate is phenomenally high, and the conditions there are not safe for anyone.

Drug stamp taxes aren't new. But Iowa is making a killing on them. They've added some new twists and are raking in the dough.

Iowa law taxes all illegal drugs - from marijuana to cocaine. The state issues stamps, which vary in cost and color according to the drug, to be affixed to the drug to show the tax has been paid.

The stamps cost $5 a gram for marijuana, $750 per marijuana plant, $250 a gram for other drugs and $400 per 10 doses of drugs that come in tablet form, such as ecstasy. The minimum charge is $215.

Some may get a good chuckle out of the idea of drug users trotting down to the revenue department to buy a tax stamp - only seven batches of stamps have been sold (none were sold last year) - but the state is making a small fortune off of those who get caught without them.

In 2002, Iowa took in $1.3 million in drug stamp tax penalties and revenues.

In Iowa, failure to affix a drug stamp is punishable by up to five years in prison and a $7,500 fine - for those who aren't habitual offenders. The civil penalty is two times what the person would have paid to get a stamp; interest accrues at 7 percent a year from the day of assessment.

23 other states have a drug stamp tax but have not figured out how to implement it, without running into a probem with the fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination. In Iowa, it's not an issue: the purchasers of the stamps remain anonymous.

"If someone came in and purchased and it was obvious that they were making a purchase to actually put on their drugs, drug containers, we would not" call authorities, which the law prohibits, Mulvey said. "People come in to make a purchase, we keep our mouths shut

Iowa also wastes no money going after the indigent. They don't pursue those in prison or without assets. They did get $119k out of a college president. And they don't collect on out of state residents.

Protestors of the tax sound a familiar refrain: "No taxation without legalization."

Marijuana activist James Getman... attended "The Greater Mississippi River Valley Tea Party" held in Rock Island, Ill., about 10 years ago to protest the tax. "It was like the Boston tea party, we (were) rebelling against an unjust tax," said Getman, director of Iowa Norml, a nonprofit organization supporting the reform of marijuana laws.

However, Getman said, the group did not throw marijuana into the river in protest.

From Atrios we learn that we've won--we've finally overtaken Russia. The U.S. now has the largest prison population largest in world .

We have over 2 million in jail. That comes to 702 prisoners per 100,000 population.

On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times more than Tanzania and seven times more than Germany.

The Justice Department reports that one in eight black men in their 20s and early 30s were behind bars last year, compared with 1 in 63 white men. The chance of a black man going to prison in his lifetime is one in three, the department says.

The Sentencing Project says a major cause is the war on drugs. Whereas in 1980, there were 40,000 in jail for drug crimes, now there are 450,000, "three-fourths of them black or Latino, though drug use is no higher in those groups than among whites."

(If you want more than the dry statistics, go over and read Atrios on this, he is right on the money and he'll make you laugh out loud.)

A criminal justice professor in Chicago has hit on a key factor to reduce the murder rate: provide affordable housing:

A study of the city's murder rate shows an unlikely factor at the heart of the violence. Chicago's rate is three times that of New York not because of policing, but because of a lack of good, affordable housing.

Here's some of what John M. Hagedorn, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a senior research fellow at the Great Cities Institute, has to say:

I'm in the midst of a two-year study, funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, to investigate why Chicago's homicide rate hasn't fallen like New York City's. While we are still collecting data, Mayor Richard Daley's recent call for ideas to stop the violence has convinced me to join the discussion now.

Hagerdorn doesn't buy that policing styles make the difference since murder rates have also dropped in Boston, Houston, San Francisco and San Diego, without a Rudy Giuliani or Bill Bratton. He notes that violence "is generally high in cities and areas that have undergone severe disruption of daily life."

In Eastern Europe. Albania, for example, according to the World Bank, has very high rates of violence, and a quarter of all of its young men are working in the drug trade. Wherever there are cities with desperate conditions and high rates of violence, as in Kingston, Jamaica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, or Bombay, we also find groups of armed young men. Whether they are paramilitaries, drug cartels, death squads, militant fundamentalists or gangs, these groups are a major obstacle to stopping the cycle of violence.

It is also apparent that where class differences within dominant groups is the main source of conflict, violence is usually sporadic and muted. High rates of persisting violence are almost always related to ethnic, racial or religious conflict.

The wide variation in rates of violence within ethnic groups debunks any notion that African-Americans, or Irish, or Hispanics are violence prone. Violence is a property of social structure, not people. (emphasis supplied)

Turning to Chicago, Hagerdorn says,

While Canada is moving to decriminalize marijuana, the U.S. is becoming stricter than ever. Don't miss this insightful and informative article in Sunday's New York Times by Eric Schlosser, author of "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market."

The number of marijuana arrests now approaches three-quarters of a million annually, largely for simple possession. More people are in prison for marijuana crimes today than ever before. Dozens, if not hundreds, are serving life sentences for nonviolent pot offenses. Attorney General John Ashcroft has called for full enforcement of the pot laws and spearheaded a crackdown on medicinal marijuana providers in California, though their efforts are legal under state law.

Some interesting factoids:

• The first American law about marijuana, passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1619, required every household to grow it. Hemp was considered a valuable commodity.

• Popular fears of marijuana arose in the early 20th century, prompted by the use of the drug by Mexican immigrants. Rumors spread about the "killer weed" that incited violent crimes and drove its users insane. The fears quickly spread to blacks and to jazz music.

• Marijuana was first outlawed in 1937. Not long after, the feds planned to conduct a national raid to round-up black jazz musicians who smoked pot. The plot failed because the agents couldn't infiltrate the "jazz milieu."

In a nutshell,

Marijuana has always been associated with minorities and subcultures that seem to threaten mainstream America. America's marijuana laws usually expressed that fear of outsiders in moralistic terms, while proving ineffective at stopping pot use.

Oregon was the first state to decriminalize pot--in 1973. Jimmy Carter supported decriminalization at the federal level. With Reagan, the pendulum began to swing the other way.

Moral condemnations of pot smokers and long prison sentences were revived by President Ronald Reagan, as a part of that era's culture wars. Mr. Reagan's first drug czar, Carlton E. Turner, felt that marijuana use was linked to anti-authority behavior and insisted pot could turn young men into homosexuals.

Today, it is largely poor people and minority offenders who are imprisoned for marijuana offenses. Pot smokers can now lose their cars, houses, jobs, student loans and food stamps after getting busted.

CNN is reporting:

On TV and on paper, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin G. Hatch pledged to hold hearings into the death of a federal prisoner the government says hanged himself even though the victim's throat was cut and his face bruised and bloodied.

A federal court recently awarded the prisoner's family $1.1 million for intentional infliction of pain for misleading the family about the case.

And Hatch didn't keep his promise to hold hearings. Who else is involved? Sen. Don Nickles (R-OK.)

"A national coalition of more than 100,000 celebrities, civil rights leaders, activists and members of Congress will converge on City Hall in New York City next week on Wednesday, June 4, to argue for the repeal of the state's Rockefeller Drug Laws, which are regarded as the most punitive drug laws in the nation."

Under the laws, defendants face mandatory minimum sentences of up to 15 years in prison for the possession and sale of even minor amounts of drugs.

"Our leaders in Albany have talked about reform for years while thousands of low-level, nonviolent drug offenders remain in jail without good reason," [Andrew] Cuomo said. "At a time when we need to focus our limited resources on educating our children, caring for those who are sick, and punishing those who present true threats to our safety, we must reject these inhumane and wasteful laws."

We couldn't agree more. For our coverage of the Rockefeller drug laws, go here.

Received from NORML today:

Pot Compound Effective In Alzheimer's Treatment, Study Says

Baltimore, MD: A synthetic version of the marijuana compound tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) appears to reduce agitation and stimulate weight gain in patients with Alzheimer's disease, according to clinical trial data presented earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Geriatrics Society.

Nine patients suffering from Alzheimer's-related dementia participated in the trial. Treatment with up to 10 mg of synthetic THC for one month resulted in significantly reduced agitation in six patients, and all patients gained weight. Prior to the treatment, all patients had experienced weight loss due to anorexia. Weight loss, a common symptom associated with Alzheimer's disease, is a predictive factor of mortality.

No adverse side effects to the THC treatment were reported.

A previous trial of 12 Alzheimer patients in 1997 also found that THC significantly decreased negative feelings and induced weight gain. A 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimated that between 5 and 10 percent of patients prescribed Marinol (synthetic THC) use it to treat symptoms of Alzheimer's.

For more information, please contact Paul Armentano, NORML Senior Policy Analyst, at (202) 483-5500.

If you have been planning a trip to Amsterdam thinking you can relax in one of the Netherlands' 800 cannibis cafes, you better go soon.

A ban on smoking in coffeehouses, purportedly aimed at protecting workers from second-hand smoke, is is likely to become law very soon.

Coffee shop owners were aghast. "The whole point of going to a coffee shop is to smoke," said Arjan Roskam, chairman of the Union for Cannabis Retailers.

....The Netherlands boasts around 800 cannabis cafes. Smoking a joint in an Amsterdam coffee shop vies with canal boat tours and trips to the flower market for a place on tourists' itineraries.

There is a one year exception from the new law for bars and restaurants, but not for coffee shops.

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It may or may not make a difference, but we certainly appreciate the gesture of Bill Lockyer, California Attorney General and 8 of the 12 jurors in the Ed Rosenthal marijuana cultivation case, who are urging a federal judge to impose a lenient sentence on the "Guru of Ganj."

Sentencing is June 4. Rosenthal's lawyers are seeking community service and probation instead of the mandatory minimum five year sentence.

At the heart of the motion is a portrayal of Rosenthal as an atypical marijuana cultivator who grew the substance out of humanitarian concern for suffering patients, did not financially profit from the activity, and believed his actions were legal, based on state law and advice from public officials.

Attorney General Lockyer wrote:

A senior scientist with the Center for National Security and Arms Control at Sandia National Laboratories checks out the new National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report on the reliability of polygraph screening in national security cases and finds that polygraphs are worse than worthless.

Late last year the NAS published its findings. It determined that the polygraph was not a worthless tool -- indeed, that it was much worse than worthless. The report said that "available evidence indicates that polygraph testing as currently used has extremely serious limitations . . . if the intent is both to identify security risks and protect valued employees." The NAS panel, made up of internationally respected psychologists and statisticians, further determined that the test was so nonspecific that even if the polygraphers managed to finally uncover their first spy, at least 100 innocent laboratory employees would have their clearances yanked because of the "false positives" inherent in the test. The NAS concluded: "Polygraph testing yields an unacceptable choice . . . between too many loyal employees falsely judged deceptive and too many major security threats left undetected. Its accuracy . . . is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies." It doesn't get much clearer than that.

Instpundit is justifiably angry about the death of the New York woman last week during a mistaken drug raid at her house. Mayor Bloomberg has accepted responsibility, but how does make it up to the woman or her family? No-Knock warrants are inherently dangerous.

Back to Instapundit:

That ought to be a firing offense, the very first time it happens, for the officers involved and their superiors. If people die, the charge should be murder. If you decide to break down somebody's door and enter with guns drawn when no one's life is in danger, then you should be able to offer no defense if anything goes wrong. Because it's indefensible.