Due to an erosion of trust in the FBI's disciplinary system, Director Robert Mueller has ordered an independent review of the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility.

Among the chief complaints are claims of retaliation against whistleblowers--and that agents are sanctioned more severely than managers.

A report by the Justice Department's inspector general last fall said the FBI "suffers from a strong, and not unreasonable, perception among employees that a double standard exists within the FBI." That view grew in part from the existence of a separate disciplinary system for managers until August 2000.

The inspector general cited several "troubling cases" in which discipline for managers appeared "unduly lenient." These included the handling of the confrontation at Ruby Ridge and falsified expense accounts submitted by several FBI managers who traveled to Washington to attend a retirement party for one of their colleagues.

Another inspector general's report early this year found that the current head of the OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility], Robert Jordan, exercised poor judgment in denying a promotion to FBI agent John Roberts after Roberts told the CBS program "60 Minutes" that managers and line employees weren't disciplined equally.

The review will be conducted by Attorney General Griffin Bell and former FBI Associate Director Lee Colwell. They will examine the practices of the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility. The review is expected to take three to six months.

As a follow-up to our post Wednesday on the pending bill to allow the Drug Control Office to spend huge advertising dollars fighting legislative intitiatives that would legalize marijuana, this just came in from Kris Krane at NORML:

Today we are writing with more good news. Thanks in large part to the thousands of e-mails and letters generated by drug law reform supporters over the past week, Congress has decided to postpone voting on HR 2086, the
ONDCP Reauthorization Act, while they debate changing some of the more nsulting provisions.

In the past week, we two legislative alerts regarding provisions of this bill. One alerted you to the fact that the bill authorized reallocating $60.5 million from High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas to target medical marijuana users. The second dealt with the ONDCP allocation of over $1 billion to fund the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, despite the government¹s own studies proving it has been a massive failure.

It appears that your letters had a tremendous impact. During yesterday¹s
hearing, several members of the committee, including Diane Watson (D-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), directly challenged key aspects of these provisions. In addition, writers form the Associated Press have also published a pair of national news stories alerting readers to these controversial amendments.

To "thunderous applause," Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue today signed into law a bill that overhauls the state's indigent defense system .

Two years in the making, the Georgia Indigent Defense Act seeks to ensure equal justice for poor people facing criminal charges. Public defender offices will be set up in each of the state's 49 judicial districts, replacing an overwhelmed system that has been judged incapable of protecting the rights of indigents.

There's only one catch: No source of funding has been obtained for the bill.

The state now hands out $6.3 million in grants to fund county programs, a fraction of the overall cost. During this past General Assembly, lawmakers approved a $2 million increase, to $8.3 million next year. But the new public defender system will cost substantially more than that. Perdue estimated the system could cost $50 million to $70 million a year.

Still, the Governor and legislators are promising to find funding:

"For too long, we have turned our heads away from a real and growing statewide issue," Perdue said of Georgia's indigent defense system. "We have not provided the resources and tools necessary to uphold our moral obligation of providing criminal defendants with adequate legal counsel."

Enlightenment in the suburbs of Los Angeles.....the town of Rolling Hills has voted to remove its 45 year old ban on adultery and immoral sex. :

The City Council voted last month to repeal an old ordinance that prohibited immoral conduct, including extramarital sex. The law was passed after the city incorporated in 1957.

"So this is a pro-adultery thing?" joked Councilman James Black in an interview with the Daily Breeze newspaper. "Good for us!"

The ordinance, will be formally repealed at the end of this month, banned immoral conduct defined as "any person exposing his or her person or the private parts thereof; or the doing of any other act with the intent of arousing, appealing to or gratifying the lust or passions or sexual desires of any person to whom he or she is not married."

A thousand miles away, the town of Lakewood, Colorado (suburb of Denver) is moving in the other direction by marshaling all its resources to close down a consenual adult S & M club.

Ridiculous law enforcement operation of the week: Police in Osceola County, Florida are going undercover dressed as homeless persons in order to catch motorists running red lights.

Homeless advocates are outraged by an operation where undercover police officers dressed as vagrants, observed drivers running red lights or committing other traffic violations, then radioed ahead to other officers who stopped those cars and wrote tickets.

....Undercover deputies stood along streets and gave the indication they were vagrants by pushing shopping carts and wearing fake teeth and tattered clothing. They also carried small cardboard signs, which read, "Sheriff's traffic sting in progress. Buckle up."

Speaking of "Buckle Up," Colorado has just started "Click It or Ticket," a zero tolerance policy towards wearing seat belts. Driving to and from court in the mountains Tuesday (125 miles each way) we were bombarded with electronic overhead signs displaying the tag line every few miles. It's annoying and distracting because these signs are usually used to warn of traffic hazards like icy roads and falling rocks, so when we see one up ahead, we look up to read it. We also think it's carrying government regulation too far.

Tomorrow the House will mark up a bill to allow the National Drug Control Office and Drug Czar John Walters to spend what could amount to up to a billion of our taxpaying dollars on advertising to fight state marijuana ballot initiatives. Marijuana Policy Project says:

Until now, the ONDCP authorization has included sensible language barring the use of National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign funds for "partisan political purposes." The new language creates an exemption from this ban when the ONDCP director is acting "to oppose an attempt to legalize the use of [marijuana]." If this provision becomes law, there is no doubt that the drug czar will use it to his maximum advantage. The idea that the drug czar will have control over $1 billion to use for partisan political purposes is almost too scary to consider.

Visit here to send a pre-written fax to your U.S. representative today.

TomPaine.Com has more:

Racial profiling by Alabama state troopers is now formally banned.

The policy, unveiled last week, prohibits troopers from stopping motorists based solely on ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, religion, economic status, age or cultural group and mandates annual training.

"This policy clearly states that such actions will not be tolerated," Public Safety Director Mike Coppage said.

There's a new drug in town, one recently approved by the FDA. It is buprenorphine hydrochloride and officials in San Francisco are hoping it will become the "drug of choice" for heroin addicts. It sounds promising.

Buprenorphine hydrochloride is an opiate, but one that is milder than heroin. It is an alternative to methadone. The best part is that users don't have to go to a clinic to get it--treatment will be available in "the privacy of a physician's office in their own neighborhood."

Interestingly, it is not being pushed as a cure for heroin addiction.

Comedian Lenny Bruce has been dead a long time. Contributing to his early demise were his troubles with the law. He was convicted of misdemeanor obscenity charges arising from language he used in his stand-up comic acts.

There will be a news conference in New York this Tuesday at which it will be announced that performance artists and First Amendment scholars are forming a petition drive to ask Governor Pataki to grant Bruce a posthumous pardon.

At the time of his death, some of Bruce's friends mourned him as a suicide victim driven to desperation while trying to appeal the guilty verdict. After he was sentenced to four months on Rikers Island, a jail term he had not yet begun to serve, Bruce grew distrustful of the law and lawyers and insisted on representing himself.

The first national study on drug testing has been released. The findings: Drug testing has no effect on deterring student drug use.

The study, published last month in The Journal of School Health, a peer-reviewed publication of the American School Health Association, found that 37 percent of 12th graders in schools that tested for drugs said they had smoked marijuana in the last year, compared with 36 percent in schools that did not. In a universe of tens of thousands of students, such a slight deviation is statistically insignificant, and it means the results are essentially identical, the researchers said. Similarly, 21 percent of 12th graders in schools with testing said they had used other illicit drugs like cocaine or heroin in the last year, while 19 percent of their counterparts in schools without screening said they had done so.

The same pattern held for every other drug and grade level. Whether looking at marijuana or harder drugs like cocaine and heroin, or middle school pupils compared with high school students, the fact that their schools tested for drugs showed no signs of slowing their drug use.

The Supreme Court, in upholding drug testing of student athletes and those involved in extra-curricular activities, justified the privacy intrusion , relied upon the assumption that the screening combats drug abuse.

This is the largest study ever conducted on the subject. It was paid for by the federal government and tracked students across the nation for 30 years. "The study, published last month in The Journal of School Health, a peer-reviewed publication of the American School Health Association."

Since the Supreme Court did not have the benefit of this study at the time it ruled in the student drug testing cases, we hope the Supreme Court accepts another case on the issue and reverses itself. As one expert says,

"Schools should not implement a drug testing program until they're proven to work," he added. "They're too expensive. It's like having experimental surgery that's never been shown to work."

Put another way, ACLU lawyer Graham Boyd, says,

"Now there should be no reason for a school to impose an intrusive or even insulting drug test when it's not going to do anything about student drug use."

Received from NORML:

A primary compound in marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), is effective in reducing "tics" in patients suffering from Tourette's Syndrome (TS), according to clinical trail data published in a recent edition of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Tourette's Syndrome is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by motor tics (sudden spasms especially in the facial muscles, neck and shoulders) and one or more vocal tics.

Twenty-four patients participated in the double-blind placebo-controlled trial over a period of six weeks. Treatment with up to 10 mg of THC resulted in significant improvement of tic severity, authors wrote. No serious adverse effects to the treatment were reported.

In a separate article published in Neuropsychopharmacology, authors elaborated, "No detrimental effect was seen on learning curve, interference, recall and recognition of word lists, immediate visual memory span, and divided attention" from THC during or after the treatment.

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly is conducting a poll on his website about decriminalizing marijuana. Go over and vote. Right now, decriminalization is losing!