Tag Archives: USA Today

Should medical marijuana patients be allowed to have guns?

More and more people in Washington are going and getting their medical marijuana authorizations. Indeed, around the country, 16 states now allow people with qualifying conditions to possess marijuana, despite its longstanding federal prohibition.

That hasn’t stopped federal agencies from chiming in over medical marijuana issues. The latest blowup concerns a medical marijuana patient’s right to bear arms.

A memo to federal firearms licensees from the assistant director of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is lucid in its belief medical marijuana patients are prohibited from having guns, according to a recent article in USA Today.

The memo states, “any person who uses or is addicted to marijuana, regardless of whether his or her state has passed legislation authorizing marijuana use for medicinal purposes, is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance, and is prohibited by federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition.”

I’m interested to hear from folks on the Kitsap peninsula regarding this topic. Should having a medical marijuana authorization prohibit someone from having guns?

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Is meth on its way out?

 

Methamphetamine, that crystalline psycho-stimulant that’s been plaguing our communities for years now, appears to be on the decline around the nation, according to results of a survey released by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

As penned in a USA Today article:

“… methamphetamine use, which raced across the USA for a decade, has declined sharply. The number of past-month users fell from 731,000 in 2006 to 353,000 in 2010.”

So could this be the beginning of the end for methamphetamine?

In our area, I’m not seeing any slowdown in police reports from around the county. But we have certainly seen heroin rear its ugly head in the past couple years. And, as you can see from this one sentence I’ve posted from a real police report, it appears, at least anecdotally, that at least one drug seller was having a tough time pushing meth.

I’ve spoken to Bremerton Police Special Operations Group Sgt. Randy Plumb about that very sentence, and he told me not to give it much credence. There’s still plenty of demand out there.

As the report shows, it certainly isn’t the end for marijuana use, which is ingested regularly by almost 7 percent of Americans, up from 6 percent in 2007. But newer laws and education efforts appear to be working in the fight against meth.

UPDATE: The National Drug Threat Assessment, authored by the Department of Justice, is out and says that actually, meth demand is increasing in some markets in America:

“High levels of methamphetamine production in Mexico, along with increasing smallscale domestic production, have resulted in
increasing methamphetamine availability,” it says.

Apparently, the federal government’s public health arm and its law enforcement arm appear to be contradicting each other a bit.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post