Last week was one of the most depressing weeks I've had in some time.Sometimes it seems the forces of intolerance have taken over the agenda.Then I remembered that intolerance is the rule of the day and listening to them rant is the price one pays to be an advocate for reform.It's sometimes really hard to listen to the way they trumpet things,even good things,because of the way they have to make everything about them being right and that their way is the only way to think and everybody else is wrong.

Did you hear about this wild booze riot in Michigan? The massive unruly crowd hurled bottles at the cops, who had to launch tear gas grenades just to break the thing up. Pete Guither observed hilariously that no one ever throws bongs and rolling papers at police. He's right, they don't.

Advocates for drug policy reform are fond of pointing out the hypocrisy of permitting limitless consumption of riot-inducing alcohol, while banning silly things like marijuana that make people draw pictures or eat nachos. And that's a legitimate point to make, as far as it goes. But it is rarely observed that the legality of alcohol, by its very nature, plays an important role in undermining other drug enforcement efforts.

For decades, illicit drug users have found cover amidst throngs of raging drunks. Alcohol is just stronger than most other recreational drugs. A decent percentage of alcohol users can just be counted on to go berserk at their preferred dosage, leading to screaming, fighting, vandalism, clumsy sex, and so on. It's not just stupid to arrest pot smokers in the midst of all this, it's impossible.

The pot smokers are the ones that get away when a party is raided. They're the ones chatting at a table in the corner while your drunk girlfriend is dancing on the bar. They're the ones that get home without incident on a Saturday night. You'll never find them puking or punching each other, so you'd better test their urine or catch 'em in a cloud of smoke, otherwise you'll never know what's up.

It's not a crime to be wasted as long as you found your buzz in a bottle not a bag, thus police have no authority to act simply because everyone in your house looks messed up. Instead, drug arrests happen primarily through the intrusive and time-consuming methods of sting operations and widespread consent searches. You can put bodies behind bars this way, but not nearly enough to win the war.

As long as it remains legal to get utterly obliterated on booze, the enforcement of other drug laws won't just look stupid and hypocritical. It won't even work.

I know, I'm a D-list pot celebrity at best, but at least I won't throw a raging hissy fit:

Tom Cruise's attorneys are looking to take legal action over a new strain of medical marijuana that has been put on the market under the star's name.

The "Tom Cruise Purple" brand, which features a picture of the actor laughing on the vials, is currently being sold in licensed marijuana clubs in Northern California. [sfgate.com]

Thanks to Prop. 215, it might even be possible to sue in California courts for trademark infringement over the name of a marijuana strain. But all you can really do is go after the clubs offering it, which can in turn just change the name to something else like TCP. Regardless, if Tom Cruise really wanted to screw these people, he would have been well advised to keep his mouth shut rather than make the strain famous by complaining about it.

Until all of this plays itself out, aspiring marijuana breeders should just name their strains after me, which I assure you is totally ok. Call it "Scotty Mo Skunk" or something like that. I won't complain unless it sucks.

Friday's paper was full of stories about drug addicted babies.By Sunday,The Province editorial was about just that.On Friday,The doctor felt compelled to phone into the Vancouver media with a story from Prince George.I guess she was bored.She started out saying it was mostly crack and went right on into the use of morphine to bring heroin addicts children down.She threw in that they were getting better at seeing the signs of addiction in babies and that that might be part of the reason for the 10 fold increase in the last 10 years.It's obvious to me exactly why these mother's are ducking the health care system as it's often asking for help that results in these mothers having to fight child services to get their kids back.When you consider that a lot of the addicts on our streets are from the child welfare system.That is the very last place that a child should wind up.I've seen a lot of really sick things that have happened in addict homes but I know a whole lot more from the children's aid society.The newspapers are eating up this "new"group that's preaching abstinence to any and every one that will listen.They've gotten more press out of one so called meeting of experts than all the harm reduction meetings in the whole year.I write letters to the papers but when they don't print them it feels like having a door slammed in your face.I'm afraid we're entering into another of those backward periods where the forces of intolerance can spout the most obscene prattle and people are listening.There's little doubt that our mayor has joined the side of the great unwashed and has been stringing us in the reform movement along all the time.Not surprising as he's never met a voter he won't try to please when in their presence.The health officer for the school district has announced that kids are using less drugs and alcohol.Of course sedentary lifestyle and obesity are worse than ever.Maybe they'll make sloth illegal and health food and exercise mandatory.Or manipulate the statistics to say something else?It'll be illegal to possess tobacco in federal prisons on may 1'08.It's already illegal to smoke in any public building or within 15 feet of any door or window.Let's just trade tobacco for pot and call it even.Big brother is watching just about everyone.

With British Prime Minister Gordon Brown poised to reclassify marijuana as a more serious drug subject to stiffer penalties, the United Kingdom appears to be in the grip of an outbreak of Reefer Madness that would make Harry Anslinger blush. Bizarrely, much of the British concern about marijuana is centered on the dreaded "skunk." The Daily Mail, which makes the New York Post look like the New York Times, has been a leading proponent of skunk mania. In an article headlined Cannabis: A deadly habit as easy for children to pick up as a bag of crisps, after blaming marijuana for the problems of British youth culture and prohibition-related violence, the Mail breathlessly reports that skunk isn't your father's marijuana. (Haven't we heard this one before?)

The other problem for the Government and others who urged the then Home Secretary David Blunkett to downgrade cannabis in the run-up to 2004, is that the drug on sale to young people on the streets today is very different from the one ministers thought they were downgrading. Doctors believe that this new strain has the potential to induce paranoia and even psychosis. Some of those we met who work with young criminals link the advent of the new drug with the growth and intensity of street violence. Uanu Seshmi runs a small charity in Peckham, where gun crime is rife, which aims to help boys excluded from school escape becoming involved in criminal gangs. He has seen boys come through his doors who are "unreachable" and he blames the new higher strength cannabis sold on the streets as "skunk" or "super skunk" for warping young minds. "It isn't the cannabis of our youth, 20 or 30 years ago," he told me. "This stuff damages the brain, its effects are irreversible and once the damage is done there is nothing you can do.

This new strain of marijuana? Skunk? Odd, since it's been around since the 1970s (read the description of Skunk #1) and is just another of the countless indica-sativa hybrids. Thankfully, we have "drug experts" like Mr. Seshmi to raise the alarm about its irreversible effects. There's more from the Mail, which apparently has made reclassifying cannabis its moral crusade of the day. In another article, How my perfect son became crazed after smoking cannabis, the Mail consults an unhappy mum whose child ran into problems smoking weed. Last fall, the Mail was warning of--I kid you not--"deadly skunk". Here are some more skunk headlines from the Mail in recent months: "Son twisted by skunk knifed father 23 times," "How cannabis made me a monster," "Escaped prisoner killed man while high on skunk cannabis," "Boys on skunk butchered a grandmother," and "Teen who butchered two friends was addicted to skunk cannabis." While one expects such yellow journalism from the likes of the tabloid press, even the venerable Times of London is feeling the effects of skunk fever. Under the headline Cannabis: 'just three drags on a skunk joint will induce paranoia', the Times managed to find and highlight some guy named Gerard who doesn't like that particularly variety of pot:

I smoke around six joints of regular cannabis every week, mostly at the weekends. What I like about smoking hash or weed is that it keeps me calm and gives me a more amusing outlook on life. With skunk, it’s a completely different story. Just three drags on a skunk joint will induce paranoia on a massive scale. I’m not talking about the difference between a beer and a vodka shot. I’m talking about being unable to get out of bed in the morning because you feel paralyzed, about being incapable of holding a conversation. I would like to think I’m a pretty lucid guy, but after smoking skunk I find myself struggling to string a sentence together. In the skunk haze of my student days, I would sometimes find myself unable to leave the house at all. It’s like a mild form of dementia. Once, a friend passed me a skunk joint before going to a birthday party. After just a few drags, I went into a room full of people, barely able to talk. I headed straight for the bar and drank as much alcohol as possible to counteract the effects. It helped, but using one vice to neutralize another is not exactly ideal.

My advice to Gerard (and it's something he apparently still has the brain cells left to figure out by himself despite smoking the evil skunk): If you don't like it, don't smoke it. But more broadly, what does the Times piece tell us? Nothing except this guy doesn't like skunk. Honestly, I don't understand this British mania over skunk. Something similar is going on in Australia, only down under, it's not skunk but the dreaded "hydro" that is causing murder, mayhem, and madness. Blaming a particular cultivation technique is about as stupid as blaming one variety of cannabis. I think this is something I'm going to have to write about in a feature article this week. I'll consult cannabis cultivation experts, media critics, and the latest science to try to get a handle on this.