Friday night (too late for last week's Chronicle), Connecticut's state senate passed a medical marijuana bill, already passed by the House, and it is now heading to Gov. Jodi Rell's desk to be signed or vetoed. Rell has said she is "torn" over it. DPA's Gabriel Sayegh sent us the following links to media stories about it:

A Seattle Post-Intelligencer story about political messages on YouTube.com contains this delightful quote from ONDCP:

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said it expects its YouTube messages to be ridiculed, laughed at, remade and spoofed. And they are.

The irony here is that, predictable as it may have been, ONDCP had no clue that this was going to happen. They deliberately generated media coverage of their YouTube page, only to find their videos marred by harsh comments and dismal viewer ratings. ONDCP quickly disabled these options, but the damage was done.

If they had genuinely anticipated this level of hostility from viewers, they would have optimized their page before sending out press releases about it. Because they did not, most ONDCP videos are now permanently stamped with the lowest-possible rating of one star.

This is to say nothing of the countless parodies that are now drowning out ONDCP’s unpopular propaganda. Since YouTube automatically recommends similar videos anytime you watch something, viewers of ONDCP’s materials are unavoidably connected to these abundant counter-messages. It is almost certainly for this reason that ONDCP has not uploaded a single new video since the page was first launched back in September 2006.

In a case like this, the mature decision would be to ignore them. But I find it amusing that even something as perfectly logical as expecting ridicule on YouTube turns out to be a lie when it comes from ONDCP.

Canadian Member of Parliament Libby Davies distributed this letter yesterday about the Conservative drug strategy and attacks on the InSite safe injection site: June 4, 2007 Dear Friends, I am deeply concerned about the Conservative government's plans to unveil a so-called New Drug Strategy for Canada and its efforts to discredit InSite. I made the following statement in the House of Commons today outlining my concerns.

Libby Davies, MP Vancouver East HANSARD, House of Commons June 4, 2007 Mr. Speaker, health and addictions professionals across Canada are bracing themselves for the worst when the Conservative government reveals its so-called new drug strategy that will sacrifice the successes of harm reduction and a balanced approach to drug use, for a heavy handed US style enforcement regime. Time and again, empirical evidence has proven that harm reduction works. Programs like needle exchanges and Vancouver's safe injection site, InSite, are reducing the transmission of HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C, and increasing the number of people accessing treatment. I am alarmed that despite this evidence, the government is accelerating the criminalization of drug users. The 2007 budget quietly removed harm reduction from Canada's new drug strategy. It now reads like a carbon copy of George Bush's war on drugs - which has seen drug use rise, along with skyrocketing social and economic costs of incarceration. In 2006, the Conservatives refused to renew the exemption that allows InSite to keep its doors open until pressure from the community forced them to grant a temporary extension. We know the Health Minister and the RCMP are now resorting to propaganda tactics to try and close InSite. Attacking InSite and adopting US drug policies will fail as dramatically here as it has in the US.

Read our feature report about this published Friday, "Battle Royal Looms as Canadian Government Set to Unveil Tough Anti-Drug Strategy." Also, we have a fair amount published about Libby Davies, including interviews she's given directly to the Chronicle -- use this search link to review it.

Joe Biden, whose brain malfunctions severely anytime he thinks about drugs, did not disappoint during Sunday’s Democratic Presidential Debate. When asked about his shifting support for a fence along the Mexican border, Biden had this to say:

Well, that fence -- the reason I voted for the fence was that was the only alternative that was there, and I voted for the fence related to drugs. You can -- a fence will stop 20 kilos of cocaine coming through that fence. It will not stop someone climbing over it or around it.

And so -- but this bill has a much more reasonable provision in it. It has much -- much shorter fence, it does have the Border Patrol requirement, and it is designed not just to deal with illegals; it's designed -- a serious drug trafficking problem we have.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Biden, understand that he is not suffering from a stroke.* This guy just has a really hard time understanding drugs, but continues to bring them up whenever he’s under pressure. Biden’s unfortunate obsession/confusion regarding drugs has led him to create ONDCP, author the RAVE Act, and propose biological warfare in South America.

So does Biden dramatically misunderstand the role of actual people in physically transporting cocaine across the border? Is it really necessary to explain that some of the people who climb over or around the fence carry cocaine with them? Does he know that 20 kilos fits in a backpack?

Whether Biden realizes the absurdity of his remarks is beside the point. He got cornered for flip-flopping on the fence issue, so he cried “Drugs! If my positions appear contradictory, it’s because I was trying to fight drugs.” That’s what he does, because he knows there’s no accountability when you talk about “Drugs!”

*No offense to stroke victims. I’m not really comparing you to Joe Biden.

Just two weeks ago, in an article titled Border Blues, we wrote about how both the Canadian and the US governments can and do deny entry to people who admit to past drug use or have a drug conviction. Last week, a particularly egregious example of the abuse of this provision occurred. In a sad tale first picked up by the Vancouver daily the Province, "Mother's Hunt for Missing Daughter Blocked at Border", Kamloops, BC, mother Glendene Grant related how she was turned away from the US as she headed for Las Vegas to search for her young adult daughter, Jessie Foster, who went missing a little more than a year ago. Although Grant had made several previous trips to Las Vegas in an effort to find her daughter and even though she was scheduled to meet local law enforcement and appear at a Crimestoppers event about Jessie's disappearance, she was turned away a week ago today. Why? The 49-year-old mother was arrested in 1986 on marijuana and cocaine possession charges. We are looking into this. Right now, I have emailed Ms. Grant to set up an interview, and I have calls in to US Customs and Border Protection and an anti-human trafficking unit in the Las Vegas Police Department. There is apparently some suspicion that Jessie Foster was the victim of sex slavers. But who cares about that, right? Customs and Border Protection appears more interested in protecting us from a harmless woman who got busted on penny ante drug possession charges more than two decades ago than helping her spur an investigation with possible international implications. My understanding that the decision to deny entry to people with old drug convictions is not mandatory (I'll be checking with CBP on this) but discretionary. In the case of Glendene Grant, the denial of entry looks to be an abuse of discretion, not to mention just downright mean, inhumane, and cold-hearted. Is there more to the story? Stay tuned.

Back during our jury civil disobedience in 2004, David Guard and I did our community service time at the needle exchange program here in Washington and got to know the people there. They've been doing a lot for the community, all of it with privately-raised funds, but more is needed to be able to reach all the people who are at risk from contracting diseases like AIDS or Hepatitis C through needle sharing. The District of Columbia government would almost certainly fund needle exchange work, but Congress gets to control what our budget looks like if they want to, and in their infinite wisdom (sarcasm) they decided to forbid DC from spending even its own taxpayer dollars on needle exchange. Rep. Jose Serrano (D-NY), who chairs the Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, which has jurisdiction over this area of the US Code, has said he wants to undo the restriction. Today the New York Times ran a strongly supportive editorial:

Washington, D.C., is one of America’s AIDS hot spots. A significant proportion of infections can be traced back to intravenous drug users who shared contaminated needles and then passed on the infection to spouses, lovers or unborn children. This public health disaster is partly the fault of Congress. It has wrongly and disastrously used its power over the District of Columbia’s budget to bar the city from spending even locally raised tax dollars on programs that have slowed the spread of disease by giving drug addicts access to clean needles.

The Times titled the editorial "Congress Hobbles the AIDS Fight." The activist paraphrase of that, which is how the editorial was first presented to me, would be "Congress has blood on its hands." Last week the Times also ran a news feature about DC's needle exchange, and an online "slide show" featuring the program's Ron Daniels. The larger legislation in which the DC funding ban could get repealed is expected to move quickly, with markups scheduled for Serrano's subcommittee tomorrow and the Appropriations Committee of which it is a part next week -- you never know how quickly something will really move in Congress, but that's how it looks right now. Stay tuned.