The Washington state Senate Friday passed SB 5516, the 911 Good Samaritan Act, on a vote of 47-1. One member was absent. The bill now goes to the House. The measure provides immunity from prosecution for drug possession offenses for overdose victims and people who seek medical assistance for overdose victims. It does not grant immunity from prosecution for drug distribution offenses. It also allows expanded access to naloxone, a powerful opiate antagonist that can bring people back from the brink of death from overdoses in a matter of moments. The bill comes as the number of drug overdose deaths in Washington state have increased from around 403 in 1999 to 707, or nearly two a day, in 2006. Drug overdose is now the second leading cause of accidental death in the state, second only to traffic accidents. The bill was opposed by the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, who argued that because there was no budget for publicizing the bill, it would not affect drug-taking behaviors, and thus would be no more than another complicating factor in drug prosecutions. Drug overdose fatalities now outrank traffic accidents as the leading cause of accidental deaths in more than a dozen states. But only one state, New Mexico, has approved a Good Samaritan law. Now, perhaps Washington will be next.

Tim Lynch at the Cato Institute has a nice piece in The Washington Times calling for the total elimination of the drug czar's office. It costs American taxpayers $400 million a year just to have these guys walk around cheerleading for the drug war, and they're not even good at it.

If drug czar Gil Kerlikoswke is serious about ending the war mentality that has long defined our nation's anti-drug crusade, he should begin by firing himself Michael Douglas-style, and walking off into the sunset. I'm sure Cato could find a desk for him.

Take heart, the American dream comes directly from God as do all dreams of freedom around the world.. The "Spirit of '76" was the Holy Spirit and is our true North!

I was recently arrested for growing 3 plants for personal use in Houston. I’ve never done anything illegal to be able to put me in jail before and have no prior incidents with the law that required me to get ticketed or mistreated. We have friends of the family who are police officers and know for the good part that they are just doing their jobs and I was doing something bad. My parents had learned that I had been smoking marijuana for about 3 years they didn’t approve because it’s illegal but even though they never acknowledged it I believe they saw it was me deal with my depression. I knew the risk when growing but too many close calls with police and once with a very understanding one that had stopped me for my head lights being off at dusk. He let me go with the message do it at home because I can’t stop you there, and the obvious greed from drug dealers stop me from buying weed since Sept. and growing seemed to be a safer and cheaper source of action. Sadly I was mistaken and watched videos about my rights and the way cops abuse theirs too late. I was good enough to hide the plants from my parents but not from Houston narcotics agents. I just bailed out and am trying to get ready for court and still I don’t fully understand how the cops were allowed to walk onto my parent’s property without any consent from us. I understand the knock method police use but what if the officer never knocked does he have the right to walk to the back of the house without any consent. Is that ever legal?

Ibogaine advocate Howard Lotsof, 66, died January 31 in Staten Island, New York. Liver cancer killed him. In 1962, Lotsof, a Bronx native, was strung out on heroin when he ingested a sample of the West African psychoactive substance ibogaine. Rocked by the hallucinatory experience, Lotsof was even more stunned when he realized that after ibogaine he no longer felt compelled to use heroin. For 20 years after that, Lotsof went about his life in the television and movie business, but when an accident cut that career short, he returned to ibogaine and began working to make it available as an addiction treatment. In 1986, he founded a company, NDA International, and began treating clients in Amsterdam. Lotsof originated numerous patents for ibogaine in treating addictions and provided data to the National Institute on Drug Abuse that laid the groundwork for still ongoing research on ibogaine and its use as an anti-addictive substance. More than 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers on ibogaine have been published so far. Thanks almost entirely to Lotsof and his supporters, including Dana Beal and Cures Not Wars, an international network of ibogaine clinics is now in place and treating addicted clients. Lotsof was not a doctor or scientist—his college degree was in film—but an outsider who still managed to bring ibogaine in from the cold and win it academic and scientific respect. He will be missed.