Gov. Sarah Palin tried marijuana

Is anyone surprised that a dynamic, competitive young

woman (a high school basketball star and beauty pageant entrant), who

has become a crusader against the corruption of the GOP establishment,

tried marijuana at some time? Half of all high school graduates try marijuana.

Most reasonable people are not surprised that curious young people

try marijuana -- even if they are athletes, raised in strong families

with good values.

Wouldn't it have been a tragic shame if Sarah Palin -- the 2008 Republican nominee for Vice President of the United States -- had been unlucky

enough to have been arrested, like 800,000 other young people every year?

Isn't it time to acknowledge that marijuana use in not only not

deviant, but not wrong? Doesn't the experimentation with and use of

marijuana by so many national leaders demonstrate that marijuana use

is normal and we should not be threatening an arrest, a criminal record and potential jail sentence to everybody who tries it or uses it?

If Sarah Palin had been arrested for her marijuana use, it is inconceivable that Senator John McCain would have selected her as his running mate, isn't it?

Isn't it time to acknowledge that since past marijuana use is clearly irrelevant in discounting a person's qualifications for national leadership, it is wrong to block the careers to tens of thousands of potential community leaders who have unluckily been caught with marijuana and given a criminal record? Nobody should have a criminal record for possessing marijuana.

Whether marijuana was legal or not in Alaska when Sarah Palin tried it doesn't really matter, does it?

The question is not whether she broke a law that most of us, in our hearts know is wrong. The question is, how long will we keep a law on the books that did not trip her up, but does devastate hundreds of thousands of lives for no good purpose?

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21-year old drinking age? College Presidents call for a debate

Those good folks at Choose Responsibility have enlisted 100 college presidents to call for a debate on the continuation of the 21-year old drinking age, according to Associated Press account in The Chicago Tribune. The project is called the Amethyst Initiative. There is also a good report in The Baltimore Sun.

Clinton Administration HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, now a university president, dissents. We've made some progress she says. Folks will remember her "wisdom," "political courage," and "respect for science" when she kowtowed to drug czar Barry McCaffrey on sterile syringe exchange. As head of health, she was willing to let injecting drug users acquire HIV and hepatitis rather than get into a fight with the "hero" of the Gulf War.

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"Expectation of privacy" -- going, going....

Congress is on a path to use colleges and universities to eliminate any expectation of privacy in using one's computer in doing one's school work, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, and ultimately ending any meaningful concept of "expectation of privacy."

To prevent cheating and plagiarism, the Higher Education Act, (versions of which have passed both the House and Senate) will have students mount surveillance cameras on their computers to record them and their keystrokes as they think, research, and write.

Of course, such cameras in students' rooms will often inevitably view a student's bed or closet. Unless they are "turned off," and how can we know if they are ever really off, they would record students' most intimate behavior. This is a foreseeable and inevitable result. We are about to move from lamenting the exhibitionism of students posing before video cams to requiring it.

From the perspective of the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, circumstances in which a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy are not subject to the constitutional warrant requirement to precede a search (Katz v. U.S., 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507 (1967), Justice Harlan, concurring). Once no one really thinks that they have any privacy in a place, then whether they are observed or not does not really matter for the purposes of arguing that no warrant is required.

Oh, and for all those occasions in which the video camera is simply on? Think about how much it easier it will be to conduct investigations and prosecutions for underage drinking or possession and consumption of prohibited drugs, etc. Instead of hilarious instances of "jackasses" who videotape their transgressions, many transgressions -- minor and major-- will now be unintentionally observed, transmitted and recorded.

Of course with all the intimate activity unintentionally being put on line, it will be easier to be a "peeping Tom." A significant fraction of distance learning students are high school students taking college-level courses. For child pornography purposes, a person is a child until he or she turns 18 years old (18 U.S.C. 2256(1)). This is good news for the courts (NOT). Prosecutors will have many more opportunities to bring child pornography prosecutions once this is required.

Do you think Congress has thought about any of this?

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Privacy in dormitory hall ways?

Do college students have a reasonable expectation of privacy for Fourth Amendment purposes in the hallway of their dormitory outside their dorm room?

A panel of the Court of Appeals for the State of Washington (Division III) ruled that they do. State of Washington v. Jacob Sterling Houvenor, No. 25332-5-III, June 26, 2008.

The story was reported in the Wenatchee (WA) World on July 9.

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“We don’t want to fight addicts; we want to fight addiction. We need to manage addiction.”

“We don’t want to fight addicts; we want to fight addiction. We need to manage addiction.” The credo of the drug policy of Iran, according to The New York Times.

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