Last week’s post was won by wes.in.wa. It was in Olympia.

This week’s is (loosely) related to something in the news from January. Good luck!

– I’m not sure it’s possible to exaggerate the differences that would exist if Gulet Mohamed and Jared Loughner were in each other’s respective situations. If Congresswoman Giffords and 18 others had been shot by a Muslim-American like Mohamed, all of the people who are falling over each other trying to absolve the paranoid and eliminationist right of any responsibility would be screaming bloody murder about how the entire Muslim world was responsible. And if a white American like Loughner were held by the FBI after visiting relatives in Europe, tortured, put on a no-fly list and prevented from returning to his desperate and anxious family (with no evidence that he’d committed any type of crime), there would be a bi-partisan consensus demanding that Obama step down over it.

– Last night on Real Time with Bill Maher, Stephen Moore humiliated himself more than anyone I’ve seen since Michael Steele did (right before he became RNC Chairman). It got so bad, he was trying to act surprised when others were pointing out to him that mandates were a Republican idea.

– One of the most horrific domestic drug war tragedies of the past few years will be in the spotlight again next week. Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD, is suing Prince George County over the 2008 drug raid where he and his family were mistakenly targeted by a SWAT team that also shot their two dogs.

– A more recent drug war tragedy comes from Utah, where the police video has been released of a SWAT team executing a 45-year-old man as they stormed his home.

– Video of Thursday’s testimony from Olympia on the medical marijuana bill SB 5073 can be seen here on TVW. Most of the testimony against the bill was fairly unconvincing with the exception of some testimony explaining that the workplace discrimination protections may not viable. This is a tricky issue to get right. It’s difficult to balance the need for any employer to fire an individual who is impaired at work and incapable of performing their duties with the need to protect individuals who use medical marijuana outside of work, are fully capable of doing their jobs, but who test positive in a drug screening.

Phil Mocek was acquitted today by a New Mexico jury after he was arrested in 2009 for refusing to show ID to TSA at the Albuquerque airport. I’ve known Phil for a couple of years, and I have to admit, when I first heard about what happened to him, I thought it was a strange point to take a stand on. But he was right. TSA doesn’t have the right to force you to show ID in order to travel within the United States. And as a quick note to all the Tea Partiers screaming about death panels and the socialist tyranny that exists only in their imagination, this is what it looks like when a citizen truly believes in limited government – and is brave enough to stand firmly on the front lines.

This Thursday, the Senate Health and Long-Term Care Committee will be having a hearing for the medical marijuana bill introduced by Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-36). State Rep. Jim Moeller (D-49) has introduced an identical bill in the House.

These bills have been introduced because of the numerous shortcomings in the original medical marijuana law passed by voters in 1998 and updated in 2007. These shortcomings have been frustrating for patients and law enforcement as it’s given rise to a quasi-legal system of underground dispensaries. Here are the main items that this legislation aims to address:

– Arrest Protection – Under the current law, patients don’t have any formal protection from arrest. Under the February 2010 State Supreme Court decision in State v Fry, courts affirmed that police can conduct searches and arrest even the patients who are following the letter of the law and force them to prove in court that they’re in compliance. In most of the state, this hasn’t mattered as few county prosecutors are willing to drag medical marijuana patients through the court system when they’re clearly in compliance, but there have been exceptions (particularly in rural counties like Kitsap).

– Cooperative Grows – Under the current law, there’s no provision for cooperative grows, which for many is a convenient way to ensure a constant supply of medicine. Under the language of the bill, coops will be limited to 25 people and 99 plants.

– Licensed Producers and Licensed Dispensaries – The most significant part of this bill is the creation of a regulated system of marijuana producers and dispensers. Producers will be licensed and regulated by the Department of Agriculture and dispensaries will be licensed and regulated by the Department of Health. Under the current language of the bill, the licensing would begin on July 1, 2012. In the interim, the bill claims that dispensaries operating under the terms of this law will be able to present an affirmative defense in court. One issue that’s been raised is whether adding these responsibilities to these state agencies can be done in the current all-cuts environment – even with the knowledge that the taxes collected from this bill would be a minor windfall for the state budget.

– Designated Providers – While this bill authorizes dispensaries and coops, it does not dismantle the existing rules regarding designated providers. However, dispensaries have used some creative legal reasoning to maintain that they’re complying with the restrictions on designated providers that they can only provide for one patient at one time (in some cases by having each customer sign a paper denoting that the dispensary is their provider for the duration of the transaction). Under this bill, a designated provider must wait for 15 days to switch the patient they’re providing for. It’s not entirely clear whether the provider will be in violation of the law if he continues to grow plants in that fifteen day period.

– Employment Protection – Earlier today, the State Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Jane Roe v. Teletech. This case involves a woman who was fired from a customer service phone job that she’d just started after she tested positive for marijuana on a drug screening. She’d previously informed them at the time she was hired that she was a medical marijuana patient. The bill includes language that provides employment discrimination protection against cases like this unless the job involves public safety, operating heavy machinery, or handling dangerous substances. It doesn’t provide any protection for those who want to use medical marijuana while at work.

– Probation – There’s language in the bill that allows for individuals (if allowed by a judge) to use medical marijuana while on probation. This is a response to the aggressive attempts (at the behest of Rob McKenna’s office) to prevent anyone on probation from being able to use medical marijuana – even if they’d been an authorized patient for years.

– Patient Registries – What’s arguably the most controversial part of the bill among patients is the patient registry. In order to provide an easy way for law enforcement officials to determine whether individuals are authorized patients, the bill establishes a patient registry. The language of the bill is fairly strong about providing the proper kinds of mechanisms to keep this information secret, but recent news events from other states have shown that promises of confidentiality don’t always work out as expected.

I’ve been typing up this list while at the Cannabis Defense Coalition’s meeting to discuss the pro’s and con’s of the bill. There’s a lot of nervousness among patients that this bill could end up like the bill in 2007, where the strongest aspects of the bill are stripped away, leaving patients in continued limbo. My hope is that the experience of the last few years gives the legislature a greater impetus to provide real fixes for a broken system. On Thursday, we’ll begin to find out where this is headed.

UPDATE: The city of Edmonds is trying to ban dispensaries. They apparently already have one that operates openly there. If Kohl-Welles’ bill passes, however, cities like Edmonds would not be able to override the state law and ban dispensaries outright. They could only use “reasonable” zoning restrictions to keep them from being located in certain areas.

UPDATE 2: Nina Shapiro has more here in the Seattle Weekly.

Last week’s contest was won by Brian. The correct answer was the church at the end of the movie Sixteen Candles, which is located in Glencoe, IL.

This week’s is a random location in Washington, good luck!

Also, this week’s View From Your Window contest at Andrew Sullivan’s blog looks like it could be from around these parts, but I haven’t pinpointed it yet. Does anyone know?

With the Green Bay victory in Atlanta tonight, the Seahawks are playing for the right to host the NFC Championship next weekend. They take on Chicago at 10am tomorrow morning.

– Pete Guither sees a glimpse of the kind of nightmare that would be unleashed by outlawing tobacco.

– Innocent man in New York finally frees himself from a phony murder conviction after 15 years.

– Nick Baumann writes about the American teenager stuck in Kuwait and allegedly tortured after he was placed on a no-fly list for traveling to visit family in Somalia and Yemen.

– Brown University Professor of Psychiatry Peter Kramer has a very good post on paranoia related to Jared Loughner and our political climate.

In the hours after Naveed Haq went on a shooting rampage at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in July 2006, Jim Miller wrote the following at Sound Politics:

In this post, I argued that the Seattle Times should not have published a letter saying that “neocons” should be weeded out, especially under the inflamatory headline they chose: Eradicate those who have put us in the Middle East. The editor, Jim Vesely, seemed not to understand my argument, judging from his reply.

Perhaps Mr. Vesely does not know that “eradicate” and “weed out” are terms commonly used by some of the bloodiest dictators. Perhaps he did not know that some, especially on the left (and among the followers of Pat Buchanan), use “neocon” to mean Jew. And it was absolutely clear that the letter writer thought that supporters of Israel should be weeded out.

Perhaps now, after the shootings at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, Mr. Vesely will understand my point. Perhaps he will even realize that publishing a letter that advocated weeding out a group, and appeared to advocate eradicating them, was wrong. Perhaps.

A few days later at his own blog, he wrote:

When Naveed Haq forced his way into the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, he told the people working there that he was a Muslim-American and that he was unhappy with Israel. He then began trying to kill them.

Even before he gave himself up to the police, our local journalists were ready with the excuses. Haq was a lone gunman (as if that made him less dangerous). He had a history of mental illness (many terrorist are not quite right in the head). He had a minor criminal record (many terrorists do). And so on.

As we’d soon find out, the local journalists’ “excuses” weren’t really excuses, they were the facts of the case. Haq was a lone gunman with a history of mental illness and a criminal background. But at the time, Jim Miller wasn’t satisfied with that explanation: Naveed Haq was acting as an agent of a larger force, intent on eliminating Jews from society. He saw this shooting as the natural consequence of the kind of eliminationist rhetoric that often emanates from those who radically oppose Israel.

Of course, after a mentally unstable lone gunman in Arizona shoots a Democratic Congresswoman in the head, Miller points to this passage from Instapunchline Glenn Reynolds, saying that it’s “worth reading”:

To be clear, if you’re using this event to criticize the “rhetoric” of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either: (a) asserting a connection between the “rhetoric” and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you’re not, in which case you’re just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I realize that a moron like Jim Miller is an easy target, but this level of hypocrisy seems to be extremely commonplace on the right. With the Haq case, Miller was right to point out that the kinds of extreme rhetoric against Jews can often have consequences like this. And Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik is similarly correct in pointing out the exact same thing regarding Arizona’s right-wing crazies.

From what we know already about the Tucson case, alleged shooter Jared Loughner is a mentally unstable loner who doesn’t fit neatly into any political profile. This is similar to Haq, who was clearly not an Islamic radical, and had even tried to convert to Christianity. But just because a mentally disturbed person doesn’t fit a particular profile doesn’t mean that they’re not influenced by the political atmosphere that surrounds them. Haq was clearly influenced by anti-Semitic eliminationist rhetoric that has a long history in numerous places around the world, especially among Muslims. And I find it nearly impossible to believe that Loughner wasn’t influenced by the eliminationist rhetoric against progressivism, multiculturalism, and government in general that’s become more commonplace within America’s far right in recent years (and especially in Arizona).

As with the aftermath of every terrorist attack, I cringe at the natural impulse to respond with stupid symbolic legislation. The answer here isn’t to ban anyone’s right to speak their mind. But if there’s one rallying cry that’s worth listening to, it’s the call to improve the state of mental health treatment in this country. That’s really the common thread between the Haq shooting and this past weekend’s tragedy. Of course, when it comes to providing help to the mentally ill, it appears that our fiscal situation leaves us with only enough money for rhetoric.

Last week’s contest was won by Darryl. It was in Simpsonville, SC.

This week’s is related to a TV show or a movie, good luck!

If you haven’t already had the chance, Brendan Kiley’s fourth and final installment in his series on tainted cocaine is excellent. The entire series was easily one of the best pieces of local journalism from the past year.

UPDATE: And in other must-read news, Matt Taibbi’s latest on our new Speaker of the House is the usual great mix of hilarious and infuriating.

I’ve had a few phone conversations over the past few days with an old college friend who’s now an attorney in the Miami area. Back in college, he was a Republican, but he’s now utterly terrified of what new Republican Governor Rick Scott is going to do to that state. For those who haven’t followed his illustrious career, Scott is the health care executive who paid a $1.7 billion settlement after his company was found to have been defrauding the government. I can’t even begin to understand how someone like that was able to win a statewide election in any state.

A reader alerted me to a news story that took place out on the peninsula right before Christmas:

Yellow crime-scene tape surrounded Dr. James Rotchford’s Olympic Pain and Addiction Services medical clinic in Port Townsend’s Uptown District on Tuesday morning, as city police officers assisted state and federal agents in executing a search warrant on the premises.

According to two other articles online, the raids were a result of an investigation by the State Attorney General’s office over Medicaid fraud. The Attorney General’s office provided no details on the warrants, which are sealed for 90 days.

Rotchford’s clinic specializes in treating pain patients and those with addictions to pain medications. Because of the risks of abuse from prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet, doctors like Rotchford are in a risky profession. Even doctors who’ve been cleared by medical organizations of any wrongdoing have found themselves guilty in a court of law, simply for not realizing that the folks they were prescribing to were supplying the black market. As a result, there are precious few doctors willing to go into this field of medicine. And the recent story of Siobhan Reynolds is a frightening indicator of how dangerous it can be merely to defend an accused doctor.

As of now, no charges have been filed against Rotchford and little else is known about why his clinic was raided. My understanding of Medicaid fraud implies that they believe that Rotchford was writing improper prescriptions that were then charged to Medicaid. Someone with some more knowledge of that charge can perhaps let me know if it could possibly mean something else. In the meantime, though, it doesn’t look like we’ll get to see anything related to the search warrant until March.

The difficulty in this issue comes from the balance we need to strike between the treatment of pain and the threat of addiction. Our federal government’s approach to this delicate topic hasn’t been very balanced. Keeping addictive pharmaceuticals under wraps is their only mandate, so there’s little consideration to chronic pain patients who suffer from the downstream effects of that mission.

This imbalance briefly came under scrutiny in December when Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin placed a hold on the nomination of Michele Leonhart to run the DEA. Kohl thought that the restrictions being imposed by the DEA on nursing home personnel were preventing adequate pain management. He lifted the hold after getting assurances from the Department of Justice that they’d work to rewrite the rules.

Reading through the comments on the Port Townsend-based articled I’ve linked, there are strong and conflicting opinions on Rotchford and his clinic, some positive, some negative. It’s not clear yet what’s going on here, but based on the history of the DEA’s conflict with pain doctors, we shouldn’t be surprised to see Rotchford targeted, nor should we be surprised if it turns out that he’s being targeted unfairly.

Last week’s contest was won by John McKay. The correct location was the building in Panama City, Florida where a gunman fired at members of the local school board.

Here’s the week’s, just a random location. Good luck!

– Publicola provided an update on the ongoing friction between the ACLU of Washington and Sensible Washington regarding legalization initiatives. Last year, the ACLU didn’t like the way the initiative was set up and refused to endorse it. Sensible Washington is once again planning to file an initiative and there are two issues that continue to keep these two organizations apart.

The first is the lack of regulation language in the bill. After the failure of Proposition 19 in California this year, it should be pretty clear that an initiative that doesn’t adequately address the regulation aspect of ending marijuana prohibition is a ripe target for effective “scare” ads. I think the ACLU is absolutely right to pressure Sensible Washington to include some language to that effect.

The other issue involved the timing of an initiative. I’m not in agreement with the ACLU that there’s much to be gained by waiting until 2012. When I crunched the numbers to compare demographic turnouts between 2008 and 2010 in California, I found that it would’ve only made a 2.4% difference in the percentage of Yes votes. But those two years represented two opposite extremes in which types of voters came out to vote. As Publicola points out and Dawdy backs up, off-year elections don’t tend to be skewed too greatly either for or against liberal causes in this state. And it’s not clear that 2012 will have as heavy a liberal turnout as 2008 did. It’s very likely that the difference between running in 2011 and running in 2012 would be negligible.

– The Cannabis Defense Coalition was curious about how the Washington State Department of Revenue arrived at their recent decision to send out tax notices to the state’s still-illegal medical marijuana dispensaries, so they did what they do best and filed a public disclosure request. After reading through the documents, there are few surprises to be found. The Department of Revenue was contacted several times (the first time in 2006) about whether dispensaries should collect sales tax on what they sell to patients. The DOR investigated and found that: a) it doesn’t matter that the money is being made illegally, and b) medical marijuana is not a prescription, so it isn’t exempted by the existing laws that don’t allow a sales tax on prescription drugs. Despite this, the internal emails among the DOR did reveal some interesting discourse.

– Some data was released recently showing that 59 police officers across the United States were shot and killed in the line of duty this past year. That figure includes federal, state, and local officers. To give some perspective on the Mexican drug war, nearly 70 municipal police officers were shot and killed in Juarez alone in 2010.