BID TO CHANGE MARIJUANA LAWS BRINGS CONCERN

In most towns, here's what happens if an officer finds a small joint
in your pocket:

You will be arrested. The officer will drive you back to the
municipal or county jail, where another officer will fingerprint you,
take your mugshot and hold you in a cell until you post bond.

The police department will send the joint to a state crime lab to
make sure it's really marijuana.

Meanwhile, if you don't or can't post bond, you'll sit in jail until
your first court date. Because you're facing possible jail time and a
$1,500 fine for the misdemeanor, you're more likely to go to trial,
at which point a police officer will have to come to testify.

Facing this long and expensive process, some towns are treating
arrests for having a small amount of marijuana more like they would
treat a parking violation. They simply issue the offender a ticket
charging him with breaking a local ordinance, and levy a small fine.
Aurora, Sugar Grove and Yorkville already have ticketed low-level,
first-time offenders, with varying levels of success. In the past few
months, Oswego and Cook County have also considered issuing only tickets.

Naperville, however, is sticking with its policy of being tough on
marijuana users.

"I have heard no discussion of it in Naperville and I do not
personally support changing the existing laws governing marijuana
use," Naperville Police Chief David Dial said. "If I thought that
reducing the penalties for marijuana would somehow make the community
safer, I absolutely would support it. I do not."

Dial said that although some communities seem to be taking marijuana
use a little less seriously, he believes use of the substance needs
to be dealt with firmly.

"It's a gateway drug and it's dangerous," he said.

That line of thinking is especially relevant in Naperville, some say,
as the use of stronger drugs such as heroin are on the rise.

Dial said that going easier on marijuana users could just end up
ecnouraging more people to use the drug and create more of a problem.

"I think we can result with a disproportionate use of law enforcement
time and resources if there is an increase in use," he said.
"Lessening the penalty will only increase those numbers."

Officials in most villages and cities that have tried a looser
approach - called "decriminalization" in some quarters - point to how
it saves officers the time and expense of traveling to the circuit
court to testify. And it also may increase income to the city or
village, because fines for a local ordinance violation all go into
the village coffers instead of being divided between village and county.

But those weren't the main reasons the Carpentersville Police
Department urged the change on the village board, according to police
Cmdr. Tim Bosshart.

"It's not to generate revenue. It's to give people a second chance,"
so that one relatively minor offense doesn't wreck the offender's
life, Bosshart said.

In 2008, the Sugar Grove Police Department formalized its policy to
allow officers to write city tickets to first-time offenders caught
with a small amount of marijuana. Since then, Sugar Grove police have
issued 25 marijuana tickets and 30 paraphernalia tickets. Sugar Grove
Detective John Sizer said no one who was issued a Sugar Grove
marijuana ticket has ever been arrested again for the same offense.

"It's a huge time-saver for everyone," he said.

About a month after Sugar Grove changed its rules, Aurora passed its
own marijuana-ticket ordinance, authorizing tickets for first-time
offenders found with less than 30 grams. But less than a year later,
the city stopped issuing such tickets.

"It's a nice thing in concept, but it just hasn't worked out well,"
said Aurora Police Chief Greg Thomas. "It really hasn't turned out as
nice and clean as we'd hoped."

'I'm a lifer'

"I'm a lifer," Kate said as she sat in her living room. "I've been
smoking pot for 30 years."

Kate and Tom live in an upscale neighborhood in DuPage County.

Like an estimated 17 million other Ameri-cans, they're regular marijuana users.

They're also among a growing number of Americans who support
legalization of the drug. But they're careful about whom they let
know about their habit. That's why they asked that their full names
not be used.

Kate, 48, smokes about five times a week after work and on the
weekends. Tom, 52, smokes almost as frequently.

Kate's long relationship with marijuana began when she was in high
school. Someone at a party dared her to smoke a joint. So she did.

Tom, on the other hand, didn't start smoking pot regularly until he
was almost 30 and working in Chicago's Financial District. The first
two times he tried pot in college, he suffered from splitting
headaches. He tried it again as an adult and enjoyed the relaxing
feeling he got.

"Very mellow and mild," he said. "Not like any other drug."

Kate said she's never bought marijuana from a drug dealer. There have
always been friends of hers who had it and shared it with her.

"I never had to make that inner-city purchase. If I had to go
somewhere scary to get it, I probably wouldn't use it," she said.

Kate and Tom have teenage children and they don't discuss their
marijuana habit with them.

"They know I wish it was legal," Kate said. "They know I'm not
against it. But they're minors and I don't want to cross that line.
It is illegal, after all."

While Kate and Tom keep to themselves about smoking pot, Dan Linn is
very open about it.

That's because he's the head of the Illinois chapter of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws - NORML.

Linn, 29, said he started smoking pot in his early teens like Kate.
He was an aggressive kid who got into a lot of fights before he
started using pot before school every day. He continued to play
travel hockey and worked a night job during high school.

"Once I started using cannabis, I started to calm down and focus on
activities, whether it was academics, sports or outside hobbies."

Linn, who now works at a grocery, lobbies the Illinois General
Assembly on a variety of marijuana-related bills. He's pushing for
the taxation and legalization of marijuana in Illinois. He supports
medical-marijuana legislation, which came eight votes short of passing in May.

Linn said he also backs proposals to make petty possession of
marijuana a violation that results in a ticket but no criminal charges.

'Unhealthy and dangerous'

Some people, however, are concerned about the various moves recently
to take marijuana use less seriously.

"It's not the devil," said Dr. Joseph Lee, medical director of
Hazelden Center for Youth and Families in Plymouth, Minn. "It's not
going to save society and it's not going to be the downfall of
society. But I have seen more young people coming in with psychotic
symptoms related to marijuana."

Lee emphasized that only a small percentage of young pot smokers
appear to be predisposed to suffering from mental problems related to the drug.

Still, with marijuana use rising, Lee said he's seeing more of those
patients in his clinic and some are coming from the Chicago area for treatment.

Memory and productivity suffer among kids who abuse marijuana, Lee
said. "Some kids come in with government conspiracy stories, mild
levels of paranoia or disorganized thinking," he added.

Lee said more research is needed about the effects of marijuana on
kids' health.

"But research is conclusive that people who smoke pot are at a higher
rate of developing psychotic symptoms," he said. "It is still
relatively small, but significant. It is twice what you would find in
non-pot smokers."

Over the last 30 years, marijuana growers have engineered stronger
strains, Lee said. Some marijuana grown today is five times more
potent than the "Cheech and Chong" pot of the '70s, experts say.

Peter Bensinger, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in
the 1970s and early 1980s, pointed to recent studies showing
marijuana use among motorists doubles the risk of car crashes and
that pot causes "cognitive chaos" in the brains of rats.

Bensinger said he opposes proposed legislation to allow medical use
of marijuana in Illinois. He also doesn't like the idea of issuing
tickets to people caught with small amounts of pot.

"Marijuana is not just illegal, but unhealthy and dangerous," he
said. "You need a sanction with a bite - and a ticket won't do it."

Bruce Talbot, a drug expert and retired Woodridge police officer,
said not enough has been done to educate the public on the hazards of
smoking marijuana.

Talbot lectures about drugs and trains law enforcement officials in
identifying motorists who have been using them.

"Smoking tobacco and drinking have become less glamorous with years
of public education about the dangers of tobacco and drunken
driving," he said. "We are seeing the exact opposite with marijuana.
Social scorning of marijuana use is being replaced by the idea that
it is medicine and not that bad for you. Based on the evidence I've
seen, it is dangerous."

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MORE AMERICANS LIGHTING UP

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health found there were more than
17 million regular marijuana users in the United States in 2010, a 20
percent jump over just three years. The study also showed 2.4 million
people ages 12 or older used marijuana for the first time in 2010
compared to 2.2 million people in 2002, a 9 percent rise. By far,
marijuana was the most widely used drug, the survey found.

A Gallup poll released Oct. 17 showed 50 percent of Americans
surveyed said marijuana use should be legal, up from 46 percent.

Another poll conducted last year by The Washington Post and ABC News
found more than 81 percent of Americans surveyed said they support
legalization of the drug for medical purposes.