NEW BATTLEFIELDS IN THE POT WAR

I don't know about you but if I were a narc I'd dump the badge and
invest my IRA in Acapulco Gold, Jamaica Ganja or Big Sur Holy Weed. I
don't know if it is worth the effort fighting "reefer madness"
anymore. Now, don't confuse me with a fan of marijuana.

I haven't had a cigarette of any shape, form, medical quality or
condition of legality since May 17, 1964, at 3 o'clock in the
afternoon when I got on a Fifth Avenue bus in front of St. Patrick's
Cathedral. But it seems like every time the Good Guys get a break,
like the Supreme Court giving permission for the Feds to overrule
the state laws on medicinal pot, the Bad Guys come up with a
game-tying touchdown of their own. I was reading last week where
Federals narcs knocked over a storefront medical research center in
Cool, Calif., and arrested attorney Dale Schafer, 50, and his wife,
Marion Fry, 48, on charges of growing and distributing marijuana.
California was one of those states where folks with glaucoma were
allowed to puff away on the weed legally on the assumption it was
good for you. Of course, anything that is good for you immediately
comes under government suspicion. "They are charged with violating
the old marijuana laws, which are now back in effect, and I'm hoping
that the jury will see that Dr. Fry was acting as a physician,"
said their attorney, Laurence Lichter, But that's not all, as the
TV pitchmen like to say. On the same page in USA Today was a report
that Canadians now have access to a new drug called Sativex, which
is derived from the marijuana plant and which you spray in your
mouth rather than smoke.

Sativex is expensive, $124.95 a vial, which provides 51 squirts, and
that averages out to $2.44 a squirt. Not that I know anything about
it personally, but if you could get a quality toke for $2.44 or less
before May 17, 1964, the dealer wasn't advertising.

Of course, Sativex is unauthorized in the United States and will be
for years but I'm sure it won't be long before a brisk trade has
developed between Niagara Falls, Ont., and Niagara Falls, N.Y. among
grandsons of men who did it in the 1920s.

But that's still not all, as the TV pitchmen still like to say.
Chronic Candy of Corona, Calif., is marketing hemp-flavored
lollypops, with two of them sold in a "nickel bag," and the
guarantee that "Every lick is like taking a hit." You don't have to
be a pothead to understand the meaning of "hemp" and a "nickel bag"
and a "hit."

"The last thing we need is for kids to be acquiring a taste for a
drug that's illegal," says Michigan State Rep. Dudley Spade, who has
proposed a state ban on candy that contains pot-flavoring.

"There's nothing in it to get you high," says Tony Van Pelt, the
president of Chronic Candy, who imports them from Europe. "My mom
thinks she gets a buzz from it. I don't have the heart to tell her
it's just the sugar."