Jamaica Sees Decline In International Cocaine Traffic

From The Jamaica Observer:

Caribbean no longer preferred choice of drug pushers

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

UNITED NATIONS (CMC) — The importance of the Caribbean as a conduit for cocaine imported into the United States has "greatly diminished" over the past 15 years, according to a new report issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The report, released here on Friday, said during the early days of the trade, traffickers preferred the Caribbean corridor and it was used preferentially from the late 1970s.

"In the 1980s, most of the cocaine entering the United States came through the Caribbean into the southern part of the state of Florida. But interdiction successes, tied to the use of radars, caused the traffickers to reassess their routes.

"As a growing share of cocaine transited the southwest border of the United States, Mexican groups wrested control from their Colombian suppliers, further directing the flow through Central America and Mexico."

But UNODC said that the decline has not necessarily led to increased stability or lowered violence in the transit countries.

"On the contrary, it seems that once the drug is introduced, instability in the market can drive violence," UNODC said in its global report, noting that Jamaica provides a case where violence has become the norm despite the efforts to eradicate the trade.

It said that estimates of the cocaine flow through Jamaica dropped from 11 per cent of the US supply in 2000 to two per cent in 2005, and fell to one per cent two years later.

"This is reflected in declining seizures in Jamaica and declining arrests and convictions of Jamaican drug traffickers in the United States. It is also negatively reflected in the murder rate, which rose from 34 per 100,000 in 2000 to 59 per 100,000 in 2008.

"There are historical reasons for this paradoxical effect. The importance of Jamaica as a transit country in the cocaine trade really rose after the violent 1980 elections in that country. A large number of important crime figures -including some so-called 'area dons' and their enforcers- left Jamaica for New York, where they became key suppliers in the crack cocaine boom."

The report said that this period of growing criminal opportunities represented a time of relative calm in Jamaica.

"When this market died out and cocaine flows began to shift westward, these men returned to Jamaica to find a much less well organised crime scene, where 'neighbourhood dons' had turned to more direct means of income generation: violent acquisitive crime, including extortion and robbery.

"The Jamaican cocaine trade suffered another blow when cooperative efforts between Jamaican law enforcement and the United Kingdom sharply reduced the air courier traffic to Europe around 2002."

It said that street-level competition for diminishing returns has fuelled growing homicide rates; the highest in the Caribbean and among the highest in the world.

UNODC said a similar, but more compressed, effect could also have occurred in the Dominican Republic where the share of the US cocaine supply that transited Hispaniola dropped from eight per cent in 2000 to two per cent in 2004, before rising again to four per cent 2005 and nine per cent in 2007.

"Around this time, the murder rate in the Dominican Republic doubled, from 13 per 100,000 in 2001 to 26 per 100,000 in 2005. It has remained at high levels, and the drug trade in the Dominican Republic is still volatile.

"Dominican traffickers have grown in importance in Europe since about 2005, and today are second only to the Colombians among foreign cocaine traffickers arrested in Spain, the primary point of entry," the report added.

It said that another shift that may have affected local stability is the reduction in air courier traffic though the Netherlands Antilles.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Caribbean-no-longer-preferred-choice-of-drug-pushers_7746928

The Count

Boswell doesn't say how old he was when he figured out the point of his commentary - but for me it has always been about the count, in baseball and life.

Pay attention to the count, baseball's hidden treasure

By Thomas Boswell
Thursday, May 27, 2010; D01

How do you watch a baseball game?

To enjoy the sport fully, you have to grasp the huge importance of the ball-strike count -- especially the power of "strike two."

The count is where the strategic heart of the game is found. That's where every iota of study and intuition about your enemy comes into play. That is where veteran big leaguers live, constantly anticipating what pitch will be thrown next, or should be thrown, depending on the count. Only then can we start to watch baseball the way it is experienced in the dugout.

My education started long ago watching baseball in Puerto Rico and Cuba. I was puzzled. Crowds cheered, and often roared, on a call of "ball" or "strike" or a mere foul ball. These are the boring pitches on which "nothing happens," according to some. Were fans in those baseball-as-religion countries crazed with enthusiasm?

"No," I was told. "We just understand the game."

And I suspected that I didn't. That's when I began to grasp that the count was baseball's open secret, the hidden key, the game-within-the-game that players themselves obsessed about. You don't wait for the action. You anticipate it -- through the count.

To grasp baseball better, digest one vital but little-known fact that has only been discovered in recent years as copious data about ball-strike counts has finally become easily available online.

With less than two strikes, the average hitter is a superstar in every count. It doesn't matter whether the scoreboard says 0-0, 1-0, 2-0, 3-0, 0-1, 1-1, 2-1 or 3-1. In those counts, the average big leaguer is a .339 hitter, comparable to Stan Musial, and is a .549 slugger, comparable to Hank Aaron.

Last season, in those eight "hitter's counts," the MLB average, respectively, was .339, .340, .368, .395, .317, .332, .339 and .352. You barely need to distinguish between them. If the next pitch is hit into play, watch out. The results will evoke "The Man" and 'The Hammer."

So, don't slumber through a game thinking, "This bum'll never get a hit." Oh, yes he may. As long as he hasn't got two strikes yet.

By one of those lovely baseball symmetries that nobody can explain, almost exactly half of all plate appearances end with less than two strikes. Happy hitters! But the other half reach strike two.

Once that happens, the whole sport changes. On the two-strike counts of 0-2, 1-2, 2-2 and 3-2, batters hit .156, .171, .189 and, finally, if they can reach a full count, .233. In every at-bat last season that reached a two-strike count, the MLB average was .186, with pathetic on-base and slugging averages of .259 and .283.

How bad is that? Mario Mendoza, for whom the Mendoza Line was named -- signifying the worst imaginable big league hitter -- batted .215 with a .245 on-base and .256 slugging average.

Take Adam Dunn for example. He studies pitchers endlessly so he can anticipate -- okay, "guess" -- what they'll throw or where. He'll look for a pitch or a zone or both -- like "low changeup." With less than two strikes, when he can pick and choose, he's batted .381 in his 10-year career with a home run every 11.3 at-bats. With two strikes, he hits .151 with a homer every 30 at-bats.

Knowing the exact degree to which "strike two" changes the game may be new. But it doesn't change the sport. For 100 years, every batter has wanted to avoid two strikes and every pitcher wants to get ahead in the count. It is just in the grain of the game.

When I showed these numbers to Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer, he said: "Makes sense. Once you get two strikes, they have to defend the whole plate against all your pitches at any speed. I guess that would be make it a little harder, wouldn't it?"

Nevertheless, knowing how dramatically every change in count alters what's likely to happen next makes the game more exciting and illuminating to watch. Too bad it took me until this season for the "strike two" insight to finally click in. I searched Google, and my Sabermetric tomes, to see who else was preaching "strike two."

Finally, I got a hit. In 2004, using "a pen and a pad of paper," Bill Felber amassed data on 5,000 plate appearances, then devoted one of the 13 chapters of his "The Book on the Book" to "The Most Underappreciated Words in Baseball: Stee-rike Two."

Since then, with every-pitch-of-every-game tools such as baseball-reference.com, others may have mined the field. Still, in locker rooms, this new info brings blank stares. Ballplayers still think the game's most important pitch is "strike one" on 0-0. Oh, boy.

True, strike one is important. After an 0-1 count, the MLB average drops from .262 to .232; after a 1-0 count it rises to .278. By all means, keep telling pitchers to "get ahead early."

However, the difference between 1-0 and 0-1 has less impact on the eventual outcome of an at-bat than a change of a ball or strike in several other counts, such as 0-1, 1-0, 1-1 or 2-0. Greg Maddux sensed this. He thought 1-1 was the most important pitch -- not 0-0 -- because "2-1 and 1-2 are different worlds." At 2-1, you have to come to the hitter more. At 1-2, you can use all your tricks to "expand the zone." Mad Dog was on the right track.

But, in fact, the most transformational count of all is 2-1. If you do nothing else, watch that pitch. Measured in OPS, it has twice as much influence on the ultimate results of an at-bat as 0-0. Above all, the tale of the 2-1 pitch illustrates how, as the count changes, the hitter at the plate seems to change identity before our eyes.

For example, the current player whose career stats come closest to duplicating the '09 MLB norms of .262 batting, .333 on-base and .418 slugging is Cleveland's Jhonny Peralta. The Nationals' Willie Harris, since he came to Washington, is our Mr. Average.

Yet, as the count changes, so does their ability to "sit on" a favorite pitch or ignore any ball not in their "happy zone." As a result, in a span of minutes, they morph into different hitters.

On a 2-1 count, the average hitter is already "ahead of the count" and happy. In fact, such a guy has so much leeway to "guess hit" or "zone" that, if he puts the next pitch in play, he'll generate an .833 OPS -- equivalent to Orioles star Nick Markakis.

The true drama arrives if the count changes to 2-2 or 3-1. Hold on to your batting helmet. At 2-2, our average hitter plummets to the level of a backup player (a .618 OPS), like the Nats' Wil Nieves last season.

But if the count reaches 3-1, our Mr. Mundane suddenly becomes better (1.090 OPS for all hitters on 3-1 counts in '09) than anybody who ever lived, except Babe Ruth and Ted Williams.

Feel free to gasp. Every time you see a ball added to the count, the hitter just added 77 to 257 OPS points. Every time he gets an additional strike, his OPS for the rest of that at-bat just dropped by 122 to 215 OPS points. No change in count is inconsequential.

So, the next innocent foul ball you see may not be innocent at all. If a vet like Liván Hernández gets a slugger like Alex Rodriguez to pull a slow curve foul on a 1-1 pitch, taking the count to 1-2, then he just turned A-Rod from an all-star (.885 OPS after all 1-1 counts) into a utility man (.694 after all 1-2 counts).

The permutations are endless. But the central theme never changes. In all counts with less than two strikes, an average hitter is as good as Musial or Aaron. And a good hitter becomes a monster -- often better than Ruth. But as soon as the count gets to two strikes, all but the greatest hitters are reduced to scrubs.

"Baseball is only dull to dull minds," Red Barber famously said.

But then, as an announcer, Red had an edge. He always had to know the count.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/26/AR2010052604973.html

Does It Get More Mainstream Than This?

In my on going observations of once far out ideas going more mainstream I note the following political corruption case from Jamaica. The politician on trial is charged in connection with a bunch of compact fluorescent light bulbs. In the early 1990's I took a lot of CFL's to Jamaica, giving them to friends as well as using them at the house where I stayed. To say the least, slightly ahead of the curve.

Kern's status in question

Sources say PNP MP dropped from 2012 slate

BY GARFIELD MYERS Editor-at-Large South/Central Bureau

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

SANTA CRUZ, St Elizabeth — The word is circulating in political circles, but general secretary of the Opposition People's National Party, Peter Bunting says he cannot confirm reports that the party has dropped embattled member of Parliament for NE St Elizabeth Kern Spencer from its election slate.

"I cannot confirm that for you," was all Bunting would say when contacted by telephone yesterday.

......

Spencer is before the courts on corruption charges related to the distribution of energy-saving light bulbs -- a gift to Jamaica from Cuba -- when he served as junior minister for energy in the last PNP government.

.........

North East St Elizabeth was the only seat in the parish secured by the PNP in the 2007 elections. It is considered among the safest of PNP seats in Region Five and rural Jamaica.

Despite a significant swing against the party, Spencer and the PNP won NE St Elizabeth by more than 2,000 votes in 2007.

The PNP has stepped up attempts to clean up its image in recent months with the establishment of an Integrity Commission charged to uphold integrity and transparency.

At Sunday night's divisional meeting, guest speaker, former National Security and Justice Minister KD Knight urged the party to select only candidates of the "highest integrity" for local and parliamentary elections.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Kern-s-status-in-question_7689395

Vincent Chin

Chin Music

How one little record shop climbed to the top of the reggae world

By Jeff Stratton

published: April 10, 2003

Easing his white Ford Bronco into the lead spot of the funeral procession, red-faced, red-haired Irish Catholic priest Father Gabriel O'Reilly leaves the church in Broward where he's just officiated over the mass for Vincent "Randy" Chin. A trail of funeral flags follows him, all flying atop sedans and SUVs loaded with black-clad mourners. There's a tiny, wizened Rasta with gray dreads arranged neatly under a wool herringbone hat. There's a little black girl with a new dress and new braids. And there's an elderly Chinese couple speaking in Jamaican patois. At Chin's soon-to-be grave site, O'Reilly says a quick midafternoon prayer for the man who somehow transformed a simple mom-and-pop record store into the world's most successful reggae-oriented record company.Standing next to the casket is Chin's widow, Patricia -- better known as "Miss Pat" -- a tiny woman of Chinese/Indian heritage who grew up in Kingston. The two maintained a modest home in Pembroke Pines, where complications from diabetes took 65-year-old Vincent on the morning of February 2. Clive Chin is there too, Miss Pat's stepson and Vincent's oldest heir. From New York City, where they run the company their parents began, have come Christopher and Randy Chin. There's the Chins' youngest child, Angela, and her husband, Howard Chung, who oversee the Miramar branch of the international label known as VP Records. Clive's son Joel, who now works as the company's A&R director, and twelve more grandchildren are here as well.

Clive's ex-wife, Mandy, steps up to Chin's casket, touches it, and tells the assembled mourners that she'd long ago promised him she'd attend his funeral to fulfill one final wish. With that, she launches into a long, slow rendition of "My Way." "Frank was one of his idols, I think," Chung mentions later.

As Chin's family buried its patriarch, thousands of reggae fans celebrated (with the help of numerous blunts and copious cups of booze) the Bob Marley Festival at Miami's Bayfront Park, with the talents of Cedella Marley Booker, Steel Pulse, Inner Circle, and a brace of Marley kin. Throughout the performances, no one mentioned Chin or his passing. But his family never noticed -- they'd rented a hall and filled it with jerk chicken, rice and peas, oxtail, egg rolls, fried rice, and won ton soup. They ate and reminisced, Skatalites songs playing as they skanked the day away.

The elder Chin left to his family a still-growing empire they remain grateful for. "He was a very good provider," Angela says. Adds Miss Pat, "The bottom line is, it's not just money. It's what you do over the course of your life that makes you stand out, even when you're gone."

But VP's bottom line is indeed impressive: The family now oversees the most successful reggae record label ever -- one that has crossed over onto Billboard's charts and mainstream radio without losing its insurrectionary spirit. Saddled with the thankless task of replacing Bob Marley as the end-all and be-all of the genre with something a bit more contemporary, VP went beyond. Sensing dancehall's parallels with hip-hop, the label took reggae back to the streets, where it started. Some of her youngest grandchildren, says Miss Pat with a soft, melodious giggle, are on the front lines. "They're always telling me what's hot and when the beat is changing," she says.

---

Vincent G. Chin was born to Chinese immigrants on October 3, 1937, in Kingston, Jamaica. Music ruled the island's culture even in the late 1950s, with radio stations from Miami and New Orleans offering Jamaicans tempting glimpses of American jazz and R&B. Chin found employment servicing the island's jukeboxes, all stocked with seven-inch singles.

"He used to sleep in his car," remembers Clive Chin, who speaks in the gruff patois of Kingston's streets, even though he has lived in New York since the 1970s. "His duty was to clear the boxes and keep the money, and it was a rough time to travel with all that silver, y'know, with coins in your car and no protection."

Amassing an impressive personal collection of music through his line of work, in the summer of 1959 Chin was able to open up his first record store. "He kept dem records, and that was the springboard of his business, y'know?" explains Clive. Vincent's biggest source of musical information from abroad was Gene Nobles, a disc jockey from WLAC in Nashville. Transmitting as far as Kingston, Nobles's late-night show fed Vincent a steady diet of American AM hits.

By the time he moved the store to the oldest part of central Kingston, Vincent had become "Randy," and applied his new nickname to his shop as well as the store's small, home-grown label. Randy's became a hub of activity and a major player in Kingston's network of retail and wholesale record sales and distribution. The cauldron of Jamaica's music business depended more on records than musicians; more on traveling sound systems and recording studios than the material itself. The store wasn't just a place for making purchases; it was where customers came in to hear what was new and to socialize. Above Randy's, Vincent was busy constructing a basic recording studio. By the time the place opened for business in the spring of 1969, reggae had begun to unfurl its revolutionary counterpoint to the previous feel-good vibes of calypso and mento. A radical time was coming to the island, and Randy's sat atop its geographical and cultural center.

"Randy's was the place," remembers Lloyd Campbell. "Studio 17, we used to call it. That's where everything used to happen at the time." Campbell grew up in Kingston with the Chin family and lives today in Pembroke Pines. He works in VP's Miramar office, where he oversees his own small label, Joe Frazier.

It's difficult to overstate the importance Randy's small empire held in early 1970s Kingston. The main downtown bus stop for travelers arriving from out of town, a bustling nerve center called Idler's Rest, was next door to Randy's. Producers would show up as early as 8:00 a.m. to find session musicians kicking it on the street corner, and hire them to record tracks upstairs. "Everything that happened in the music business, bad and good, happened there," recalls Miss Pat, who had emerged as the store's -- and Randy Chin's -- primary fixture. "It was a very popular spot, every day there would be Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown ..."

"Oh, we're talking, like, the Skatalites, the Maytals, Ken Boothe, Lord Creator -- a host of artists coming in and out of the store," continues Clive Chin. Saxmen Tommy McCook and Roland Alphonso, trumpeter Johnny Moore, and trombonist Rico Rodriguez were among Studio 17's best-known session men. When they joined the legendary Skatalites, Vincent gladly became the producer. He performed similar functions for Ken Boothe, John Holt, and the Maytals trio (before their affiliation with "Toots" Hibbert).

It was a productive time. Niney the Observer recorded singer Dennis Brown there, Bunny Lee taped Delroy Wilson, and Lee "Scratch" Perry cut some of his earliest sessions with Bob Marley and the Wailers. By the early 1970s, engineer Erroll "ET" Thompson had added more modernized equipment to the studio, Clive became the de facto producer-on-premises, and the house band (called "Randy's All-Stars") included Wailers bassist Aston "Familyman" Barrett, Wailers keyboardist Tyrone Downie, drummer Sly Dunbar, and another young keyboardist named Horace Swaby, better known as Augustus Pablo.

Son Clive spent little time in the retail store, instead gravitating to the studio, where he learned to run the boards alongside the few other engineers of that era. "I grow up in the business, y'know," he says. "I got out of school in the early '70s and went straight into my father's business establishment." Soon it was Clive who was running the show upstairs at Randy's.

But by the late 1970s, once Kingston's large, ultramodern Studio One opened up, Randy's upstairs room saw less and less business. Bob Marley was becoming an international success, putting Jamaica in the spotlight, but Randy's wasn't responsible for much of his music.

---

Although Studio 17 had waned in influence, Patricia and Vincent were increasingly busy downstairs with Randy's Record Mart, which was constantly thriving and thrumming with foot traffic as well as steady global mail-order business. Along with their three young children, Christopher, Vincent "Randy" Jr., and Angela, the Chins made the store a second home, remembers Lloyd Campbell. "In those days, anywhere in the world that wanted a reggae record, you had to send off to Jamaica to order your records from Randy's!"

Unfortunately in 1977, Michael Manley's electoral victory spooked businesspeople all over the island, who already feared his socialist leanings and cozy relationship with Cuba. "It wasn't that we didn't like the country," explains Clive. "My heart and soul was in the music business there, I knew I was playing a major role, and I felt betrayed that I had to leave at such a precious time."

But in 1978 the Chins left for Queens. By the next year, the studio and record store in Kingston, unable to survive without the family's presence, both shut their doors. But Jamaica -- the one in Queens -- soon emerged as a reggae hub in its own right. Favoring the tactic of using their first initials, Vincent and Patricia brought Randy's Records to New York as VP Records.

VP's first store rented for $375 a month, Clive remembers, at 170-03A Jamaica Ave. "Print that," he insists. "Me run that for eight years." After that, he took a break from the record industry and got into catering and Caribbean food. In the meantime, Angela and Miss Pat had moved the retail store into a bigger location while Vincent, Randy, and Christopher turned their attention toward VP, the label. After licensing their past recordings for U.S. distribution, VP Records officially launched in 1993. "It was tough when we came here," recalls Miss Pat. "People didn't know much more than Bob Marley. But Clive was into the older type of recordings and Chris took on the newer."

Sensing that the dancehall sensation taking place back on the island would translate well to hip-hop aficionados in the States, VP began signing Jamaican dancehall artists in earnest: Beenie Man, Shaggy, Sizzla, Capleton, and Buju Banton all recorded for VP under Chris and Randy's supervision.

By then Vincent had less and less to do with the day-to-day operation of the label. He'd never developed a taste for dancehall. When he decided it was time to retire, he selected South Florida. It was close enough to Jamaica to make returning to see relatives simple, and besides, none of the Chins had ever gotten used to New York winters. When Vincent and Miss Pat resettled in Pembroke Pines around 1997, Howard and Angela headed south as well and opened their own branch of VP in Miramar.

---

All but hidden behind a barbecue restaurant sending visible streams of hickory-flavored goodness across the clogged lanes of 441, VP Records Florida occupies one end of a nondescript block of businesses. Inside the clean white space is a large warehouse with floor-to-ceiling product, a series of offices where the seven employees make their calls and send their e-mails, and a noisy retail outlet, whose vibrating bass permeates the whole place.

VP itself is vibrating. The music industry couldn't help but notice the label's standout reggae and soca compilations, like its huge Strictly the Best series. Packed with hits, garishly designed to resemble those attention-wrenching K-Tel covers, picturing thongs riding up, up, up butt-cracks, the comps collectively sold in the hundreds of thousands. This year Sean Paul's new album Dutty Rock debuted at number 14 on Billboard's pop chart, and Wayne Wonder's No Holding Back entered at number 29. Wayne Wonder's "No Letting Go" is the number one song on Z100 (WHTZ-FM 100.3), the big pop station in New York. Sean Paul's clip for "Gimme the Light" was the number one video played last year on BET. Much of this is the result of a distribution deal VP entered into with Atlantic Records last October, instantly making the conglomerate responsible for VP's international marketing.

The crossover victories scored by VP were too striking to ignore, says Atlantic vice president Craig Kallman, who adds, "This agreement puts us in the position of capturing Jamaica's most innovative sounds as soon as they happen in the studio."

The benefits of the Atlantic partnership are enormous, obviously. "Even though we have an office in the U.K. and distribution deals in other countries, we don't have infrastructure across the world," says Randy. But even without Atlantic's helping hand, VP artists have scored well critically as well as commercially, and though Freddie McGregor's Grammy-nominated Anything For You album lost to Lee "Scratch" Perry's Jamaican E.T. for best reggae album in February, the Chin family doesn't seem to mind. In fact, Clive says, "I'm pleased to know Perry got the Grammy this year. It was well deserved."

---

Friday morning, three weeks after Vincent Chin's funeral, Randy is busy polling the VP staff for impressions about last night's triumphant, sold-out concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York that featured Buju Banton and Wayne Wonder. "Everybody loved it!" he says excitedly. "Wayne did 'No Letting Go' and the crowd went crazy! He did extremely well onstage."

Clive, on the other hand, sounds less impressed. "I had to leave halfway through, because I started fallin' asleep," he deadpans. In the background, but still loud and clear, Clive can be heard playing some of the old music he recorded during the fertile period from 1972 to 1975. The original album release of Randy's Dub was limited to a mere 200 copies, but five years ago was reissued as Forward the Bass: Dub From Randy's, credited to Impact All-Stars. Clive is recording it for a friend this afternoon.

Today the old master tapes from Randy's Studio 17 are in Clive's control; he is in charge of overseeing the archives left behind by his father. Some have been released already -- Skatalites & Friends at Randy's, for example, and Lord Creator's Greatest Hits. He promises it will all eventually see the light of day, but it'll be on his terms; he certainly won't be turning the reels over to Atlantic. Upcoming archive projects, he says, include A Rough Guide to Ska and another Impact All-Stars collection of soul, funk, and rarities.

"With the old stuff, if you package it right, people enjoy it. Atlantic commercializes too much. Me go right down to the groundwork and let the music speak, because the music is timeless!" roars Vincent Chin's eldest heir. "And whoever is keeping it alive, it's lovely, and me love dem for that."

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2003-04-10/music/chin-music/

Medical Marijuana - On and On

Form of medical marijuana won't get you high, but it's creating a buzz

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 1, 2010; C01

WILLITS, CALIF. -- The one-armed man loitered in the waiting room for much of the morning, flipping through magazines with impressive dexterity, quietly waiting for word that the doctor would see him. Now.

William Courtney, MD, offered the chair to the right of the desk, the one occupied during regular office hours by a steady stream of patients seeking a doctor's recommendation for marijuana. In California, such a recommendation means an adult may grow, buy and smoke marijuana, all while remaining safely within the confines of state law.

The singular peculiarity of Courtney's "pot doc" practice here in Northern California is what he recommends: Don't smoke the stuff, he tells patients. Eat it.

Marijuana, he avers to every person who appears before him, turns out to be brimming with healing compounds. It won't get you high eaten raw, but juiced with a handful of carrots to cut the bitter taste, its leaves and buds may well have restored the health of his girlfriend, who had been given a diagnosis of lupus and a butcher's bill of other disorders that lab tests show have subsided. A local sufferer of Crohn's disease credits the plant with helping reverse the debilitating intestinal disorder. And published research from accredited laboratories suggests promise in preventing diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancers and assorted maladies arising from chronic inflammation.

Yet almost no one knows any of this beyond a handful of scientists, including two at the National Institutes of Health who were sufficiently impressed that they joined a Nobel laureate in patenting a cannabis molecule. Courtney hands a copy of their U.S. Patent 6630507 to occupants of the chair, typically midway through a jargon-rich spiel that sometimes hits the patient right in the wheelhouse and sometimes goes whizzing overhead.

"I have no idea what he's talking about," said the auto mechanic who was in the chair a few minutes earlier, seeking relief for a broken vertebra and a bum knee. "Every once in a while he says something comprehensible."

But now, with no appointment and no right arm, someone was way ahead of him. "The last time we talked you said you had a source for the high-CBD material down by San Diego," the one-armed man began. He was dressed like a workingman but used the chemists' shorthand for cannabidiol, the most promising healing molecule, yet in most of the marijuana bought and sold these days, also the most elusive. CBD tends to show up least in plant strains that are richest in THC, the molecule that produces marijuana's high.

Courtney listened to the man, attentive yet guarded, the standard posture of a licensed medical practitioner operating on the far edge of the frontier where law, medicine and cannabis meet. It is a place in which he is used to being pretty much alone, and after a few minutes, Courtney sat upright and looked his patient in the eye.

"Are you wearing a wire?" the doctor asked.

'The basis of health'

Five years ago, while still a regular physician, Courtney was as spooked as most doctors about pot. Then he came across an article in the December 2004 issue of Scientific American. It changed his life. The article highlighted a molecule in cannabis that could do something he had never seen before: send signals not only into a nerve cell, but also back out again.

The finding reversed 20 years of his understanding of how neurotransmitters work. One-way traffic was the basis for inflammation: Immune cells receive endless messages to get cracking, none to calm down. Continuous attacking can inflame otherwise healthy tissue. Two-way communication makes possible a feedback loop, encouraging a modulation, the promise of which swept over the Michigan-born microbiology major with the force of religion. "My God," he said. "It's the basis of health."

Courtney keeps a framed graphic from the article on his desk. It stands beside copies of "Non-psychotropic plant cannabinoids: new therapeutic opportunities from an ancient herb," from Trends in Pharmacological Sciences -- and of course U.S. patent 6630507.

Among the three NIH scientists awarded the 2003 patent was the late Julius Axelrod, who won a share of the Nobel for nerve research that laid the groundwork for Prozac. "It took us a while to appreciate what was going on here," said Aidan Hampson, another of the patent holders, now a scientific review officer at NIH. "And it turns out cannabinoids had not been appreciated before, but they were strong antioxidants. The idea of a panacea," he added, however, "is just crazy."

Courtney feels differently, of course, but assessing the merits behind his enthusiasm is a difficult task. He has bona fide medical credentials and an evident passion to heal. But his approach is grounded in the counterculture ethos of Mendocino County, a coastal forestland populated since the 1960s by "new settlers" who rejected the establishment of two generations ago, and have since been in front on some things -- organic farming, for instance.

So when Courtney, excited by the ancient pedigree of cannabis, says "there are 34 million years of research in that plant," he might sound like one of your stoner friends. On the other hand, his Web site, http://leavesofgrass.info, links to an assortment of establishment scientists, including the International Cannabinoid Research Society, which brings together hundreds of mainstream researchers in its annual meeting. One year, his domestic partner, Kristen Peskuski, summarized her return to near-full health -- from debilitating lupus, interstitial cystitis, rheumatoid arthritis and 40 medications a day -- after juicing fresh pot leaves over a 30-month period. Clinical tests documented the remission.

"Look at the people I'm rubbing elbows with -- Abbott, Smith, Merck," Courtney said, flipping through an ICRS program, thick as a phone book. "They know this is the future of medicine, without side effects."

Attention in scientific circles is, in fact, way up. "The amount of research published is growing algorithmically," said Allyn Howlett, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest University and ICRS president. Howlett has concerns about Courtney's approach. While he promotes marijuana as a good-for-you vegetable, like spinach, she regards "folk medicine" as backward and believes promising a spectrum of benefits is akin to peddling snake oil. Howlett pointed out that the pharmaceutical industry was created to standardize dosages, and the FDA to protect the consumer.

Quietly, one pharmaceutical firm has proceeded to FDA trials with a cannabinoid product. GW Pharmaceuticals, a British company, years ago bought the marijuana seed stock from a pair of Northern California botany enthusiasts who had decamped to Amsterdam, where it was safer to grow such things. After reading a GW report on a plant extremely high in CBD, Courtney for a while considered it the Grail, and looked high and low in Northern California. But in vain.

"What has happened is, almost all strains available in America through the black market are THC concentrates," said Ethan Russo, a Seattle area physician who is senior medical adviser to GW. "The CBD in almost all cases has been bred out. The reason is cannabis in this country has been cultivated for its intoxicating effect."

The company has produced an oral spray, called Sativex, approved in Canada for treatment of pain associated with multiple sclerosis and is pending in the U.K. and Spain for spasticity in MS. It has completed Phase II clinical trials in the FDA approval process as a treatment for cancer pain. The final trial awaits.

"It's going to be a few years yet," said Russo, who in the mid-'90s left his neurology practice in Montana, concerned by the toxic side effects of medicines he was prescribing. He returned from a sabbatical to Peru convinced that marijuana holds the greatest potential among medicinal plants.

"There's a tendency to discount claims when something appears to be good for everything, but there's a reason this is the case," he said. "CBD works on receptors, and as it turns out, we have cannabinoids in our bodies, endogenous cannabinoids, that turn out to be very effective at regulating immune functions, nerve functions, bone functions."

Hampson, of the NIH, likened the discovery of cannabinoids inside the body to "the opiate-endorphin story from 25 to 30 years ago. Before that, no one knew how heroin and morphine worked until they found these compounds in the brain, endorphins, and they used the same system. What were they for? To repress pain during exercise, et cetera."

Russo: "The endogenous cannabinoid system acts as a modulator in fine-tuning a lot of these systems, and if something is deranged biochemically in a person's body, it may well be that a cannabinoid system can bring things back into balance."

Stigma and red tape

Whatever potential may lurk in pot -- and most medicines start with a plant -- all agree that what Howlett called "the stigma associated with marijuana" presents powerful discouragement to scientists and firms. States may normalize access to marijuana, but the supremacy clause gives primacy to federal law that lists marijuana on Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, the tier reserved for drugs with "no currently accepted medical use."

"As far as the pharmaceutical industry goes, anything that has a controlled substance, they won't touch with a ten-foot pole," Hampson said.

Simply acquiring laboratory marijuana requires permission from an alphabet soup of agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is famously hardheaded on the matter. It was, in fact, a sidelong mention of the DEA that cued Courtney to ask his patient about a wire. The agency must grant permission to import the device the one-armed man proposed to bring from Holland, a cannabis analyzer that might tell CBD enthusiasts exactly what they have in a particular plant.

This is a point of immense frustration in the gargantuan, perhaps $15 billion underground economy that flows from marijuana in California: No one knows for certain what they're buying. "I can't breed analytically," said Jim Hill, a pot farmer in Mendocino's Potter Valley. "I can only go by patient anecdote: 'Yeah, that really worked for me.' I can't go by graph paper."

After the DEA raided Hill's operation last October, he immediately replanted, emphatic that it was his right to supply dispensaries legally organized under state law as a "collective." Favorable court rulings have both emboldened and, in spots, professionalized California's marijuana industry. At Oakland's Harborside Health Center, pot is sold not by dealers but from a clean, white building where doors open by fingerprint scans, cameras monitor every corner, and pot brownies come in "childproof" wrappers.

"We're trying to medicalize down to the finest detail," chief operating officer Andrew DeAngelo said.

A few blocks away, the Steep Hill Medical Collective invested in a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer in hopes of learning precisely what's in each pound of Grand Daddy and Purple Kush. In one room recently, a lab tech in a white coat bent over a console, while in another, two entrepreneurs mulled the lay of the land.

"You've got a movement that's turning into an industry," said Addison DeMoura, a Steep Hill owner.

A man in a Panama hat nodded agreement. Sixties activist Fred Gardner edits O'Shaughnessy's, a quarterly devoted to medical marijuana and named for the physician who brought cannabis to the attention of European medicos. "I think people owe it to the industry, owe it to the people, to do something honestly medical," Gardner said. "And CBD is honestly medical."

DeMoura could see it. "Twenty years ago it was just cannabis," he said. "The bridge to legalization is medical marijuana. I believe the bridge from medical marijuana to real science will be CBDs."

Meanwhile, two hours up Highway 101, William Courtney toiled in the laboratory that is Mendocino County. Maybe nowhere else in the country could a pot doc advise growing 40 plants -- enough for one juicing each day on the 45-day cycle required of the auto-flowering strain. Not only is it possible here, but a striking number of patients truly do not want to get high.

"I'm a mediator, so I don't want any psycho-activity," said a yoga enthusiast.

"I have two tokes and I pass out. It's unbearable," said the one-armed man.

Office hours over, Courtney climbed into his pickup, flicked on the radar detector intended to minimize encounters with the police, and steered over the switchbacks of the coast range toward home. His father was in from Michigan, watching the surf pound the rocks below the picture window and playing with his granddaughter, born 14 months earlier to Kristen, whose insides at one point were so bad off a doctor warned she would never bear children.

"Irv?" she called from the kitchen counter cluttered with carrots, pears, apples and Pineapple Thai. "You want a glass of juice?"

The old man looked up from the sea. "Sure," he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/31/AR2010053103231.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A tax on medical marijuana
could generate some $400,000 for Washington over
the next five years.

Marijuana Could Make $400k For DC Over 5 Years


That's according to information provided by the city on Tuesday.

The D.C. Council has proposed taxing marijuana as part of budget negotiations. Council members are expected to vote June 15 on a budget that includes a provision that would impose the city's 6 percent sales tax on medical marijuana sold in D.C.

The finance office says that an ounce of marijuana is expected to cost an average of $350. Adding the 6 percent tax would mean users would pay another $21 in taxes.

Washington's financial office estimated that about 850 people would fill prescriptions for medical marijuana in 2014.