News Cut: March 11, 2009 Archive

Should marijuana be legalized in Minnesota?

Posted at 9:39 AM on March 11, 2009 by Bob Collins (30 Comments)
Filed under: Crime and Justice, Health

Should Minnesota legalize marijuana for medicinal uses? The issue is steaming along at the Capitol. On Tuesday, it passed through a Senate committee. Today, the bill got an OK from a House committee.

"I spent the last eight years in the nursing home with my aunt and my mother, also at the end of my fathers life, I watched them in a lot of pain and taking a lot of pills," Rep. Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, said. He's sponsoring the proposed legislation. "I just think there's a better way for some folks to address their pain and medical marijuana is legal in 13 other states and there's overwhelming public support."

Like many bills that make annual appearances at the Capitol, the arguments on both sides were predictable, but no less emotional with every story.

Kathy Rippentrop, whose mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, described her mother's slow death. "Mom tolerated the first round of chemo, but the pills to control vomiting cost $100 each. Mom was withering away to nothing with no appetite."

Her father, a recovering alcoholic and drug user, got some marijuana from a friend. "The only miracle drug for cancer is marijuana," she said. "My father will tell you how ironic it is that the government is concerned about the pain of a murderer, but makes the only cancer drug that reduces pain against the law."

Joni Whiting told the story of her 26-year-old-daughter, Stephanie, who was diagnosed with skin cancer and died six years ago. "They cut her face off one inch at a time until there was nothing left," she said. Despite being told by a doctor that smoking marijuana would ease her pain, neither Whiting or her daughter could break the law. By the time she died, Whiting said, her daughter was taking 50-60 Oxycontin pills a day.

"The fear of being caught was significant," she said of her and her daughter's initial decision. That changed when someone left a bag of marijuana on the front step. By the end, Whiting said through tears, her daughter couldn't "stand the pain of us touching her."

"To threaten the sick and dying with jail is unconscionable," she told the House Civil Justice Committee. "What would you have done if you were in my shoes. What price would you be willing to pay to relieve the pain of a loved one. I was the one who listened to her scream in pain."

But Michael Campion, the state's commissioner of public safety defended the state's position on legalization of marijuana. "There is an absence of any empirical data that this legislation is going to do what it intends to do; there's a lot of anecdotal stories but the AMA and the FDA have not endorsed the smoking of marijuana," he said. "It's against federal law and it puts the federal justice system in conflict with our state partners."

An ex-drug dealer testified briefly that if the law is enacted, "people will kick the door in to get those plants in." Under the bill, people would be allowed to grow 12 plants of marijuana.

Another man, Jim Fahiz, testified he blew a hockey scholarship at the University of Minnesota because he smoked marijuana. "I've known thousands of drug addicts," he said, "and every one of them started with marijuana."

The bill passed the committee on a voice vote without opposition.

A similar bill passed through committees in the House last year but never came up for a vote on the House floor.

(30 Comments)

In the public interest?

Posted at 10:52 AM on March 11, 2009 by Bob Collins (28 Comments)
Filed under: Crime and Justice, Politics

Contributors to Norm Coleman's election recount effort might want to cancel their credit cards, according to the campaign.

An e-mail circulated on Wednesday said the Web site, WikiLeaks, which specializes in providing an outlet for people who want to post secret information, has obtained private information from the campaign such as the credit card numbers of donors.

"Let me be very clear: At this point, we don't know if last evening's email is a political dirty trick or what the objective is of the person who sent the email," Campaign official Cullen Sheehan wrote in an e-mail to donors. "What we do know, however, is that there is a strong likelihood that these individuals have found a way to breach private and confidential information."

While the Coleman campaign e-mail notification might alert some of the donors, 1,500 of the nearly 5,000 people on the spreadsheet did not list an e-mail address.

Who's behind WikiLeaks? Julian Assange, an Australian living in Africa who was interviewed last summer (by email) by the Sydney Morning Herald. "In every negotiation, in every planning meeting and in every workplace dispute a perception is slowly building that the public interest may have a number of silent advocates in the room," Mr Assange said in an email interview. Wired.com published an extensive profile of him around the same time.

The question to ask, however, is whether there's a compelling "public interest" in releasing the (partial) credit card information of donors to a political campaign and, if so, what is it? The Coleman campaign may have violated several state privacy laws, but the punishment will be delivered to the innocent.

One of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics is to "minimize harm," although it adds, "Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone's privacy." By providing links to the spreadsheet in question, have journalists overstepped their own code? Absolutely. Consider this item that's in the code: "Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others." One cannot criticize the Coleman campaign for not securing its data, while at the same time publishing -- or at least providing a direct link to -- that data.

Efforts to close the site down have failed, because of the nature of the Internet in the first place. The organization behind it registered its domain name in Nairobi, Kenya. Last month, a federal judge in San Francisco, citing 1st Amendment considerations, rescinded an order that disabled the Web site when it was registered through a California server. The original order stemmed from a Swiss bank's lawsuit against Wikileaks, which had posted 14 leaked documents about transactions at the bank.

It's also the site where a person who broke into then-VP candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail account posted the messages he retrieved.

Ironically, it also posted a leaked document containing the e-mail addresses of its own contributors.

There'll be plenty of questions for the Coleman's campaign alleged mishandling of data, but the story may also present a troubling picture of the collateral damage journalists' can inflict, too.

Update: MPR's Mark Zdechlik will update the story during this evening's All Things Considered.

Update 8:24 p.m. Twin Cities based computer consultant Adria Richards describes how she found the security breach.

This was really interesting. One key fact she dropped was "I didn't download anything; I just noticed that something wasn't right." I have found this to be a trait of I.T. professionals; they're not interested in spreading the information that they know should be locked down, they want the information locked down.

(28 Comments)