JACKSON COUNTY, Miss. (FOX 10 TV) – A Mississippi high school teacher is behind bars and facing fines up to $1 million, all for growing marijuana at his St. Martin home.

Narcotics officers from two agencies searched the home of 51-year-old Patrick Charles Walker on Wednesday, November 15. Walker is a teacher at St. Martin High School.

During the search, agents found marijuana plants growing inside and outside Walker’s home. They also seized marijuana that had been recently harvested, as well as stuff to grow marijuana, like fertilizers, nutrients, fans, and Ultraviolet grow lights.

If convicted, Walker faces a fine up to $1 million and up to 30 years in the state penitentiary.

In other news from Mississippi high schools:

Desoto County, Ms (My FOX Memphis) – A substitute teacher is behind bars after Desoto County Sheriff’s deputies arrested him Monday, for allegedly having sex with multiple underage students.

23-year old Joey Johnson of Horn Lake, Mississippi is charged with multiple counts of sexual battery. Johnson is alleged to have had sex with at least two 16 year old students while working as a substitute teacher at Lake Cormorant High School near Walls, Mississippi.

Johnson isn’t the only Mississippi teacher facing charges. Last week, 22-year old Tyler Bigham, a music teacher at Desoto Central High School was arrested and charged with sexual battery for allegedly having sex with a 17-year old student at a park.

(Smoking Gun) A Mississippi teacher admitted to cops that she had sex with a 15-year-old male student to whom she sent explicit text messages and trysted with in her Jaguar, which bore the license plate “GRRRRR.” Those are just some of the sleazy details in a Biloxi Police Department report detailing Rebecca Dawn Bogard’s alleged sexual assault of the boy, who the 27-year-old educator taught at the Biloxi Alternative School.  Bogard… is facing felony sexual battery charges. She has been suspended with pay and is free on $50,000 bail.

LONG BEACH, MS. (WLOX) – A former teacher faces new sex charges. Police say Joseph Eugene Council, 33, of Long Beach confessed to having a sexual relationship with 17 year old girl.

Until May, Council taught band and choir at Pass Christian Middle and High Schools. Council was taken to the Harrison County Jail where he was being held pending $75,000 bond. Long Beach Police say the investigation is continuing and ask anyone with information about the case to call 228-863-7292.

Four different Mississippi teachers involved in sexual relationships with minors.  Their bonds were set at values between $50,000 and $100,000 dollars.  Mississippi law sets the bar for statutory rape at age 16, so only the female teacher in the Smoking Gun piece might have been charged with rape.  But in her case, and the other teacher cases, the charges are set to felony sexual battery, defined as:

§ 97-3-95. Sexual battery.

(1) A person is guilty of sexual battery if he or she engages in sexual penetration with:

(a) Another person without his or her consent;

(b) A mentally defective, mentally incapacitated or physically helpless person;

(c) A child at least fourteen (14) but under sixteen (16) years of age, if the person is thirty-six (36) or more months older than the child; or

(d) A child under the age of fourteen (14) years of age, if the person is twenty-four (24) or more months older than the child.

(2) A person is guilty of sexual battery if he or she engages in sexual penetration with a child under the age of eighteen (18) years if the person is in a position of trust or authority over the child including without limitation the child’s teacher, counselor, physician, psychiatrist, psychologist, minister, priest, physical therapist, chiropractor, legal guardian, parent, stepparent, aunt, uncle, scout leader or coach.

§ 97-3-101. Sexual battery; penalty.

(1) Every person who shall be convicted of sexual battery under § 97-3-95(1)(a), (b), or (2) shall be imprisoned in the State Penitentiary for a period of not more than thirty (30) years, and for a second or subsequent such offense shall be imprisoned in the penitentiary for not more than forty (40) years.

So remember folks, if you’re a high school teacher in Mississippi, growing marijuana plants in your own home is as reprehensible as having sex with your teenaged students.  Oh, wait, I’m sorry, it’s worse.  The felony sexual battery charges don’t carry a $1,000,000 fine.

(The Romeo Observer) Members of the Northwest Zero Tolerance Coalition learned that new marijuana laws are leading to strains on law enforcement.

Assistant Prosecutor Bill Dailey of the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office spoke to the coalition about some of the drug use problems he has seen in the county, mainly with medical marijuana.

He said he is concerned it will be more readily available to students due to people owning medical marijuana cards that grow their own plants.

“I think there is going to be more marijuana available to our young people and I think that it’s because there is now a lawful way for it to be out in the stream of commerce,” he said. “The same thing has happened with Vicodin and OxyCotin pills.”

I think if medical marijuana were as toxic, addictive, and laden with side effects as Vicodin and OxyContin, that statement would scare me more.  Or if I didn’t know that in the medical marijuana states that have been at it long enough to collect data, fewer teens are using marijuana and their use rates are declining faster than the national average.

“Not to offend anybody, (but) in my opinion, it’s pretty amorphous criteria to get a card,” Dailey said. “There are people I know who have got a card for asthma, which is kind of surprising.”

I don't think Georgine would be offended; I think she'd see it as a teachable moment.

Well, you wouldn’t be surprised if you met Georgine DiMaria or any one of the dozens of medical marijuana patients I’ve met who use cannabis to treat asthma.  THC is a bronchodialator – it opens up the breathing passages – and other cannabinoids work as anti-spasmodics.

He said that the offices don’t want to bug people who are lawfully following the program. He said that part of him wonders why the state didn’t just totally legalize it so there could be quality control and regulation instead of the current “middle ground.”

That part of you would be called the “logical” part, Mr. Prosecutor.  Surprisingly, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that refrain from law enforcement.  “Just legalize it,” one cop told me, “either it’s illegal for everybody or it’s legal for everybody, but this in-between some-legal some-not shit is impossible for us to deal with.”

We’re working on it.  In the meantime, the way you folks in law enforcement have gone about scaring the hell out of people regarding marijuana for the past seventy years has made it very difficult for us to just legalize it.  Only people’s compassion for the desperately sick and disabled people suffering with pain has allowed us even this tiny bit of marijuana regulation for a small subset of its users.  So if the slow process from prohibition to regulation temporarily makes your jobs a bit more difficult, excuse me if hundreds of thousands of marijuana patients and twenty million marijuana arrestees don’t shed a tear.

(Los Angeles Times) In the end, despite a sophisticated filtration system, it was the smell that smoked out the marijuana-growing operation located just 25 feet from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Topanga station in Canoga Park.

LAPD officials said officers began noticing the smell of pot Tuesday morning, investigated, got warrants and closed down the indoor farm within eight hours.

Three men were taken into custody earlier Wednesday after officers served a search warrant on the warehouse in the 8400 block of Canoga Avenue.

Growers had built three rooms in the building — one for seedlings, another for medium-sized plants and one where harvesting was apparently conducted, police said. The lights were controlled so they wouldn’t overheat, watering systems were automated and oxygen levels were supplemented by carbon dioxide tanks, according to police.

Oh, for the life of me, I cannot even begin to imagine the cognitive processes and critical thinking that went into this particular choice of real estate for this particular commercial venture.  Wait a minute, yes I can…

BRAD: Dude, check it out, I found an awesome place to grow pot!

JEFF: Oh, gnarly!

BRAD: It’s not in the best location, though.

JEFF: I see the globe right there.

BRAD: Well, yeah, it’s in California.  No, dude, I mean, like, it’s right next to the cop shop.  You know, the po-po!  The five-oh!

JEFF: I know that dude.

BRAD: Yeah, so I’m kinda worried that they’ll figure it out and bust us.

JEFF: Those guys are f…

BRAD: You’re right, man.  Besides, check it out, they’ll never figure it out.  I got these awesome air filters and we’ll seal up the whole inside with caulk!

JEFF: Hey, bud, what’s your problem?

BRAD: No, caulk, you know, like you use to seal up window cracks and stuff!

JEFF: Totally.

BRAD: So whaddaya say, are you in, brah?  Look at all this amazing weed, huh?  We’re gonna make a lotta money, dude, and we’re doing it all just 25 feet away from the LAPD!  Are you in?

JEFF: I am today.

(we hear sirens, police bursting in…)

OFFICER HAND: Am I hallucinating here? Just what in the hell do you think you are doing?  What are you people, on dope?

JEFF: You dick!

BRAD:  Aw, this really sucks.  How did you find us?  Hey, you don’t have to hit us!  Ow! Ow!

JEFF: That was my skull! I’m so wasted!

(Thanks to the site MovieWavs.com for what shall be a very entertaining podcast segment!)

(PhillyNORML: Chris Goldstein & Derek Rosenzweig) Philadelphia could save more than $3,000,000 annually by not taking pot smokers in for mugshots.

Minor marijuana possession arrests in Philadelphia are handled with mandatory custody; this is a different process than every other county in Pennsylvania costing the city millions of dollars. A disproportionate number of citizens (84%) arrested for marijuana possession in the city are black.

Research by PhillyNORML this year has uncovered these two disturbing trends that present serious challenges to the city. But in a sign of a pragmatic shift in attitudes, city officials have held an ongoing dialogue with reform advocates to proactively address these concerns.

In March of 2009 the Philadelphia chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws performed their annual observation of the Pennsylvania Uniform Crime Report data for the marijuana arrest numbers. At the same time, the city was beginning to face a heartbreaking economic plight that pitted police jobs against a lack of Public Safety Budget funds.

Data indicates that 4,716 adults were arrested in 2008 on the singular criminal misdemeanor charge of marijuana possession less than 30 grams. In Philadelphia such arrests are required to be custodial. For even a single cannabis joint this means an offender must be handcuffed, transported to a holding cell, photographed and perhaps make bail before release. In every other county in Pennsylvania there is no mandate for the custodial arrest of citizens found with small amounts of marijuana. Instead, summary violations are issued along with a date to appear in court.

PhillyNORML is a sterling example of how ordinary cannabis consumers can band together under the NORML banner and affect real change at the local level.  Reformers at the national level don’t have the on-the-ground knowledge of local politics like everyday citizens living in cities like Philadelphia.  Local reformers can better cultivate personal relationships with mayors, city councils, and all their staff, as well as integrate with groups as disparate as unions and libertarian groups, parents and police, and churches and universities.

If you’re sitting around wondering when they are going to legalize pot, you’re part of the problem.  YOU have to legalize pot.  You and your like-minded pot smokers, cannabis consumers, medical marijuana patients, and lovers of liberty, peaceably assembled to exercise your free speech and to petition your government for a redress of grievances… there’s nothing more American than being NORML.

OK, maybe it’s not an overt lie, just a failure to update their website in lieu of last week’s reversal by the American Medical Association of their position on medical marijuana:

(DEA) Exposing the Myth of Smoked Medical Marijuana

Q. Does marijuana have any medical value?

…The American Medical Association recommends that marijuana remain a Schedule I controlled substance.

In case the DEA didn’t read it:

“short term controlled trials indicate that smoked cannabis reduces neuropathic pain, improves appetite and caloric intake especially in patients with reduced muscle mass, and may relieve spasticity and pain in patients with multiple sclerosis.” Furthermore, the report urges that “the Schedule I status of marijuana be reviewed with the goal of facilitating clinical research and development of cannabinoid-based medicines, and alternate delivery methods.”

Our friends at LEAP have an action alert for Attorney General Holder to direct the DEA to clean up the FAQ sheet. Go there now!

(Buffalo News) Bianca Hervey, a 20-year-old college student, was returning home to her apartment in Attica when a village police officer drove up behind her, put on his flashing lights and pulled her over.

Hervey’s driver’s license, Officer Christopher Graham told her, had been suspended for failing to pay traffic tickets. He arrested her.

Graham handcuffed her, put her in the back of the police cruiser and took her to police headquarters. Her car was impounded and towed away.

At the police station, Graham handcuffed Hervey to a bench and told her she would probably spend the night in jail, Hervey said.

But then Graham offered her a way out of her problems.

Become a confidential informant for the Wyoming County Drug Task Force, he told her, and he could make the charges disappear.

Police departments throughout the country use people arrested on drug charges to inform on others. In return, their charges are reduced or dismissed.

But Hervey said she doesn’t use drugs and, having just moved from Batavia to the tiny village of Attica, doesn’t know anyone in Attica who does.

That didn’t stop her recruitment as a confidential informant.

Neither Wyoming County Sheriff Ferris Heimann, nor District Attorney Gerald Stout has a problem with how Smith’s department handled the case.

Asked about recruiting someone who said she is not part of the drug trade, Stout responded to The News: “But she agreed to do it.”

Nothing more aptly demonstrates the idiocy of prohibition than a system of law enforcement and justice that uses young people as bait.  Surely nobody in the close-knit group of drug users in the tiny town of Attica, NY, is going to think twice about the new girl in town who is so desperate to buy a large amount of cocaine or pills or weed, but doesn’t seem to know which end of a joint to light.

This is even more shameful than the Rachel Hoffman case.  At least Rachel was someone who hung around with a cannabis and ecstasy-using crowd.  This Bianca Hervey sounds the majority of young people who, believe it or not, don’t do any drugs!  When police infiltrate criminal organizations, they’ve had months of training, so why do they think they can take a young lady who doesn’t pay traffic tickets and turn her into supercop?

Click here to view the embedded video.

I can’t do any better than MPP’s Bruce Mirken on this one:

(LA Times) Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, ridiculed the effort. “Let me guess, they set a record number of plant seizures and marijuana has now been eradicated from California?” he quipped.

Mirken said the campaign has caused growers to move from private lands into wilderness areas. “This is an annual exercise in futility. Not only does it not do anything meaningful, it actually makes the problem worse,” he said.

It’s all part of California’s CAMP – Campaign Against Marijuana Planting – which over 27 years has been funding law enforcement to take helicopters into the hills so police can get paid triple time to pull weeds and then fly them all over the wilderness blowing their seeds across the land so the cops can go weeding again next year.  According to the report:

Los Angeles County, which has seen a whirlwind expansion in medical marijuana dispensaries this year, has notched another marijuana milestone. The county has moved to No. 5 for the amount seized in the state’s annual eradication campaign, with 340,187 pot plants uprooted — more than a fourfold increase.

Statewide, the 27-year-old effort, known as the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, found and destroyed almost 4.5 million plants in 41 counties, up from 2.9 million seized in each of the two prior years’ growing season. The amount has climbed steadily since 1996, when California voters approved the nation’s first medical marijuana law.

State officials put the wholesale value of this year’s eradicated marijuana at $17.8 billion.

Let’s see, the standard California sales tax, minus any county or local taxes, is 8.25%, so that eradication represents about $1.46 billion dollars in tax revenues.  Obviously marijuana has not been completely eradicated by CAMP and I think even the cops will tell you they’re only scratching the surface.  Let’s be generous and suppose they’re pulling up 10% of California’s outdoor crop.  That would be $14.6 billion in taxes going uncollected.  It’s even more money if we include indoor grows and figure they’re catching much less than 10% of the crops.

(Mission Local) The federal government will continue raids on medical marijuana operations in California despite guidelines issued by the Justice Department two weeks ago indicating the contrary.

“I think it’s unfortunate that people have for some reason picked up on this as a change in policy, because it’s really not a change at all,” said Joseph Russoniello, federal prosecutor for the northern district of California, who was appointed in 2007 by then-President George W. Bush.

Asked if federal officials will halt investigation and prosecution of medical marijuana operations in the state, Russoniello said simply, “The short answer is no.”

Russoniello said many dispensaries in San Francisco and around California aren’t really not-for-profit, and he will prosecute any distributor fraudulently operating as a commercial enterprise in violation of state laws.

“By that I mean people who are in it as if they were running a neighborhood candy store instead of running a commune, a collective or a group club that caters only to specific identified persons,” he said.

Asked if federal agents are currently preparing to raid dispensaries suspected of illegal activities, Russoniello declined to comment.

“I cannot affirm or deny the existence of ongoing criminal investigations,” he said.

You know, I was just thinking that President Obama’s approval ratings are still way too high.  What he needs to do is have his administration issue a memo that seems to remove the threat of federal raids from lawful dispensaries, and then when people are comfortable about visiting those dispensaries, send in a few DEA agents in body armor to point assault weapons at people in wheelchairs.  Think of it as Obama’s “Read my lips; no new taxes” moment a la George Bush Sr. in 1988.  A few stunning visuals of jack-booted thugs taking down the neighborhood dispensary in a state where 56% of the voters want not just medical marijuana but outright legalization ought to drop that approval rating a few points, huh?

(Globe Gazette) DES MOINES — The White House’s drug czar said Monday that Iowa officials should look at the problems California has seen after allowing the use of marijuana for medical purposes as they consider the idea here.

Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, specifically cited problems regulating the clinics in the Los Angeles area that dispense medical marijuana.

Kerlikowske recounted going to Venice Beach and seeing people holding signs advertising marijuana and ads in newspapers.

He also pointed to reports of robberies and assaults that have occurred in and around medical marijuana dispensaries in the Los Angeles area.

“I would say that the recommendation for any state that’s considering moving to medical marijuana is to look very closely at what’s been occurring in California,” Kerlikowske said.

Kerlikowske, the former police chief in Seattle, reported better results for the medical marijuana law in Washington State.

“It was not as significant a problem for law enforcement as it was in, as it is in, Los Angeles,” Kerlikowske said.

We often hear the prohibitionists play the “Look at California” card when it comes to medical marijuana, ignoring the fact that the other twelve states with protection for medical users did look at California and crafted tighter regulations than the Golden State.  Rarely do we hear one bring up another medical marijuana state in comparison.  I’m sure Iowans looking to pass medical marijuana wouldn’t mind at all the protections of the Washington State law, which allows a patient to grow up to fifteen plants and store a pound and a half of marijuana.  Though they might want to look at the Oregon law, which allows close to the same limits and establishes a patient card registry that helps the patient identify his grow to law enforcement and avoid the arrest and investigation required in Washington to verify a patient’s status.