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0 Comments | Coventry Evening Telegraph (England), Oct 15, 2009

A MAN has been charged following an incident in which two police officers were left lying injured in the road.

Paul McMullen, of Romford, Essex, was arrested following a theft from Marks and Spencer in the Parade, Leamington, on Monday afternoon.

The 29-year-old was charged with theft of a motor vehicle, driving while disqualified, dangerous driving, driving without insurance, theft and two counts of actual bodily harm.

The Telegraph reported yesterday how thieves stole cash from the tills at Marks and Spencer at about 5.15pm.

Two men then fled the scene in a pale blue Peugeot 206, which was pursued by police towards Gallows Hill in Warwick.

When officers tried to stop the car, two Warwickshire police officers were injured and taken to Warwick Hospital for treatment.

new york auto insurance quotes The injured officers were released from hospital after treatment and are now recovering at home.

Paul McMullen appeared at Stratford Magistrates Court yesterday.

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Oct 30, 2009 | by George F Will

Note: Columnist Thomas Sowell is scheduled to return next Friday.

DURING HIS IMMERSION in his new job, Gil Kerlikowske attended a focus group of 7-year-old girls and was mystified by their talk about “farm parties.” Then he realized they meant “pharm parties” — sampling pharmaceuticals from their parents’ medicine cabinets. What he learned — besides that young humans have less native sense than young dachshunds have — is that his job has wrinkles unanticipated when he became director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

“People,” he says, “want a different conversation” about drug policies. With his first report to the president early next year, he could increase the quotient of realism.

Law enforcement has a “can do culture” but it also instructs its practitioners about what cannot be done, at least by law enforcement alone. Kerlikowske, who was top cop in Buffalo and then Seattle, knows arthritis pain relief that officers sweeping drug users from cities’ streets feel as though they are “regurgitating perps through the system.”

He dryly notes that “not many people think the drug war is a success.” Furthermore, the recession’s toll on state budgets has concentrated minds on the costs of drug offense incarcerations — costs that in some states are larger than expenditures on secondary education. Fortunately, the first drug courts were established two decades ago and today there are 2,300 nationwide, pointing drug policy away from punishment and toward treatment.

Kerlikowske is familiar with Portugal’s experience since 2001 with decriminalization of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. Nature made Kerlikowske laconic and experience has made him prudent, so he steers clear of the “L” word, legalization, even regarding marijuana.

Asked if he thinks that is a “gateway” drug leading to worse substances, he answers obliquely: “You don’t find many heroin users who didn’t start with marijuana.” And he warns that more intense cultivation of marijuana is yielding a product with notably high THC content — the potent ingredient.

In 1998, the United Nations, with its penchant for empty grandstanding, committed its members to “eliminating or significantly reducing” opium, cocaine and marijuana production by 2008, en route to a “drug-free world.” Nowadays the U.N. is pleased that the drug trade has “stabilized.”

The Economist magazine says this means that more than 200 million people — almost 5 percent of the world’s adult population — take illegal drugs, the same proportion as a decade ago. The annual U.S. bill for attempting to diminish the supply of drugs is $40 billion. Of the 1.5 million Americans arrested each year on drug offenses, half a million are incarcerated. “Tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars,” The Economist said.

“There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer.” Do cultural differences explain this? Evidently not: “Even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates.”

The good news is the progress America has made against tobacco, which is more addictive than most illegal drugs. And then there is alcohol.

In “Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson,” historian David S. Reynolds writes that in 1820, Americans spent on liquor a sum larger than the federal government’s budget. By the mid-1820s, annual per capita consumption of absolute alcohol reached seven gallons, more than three times today’s rate. “Most employers,” Reynolds reports, “assumed that their workers needed strong drink for stimulation: a typical workday included two bells, one rung at 11 a.m. and the other at 4 p.m., that summoned employees for alcoholic drinks.”

The elderly Walt Whitman said, “It is very hard for the present generation anyhow to understand the drinkingness of those years. … it is quite incommunicable.” In 1842, a Springfield, Ill., teetotaler named Lincoln said that liquor was “like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay, if not the first, the fairest born in every family.” Which helps explain why the nation sobered up (somewhat; these things are relative)