This proposal before the Ohio House would cost taxpayers and deny needy families resources they need to survive.

A Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would subject Ohio Medicaid recipients to random drug tests in order to receive benefits from the state-subsidized health program.

[…]

Gary Daniels, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, doesn’t see Balderson’s legislation going anywhere. “I have a hard time taking it seriously as an actual proposal,” he said.

Daniels called the proposed law unconstitutional. He cited a case from about a decade ago, Marchwinski v. Howard, in which a Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a previous ruling that struck down a Michigan law that tied public assistance to drug testing.

Daniels said the approach Balderson calls for has been been proposed many times in the past by states but is too “costly and ineffective” to work. He noted that the bill doesn’t mention how the state would pay for the drug-testing program. He speculated that Balderson introduced the bill to appear “tough on crime.”

An in depth look at how the War on Drugs has created a bloated prison system in Kentucky, much like it has in Ohio.

Kentucky’s 35-year war on drugs has produced “brutally harsh sentences,” flooded the prison system with non-violent and small-time offenders and helped push the state budget to the “outer edge of fiscal distress,” the author of the state’s penal code says.

An array of penalties and enhancements for drug offenses have crowded the state’s prisons with offenders who pose little risk to others and who are forced to serve lengthy terms that used to be reserved for “society’s worst actors,” University of Kentucky professor Robert Lawson said in a new report on Kentucky’s skyrocketing prison population.

Lawson’s 60-page study, which has been distributed to some legislative leaders, could provide fuel for changing a patchwork of drug punishments that he says have “failed miserably” to distinguish between minor offenders and major traffickers.

The PD issues a call for Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason to make good on his promise of reform to the criminal justice system after troubling racial disparities in sentencing were uncovered.

Minorities call it the “Just Us” system.

And it is. And it has been that way for far too long in Cuyahoga County.

In 2002, the Rev. Marvin McMickle — after completing a four-month term as a Cuyahoga County grand jury foreman — complained that the criminal justice system “had an apartheid feel to it.”

Last year, a two-part series in The Plain Dealer documented that white defendants were much more likely to have felony drug charges reduced to misdemeanors, or to receive treatment in lieu of conviction, than black defendants charged with the same crime.

The findings, based on a six-month review of hundreds of the lowest-level felony drug cases resolved between 2004 and 2007, cried out for immediate action to end the system of injustice.

Unfortunately, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason dragged his feet — his promised study only now materializing 14 months later with proposals for a team of Cleveland State University and University of Cincinnati researchers to study inequities at every stage of the process.

Scene follows up on disparities in drug prosecutions in Cuyahoga County and what is being done to curb unequal enforcement.

Local black leaders say the perception persists: At each turn, the criminal justice system crashes down harder on blacks than it does whites. Drug arrests occur at a greater rate on the city’s predominantly black East Side; Ohio prisons maintain a disproportionately black population; even the lines to get into the downtown Cleveland justice center seem overwhelmingly black, one leader says.

Efforts to understand and address apparent disparities in the system have come in waves, with varying degrees of success. Last year, academic and media reports about racial inequities in Cuyahoga County prosecutions brought the latest round of outrage and the latest calls for reform (”Disparate Times,” Scene, July 30, 2008). At the center of the reheated debate was county prosecutor Bill Mason, who vehemently defended his office after a October ‘08 Plain Dealer series highlighted favorable sentences and treatment programs for white defendants in low-level drug cases — the same types of cases that typically end in jail sentences and felony records for black defendants.

Mason put himself at the helm of the reform effort — one that is currently in a holding pattern. More than a year has passed since Mason and other county and city officials met with leaders in the black community to discuss inequities in drug-case sentencing, with no reports of progress.

And in other positive news on the medical marijuana front, legislators are drafting a bill that would allow Ohioans to use marijuana for medical purposes.

The federal government’s recent decision to ease up on prosecuting patients using medical marijuana has brought hope to activists in Ohio seeking a medical marijuana law.

But getting lawmakers here to approve therapeutic marijuana use promises to be an uphill battle.

State Rep. Kenny Yuko, a Richmond Heights Democrat, is drafting legislation with groups that want Ohio to become the 15th state to allow those who are seriously ill to use medical marijuana. While working on getting backers to unite behind a single approach, Yuko was heartened by the recent decision by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to redirect investigations away from patients in states that allow medical marijuana.

“It’s definitely good news for people who care about this issue,” said Yuko, who has multiple sclerosis but is not seeking to use medical marijuana. “I hope this gives us an opportunity to get due consideration in the House and Senate.”

But Yuko acknowledges that it’s “not going to be an easy sell” to get a medical marijuana measure through the legislature, especially with the vehement opposition of prosecutors and police groups.

The Lima News praises President Obama’s recent announcement that the federal government will not prosecute people who live in states that allow medical marijuana use.

After almost a year in office, the Obama administration made a decision this week.

The Justice Department on Monday issued a memo to federal prosecutors in 13 medical marijuana states —Michigan among them — telling them to stop enforcing federal marijuana laws against medical marijuana patients. This should result in an end to the mean-spirited and bizarre federal attacks on people treating conditions such as glaucoma and chronic pain with a natural drug that’s far less harmful than an array of hard drugs the pharmaceutical giants push like candy.

The next logical step is to eliminate marijuana from the list of drugs no doctor can legally prescribe — a step arguably called for by the Controlled Substances Act itself — and allow doctors nationwide to prescribe cannabis for patients who can benefit from it. In Ohio, state lawmakers should grant patients the same access to a treatment for painful conditions as they could find as close as Michigan.