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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Researchers from Spain have found a strong and independent link between cannabis use and the onset of psychosis at a younger age. The association, they say, cannot be explained by chance, and is not related to gender or the use of other drugs. It is, however, related to the amount of cannabis used.

U.S. growers produce nearly $35 billion worth of marijuana annually, making the illegal drug the country's largest cash crop, bigger than corn and wheat combined, an advocate of medical marijuana use said in a study released on Monday. The report, conducted by Jon Gettman, a public policy analyst and former head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, also concluded that five U.S. states produce more than $1 billion worth of marijuana apiece: California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii and Washington. California's production alone was about $13.8 billion, according to Gettman, who waged an unsuccessful six-year legal battle to...

SIERRA VISTA, Ariz — A 61-year-old woman found with a trunkful of marijuana was convicted of drug running in what prosecutors said was an attempt to earn cash for a bingo habit. State troopers found 10 bundles of pot totaling 214 pounds hidden in Leticia Villareal Garcia's car trunk last year when they stopped her outside Bisbee, in far southeastern Arizona. Villareal told jurors before they convicted her Thursday that her only regular income was a $275 monthly welfare check, but she frequently played bingo and occasionally won thousands of dollars. Prosecutor Doyle Johnstun said the game was Villareal's undoing.

Marijuana may help reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease by reducing inflammation in the brain, researchers reported yesterday. Tests on rats indicated that a compound found in marijuana stopped the loss of brain cells caused by inflammation and improved the animals' memories. The findings, presented to a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta, may help explain some studies that suggest people who regularly smoked marijuana in the 1960s and '70s are now less likely than others the same age to develop Alzheimer's. [SNIP] ``The baby boomers are just getting old enough now that we can just see this,"...

ASHEVILLE (AP) — A South Carolina man has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for cultivating a marijuana garden in the Nantahala National Forest in Macon County. Timothy Olin Bennett, 47, of Walterboro, S.C., was sentenced Tuesday at a hearing in U.S. District Court before Judge Lacy Thornburg. He had pleaded guilty earlier to one count of conspiracy to unlawfully distribute and possess with intent to distribute marijuana. The office of U.S. Attorney Gretchen C.F. Shappert said Bennett, James Patrick Davis and Josh Lee Flynn maintained a marijuana garden inside the national forest between October 2001 and November...

Leon Nunn stepped out his front door one recent afternoon only to be waved back by a squadron of drug agents using a battering ram on a neighbor's home. The half-million dollar home in the quiet subdivision was stuffed with high-grade marijuana, plants covering nearly every square foot. The bust is one example of a phenomenon that has come to light recently in subdivisions around the state's capital. Marijuana growers with suspected ties to Asian organized crime have been buying suburban homes — many in newer developments — because of the anonymity the drug dealers believe the neighborhoods afford. They...

GETTYSBURG, Pa. - A woman admitted to smoking marijuana daily with her 13-year-old son to reward him for completing his homework. Amanda Lynn Livelsberger, 30, pleaded guilty to several charges Monday and will be sentenced Nov. 27. Livelsberger, of Conewago Township, admitted in Adams County court that she had been smoking marijuana with her son since he was 11, and that she often gave it to him as a reward. The boy told police that he was required to do his homework as soon as he got home from school, and then was allowed to smoke marijuana with his mother,...

VALENCIA — A Tracy man stopped Thursday afternoon for not wearing his seat belt in Southern California was found carrying about 400 kilograms — about 880 pounds — of cocaine in the back of his pickup, California Highway Patrol officials said. Juan Alvarez, 31, was arraigned Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court on two felony charges: possession for sale of a controlled substance and transportation of a controlled substance, according to court documents. Both charges carry an enhancement for exceeding 80 kilograms and could net Alvarez a maximum of 50 years in prison. Alvarez did not enter a plea...

Generally, there are two types of marijuana users. First is the most commonly stereotyped “stoner,” depicted in the media of movies (e.g. Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and television (e.g. Shaggy from Scooby Doo). These are the dead-end job, ambitionless abusers who ingest marijuana to escape their already dismal lives. They represent the image which is most often associated with marijuana use. Certainly, the average American high school is teeming with similar directionless pot-smoking losers, further cementing this public perception.

It's election season again, and, in the world of drug-law reform, that can mean only one thing: Time for federal narcos at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy – home to the nation's "drug czar," John Walters – and their buddies in the Drug Enforcement Administration to get busy spending your hard-earned tax dollars – and using their official titles, offices, and government e-mail addresses – to get out on the campaign trail in an attempt to thwart citizen-driven – and thus, also taxpayer-supported – ballot initiatives that seek to reform marijuana-related laws. Revising his 2002 role...

It turns out that alcohol is legal for the simplest, most nostalgic, and most American reason of all. Despite its risks and harmful side-effects, adults are reserved right to drink because they are independent adults in a free country. For all of the empty rhetoric about economics and black markets, the end of Prohibition was due to a single principle: even if drinking may be bad for society, government has no right to keep the people from doing it. The ability to get drunk is an inalienable right that we have forever confirmed with the 18th Amendment.

Denver DEA Rep: Don't Legalize It Colorado -- The Drug Enforcement Agency is stepping into the political fray to oppose a statewide ballot issue that would legalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. In an e-mail to political campaign professionals, an agent named Michael Moore asks for help finding a campaign manager to defeat the measure, which voters will consider in November. If passed, it would allow people 21 and older to have up to 1 ounce of marijuana. In the e-mail, which was sent from a U.S. Department of Justice account, Moore also writes that the group has $10,000...

White House Sends Money To Fight Pot Growing Washington, DC -- The White House is sending money and some momentary manpower to reinforce the fight against California marijuana growers. When national drug czar John Walters lands in Fresno on Tuesday, he'll be bringing a commitment of an additional $2.2 million in law enforcement funding. The money will include $100,000 grants for Fresno, Tulare and Kern counties, as well as more support for a coordinated anti-pot campaign. He'll also be bringing the extra attention that comes along with the job of directing the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy....

WASHINGTON -- The government's anti-drug ad campaign has not been proven to deter children from using drugs, and lawmakers should consider reducing funding for the $1.2 billion program, congressional auditors said Friday. The Government Accountability Office based its recommendation on its review of an independent evaluation of the media campaign by Westat Inc. The government has spent about $1.2 billion since 1998 on scores of television, print and radio ads designed to discourage drug use among youth. The ads also describe parents as the anti-drug. President Bush requested another $120 million for next year. Westat found the ads had no...

The reporters made their way through the dim lights and small huts of Virginia City's Chinatown. In the huts, one of the reporters later wrote, "A lamp sits on the bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker's mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a hole with putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to smoke--and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the...

In a large raid preceding the harvest season, the Jackson County Sheriff's Department has seized 2,500 marijuana plants with a street value estimated at up to $12.5 million. Two men found at the scattered gardens near Hyatt Lake on Monday remain in Jackson County Jail on immigration holds and the investigation is continuing, Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters said. Officials had watched the growing operation, believed to be linked to a Mexican drug cartel, and swept in Monday to destroy it just before harvest time, sheriff's Lt. Pat Rowland said. SWAT teams from Jackson and Douglas counties and Oregon State...

Marijuana Amendment Will Be On Ballot Denver -- Coloradans are to decide this fall whether to make it legal under state law for anyone age 21 and older to possess up to an ounce of marijuana. Secretary of State Gigi Dennis said Wednesday that backers of that initiative had turned in enough signatures to qualify for the Nov. 7 general election. The proposal will be Amendment 44 on the state ballot, Dennis said. Under Colorado law, anyone in possession of an ounce or less of marijuana can be charged with a Class 2 petty offense, punishable by a fine of...

Would you support the creation of safe-injection sites for drug users in your community? * Yes * No

Voters have been losing their taste for the war on drugs lately; in the past few years, states from Arizona and Alaska to California and Hawaii have moved toward making marijuana, in particular, a low priority for law enforcement, with first-offense possession cases often dismissed with small-time fines and medical-marijuana measures on the books in several states. But the initiative voters in Nevada will be considering this fall goes much further: The “tax and regulate” measure, whose supporters got it on the ballot by collecting 86,000 signatures, would allow anyone over 21 to possess up to one ounce for personal...

ederal agents arrested more than 130 alleged drug traffickers from coast-to-coast Tuesday who U.S. officials said smuggled heroin from Mexico and offered phone-up home delivery like a takeout pizza shop. Beginning before dawn, Drug Enforcement Administration agents conducted arrest raids and searches, seeking up to 150 people, about half of them illegal aliens, according to senior drug enforcement officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity before the official announcement. By early afternoon, the investigation had produced 131 arrests in 15 cities, from Charleston, S.C., to Los Angeles, based on 10 federal indictments and state charges, the officials said. Known as...

Nearly two week ago, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell suggested hard-line Communist Raul Castro really did have a soft spot for capitalism. “Raul has been in charge of the military and the economy,” Mitchell explained to the August 2 “Today” show audience, calling Fidel’s younger brother “politically hard-line but more open than his brother to free enterprise, including foreign investment.” She might be on to something, after all. “Federal prosecutors in Miami were prepared to indict Raul Castro as the head of a major cocaine smuggling conspiracy in 1993, but the Clinton Administration Justice Department overruled them, current and former Justice Department...

Reefer is Worth Getting Mad About Vienna -- Supporters of the legalization of cannabis would have us believe that it is a gentle, harmless substance that gives you little more than a sense of mellow euphoria. Sellers of the world's most popular illicit drug know better. Trawl through websites offering cannabis seeds for sale and you will find brand names such as Armageddon, AK-47 and White Widow. "This will put you in pieces, then reduce you to rubble -- maybe quicksand if you go too far," one seller boasts. This is much closer to the truth. In Canada, as in...

Cops slip up on medical marijuana Not many people go to the Denver Police Department to pick up bags of marijuana, but Thursday a police officer handed Larisa Lawrence about 2 ounces of the drug. "It's squished," she said, scrunching her nose and pressing down on the red evidence bags. "It's just not the same." Late Tuesday, Lawrence's marijuana was seized by Denver police during a traffic stop even though she produced proof that she was allowed to carry it under the state's medical marijuana law. Lawrence, 30, and her husband, Thomas, are caregivers who run a medical-marijuana support center...

Drug agents have raided one of the largest marijuana operations ever discovered in Gila County. The garden, located east of Payson and about a half mile east of the Tonto Creek Fish Hatchery, contained about 30,000 plants spread out over a half-mile area. The raid on the illegal operation occurred July 29 but law enforcement officers didn't begin eradication of the plants, some of which were seven feet tall, until Aug. 3. The garden was kept intact to allow other law enforcement officers, state officials and the media an opportunity to visit the site and see the garden firsthand. Also,...

Journalists have turned the radar up so high in their coverage of illicit drug use that a pair of migrating Blackburnian warblers would look like a squadron of B-52s if they applied the same scrutiny to the skies. This week's example of journalistic overkill in the pursuit of a drug story owes its origin to a 400-word letter in the July 27 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine titled "Twin Girls With Neurocutaneous Symptoms Caused by Mothball Intoxication," in which three physicians in France solve a medical mystery posed by an 18-year-old patient. The woman had developed a...

ABC News: At San Francisco's Wharf, a Fight for Medical Marijuana Ensues July 25, 2006 — San Francisco has more cannibus clubs — the dispensaries of marijuana for the medical treatment of the nasty side effects of chemotherapy, glaucoma or AIDS — than any other city in the nation. Yet, that doesn't mean cannabis clubs make welcome neighbors, even in bluest of the blue San Francisco, a city that prides itself on being tolerant of almost every lifestyle. (snip) But the reality of the program is apparently harsher than the notion. However accepting San Francisco may consider itself to be,...

Feds Warn Of Marijuana-Filled Gumballs Gumballs Called 'Greenades'POSTED: 8:00 am EDT July 27, 2006 ELLICOTT CITY, Md. -- Authorities aren't happy about yellow, smiley face gumballs. The federal Drug Enforcement Agency is warning about so-called "Greenades," which are marijuana-containing gumballs. Survey: Used Drugs? The DEA is issuing an intelligence bulletin about the pot candies to police departments across the country. The smiley face gumballs were first discovered at a Howard County, Md., high school in January. Police charged three 17-year-old students after a teacher alerted a school resource officer. She told the officer that she saw a student give a...

Hunter knows how to mellow out on marijuana. It's something he does all the time. But the first time he smoked the leaves of a plant dubbed the "magic mint," he felt as if he'd been slammed into another dimension. As drug trips go, this one was more terror than pleasure. "The first time I did it was with a lot of people," recalls Hunter, a Toronto university student who asked that his real name not be used. "That was probably a bad idea because I did it and before I even knew what was happening, I was just like...

One of the first Shelbyville confiscations of the African drug khat occurred early Sunday morning. "Approximately 11.26 grams of a green leafy substance believed to be khat" were found in a coat pocket of Mustaf Shire Abdi, 21, Anthony Lane, Officer Tracey Nelson said. Abdi tried to pull away as Officer Benjamin Burris was checking the pocket and was immediately handcuffed, Nelson said. "Khat use is most prevalent among immigrants from Somalia, Ethiopia and Yemen," a May 2003 National Drug Intelligence Center bulletin said. "These individuals use the drug in casual settings or as part of religious ceremonies. "The use...

Excuse me for a moment while I vent about the mind-boggling stupidity of the autocratic, bureaucratic, right-wing, Neanderthal numskulls who keep pushing an insane, inane, and inhumane holy war against marijuana – which is, after all, a weed. The most embarrassing thing for these holy warriors is that the weed is winning! They've been at this war since 1937, spending billions and billions of our tax dollars, militarizing our borders, and stomping on our Bill of Rights. They've used phone taps, garbage searches, jackbooted raids, and draconian prison terms to ... well, to do what? To nab peaceful, mellow tokers...

LAREDO - The deputy commander of a narcotics task force who accepted tens of thousands of dollars to protect drug dealers pleaded guilty to extortion charges Friday. Julio Alfonso Lopez, 45, pleaded guilty to conspiring to extort money from drug traffickers, U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle said. An accomplice, 32-year-old Meliton Valadez, was convicted Friday for his role as Lopez's middleman with the traffickers. Federal investigators accused Lopez of using his position to ensure safe passage of drugs through sparsely populated Zapata County along the Mexican border. They said that beginning in 2005 at least four payments totaling $44,500 were made...

Messing With Our Heads A "tobacco accessories" merchant fights a proposed ordinance prohibiting the sale of drug paraphernalia. By Alex Pickett Published 07.12.2006 http://tampa.weeklyplanet.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=73642 Weekly Planet Tampa It's 8 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and I'm inside the Home Depot at 22nd Street N. in St. Petersburg so Leo Calzadilla can prove a point. He strolls through the plumbing aisle and stops at the brass fittings. He picks up a five-inch brass nipple, screws on an elbow tube, adds a round connector on top and holds it up to a man next to him. "What does this look like to...

Drug War Police Tactics Endanger Innocent Citizens Winston Churchill is commonly credited with having said, "Democracy means that when there's a knock in the door at 3 am, it's probably the milkman." One wonders what Churchill would make of modern-day, drug war America. For the last year, I've been researching a study on SWAT teams, "no-knock" raids, and the rise of paramilitary tactics in domestic policing (the study was released this week). The trends I've found are troubling, and some of the individual stories are absolutely heartbreaking. Each day in America, police SWAT teams raid more than 100 private homes,...

A backpacker has been jailed for 10 years in India despite claiming she was tricked into becoming a drugs mule. Daisy Angus, 26, received the sentence from a Mumbai court for possessing and attempting to smuggle 10kg of cannabis out of the country. Angus from Bournemouth, Dorset, was asked to carry a case by a companion, but later confessed to her father she thought it may have held drugs. She has spent four years in Mumbai's Byculla prison awaiting sentencing. Angus will now have to serve the remaining six years of the ten year sentence but this could be served...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teens who experiment with marijuana may be making themselves more vulnerable to heroin addiction later in life, if the findings from experiments with rats are any indication. "Cannabis has very long-term, enduring effects on the brain," Dr. Yasmin Hurd of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health in an interview. Whether or not trying marijuana is a 'gateway' to use of so-called harder drugs like heroin and cocaine has been hotly debated, she and her colleagues note in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. To investigate whether pot smoking...

Judge rules against Alaska marijuana law JUNEAU, Alaska – A judge on Monday struck down part of a new Alaska law criminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, saying it conflicts with past constitutional decisions made by the Alaska Supreme Court. That means the police won't be able charge people with a misdemeanor under the new law for possessing less than 1 ounce of marijuana in their homes. The state Department of Law was expected to quickly file an appeal with the high court. Superior Court Judge Patricia Collins said a lower court can't reverse the state Supreme Court's 1975...

In the eyes of the federal agents who secretly watched him, Alberto Zatarain was a drug dealer who made all the right moves. He had at least three aliases. He switched cell phones every month and drove ugly old cars to avoid notice. After dark, he holed up and watched TV inside a rented matchbox house in Richfield that rattled from low-flying jets. No clubs, no parties, no women. And every few months, when another runner came up from Mexico, Zatarain handed off suitcases of cash -- profits from a booming business that stretched from metro suburbs to farm towns...

PIMA — The Church of Cognizance, which has quietly operated here since 1991, has an unusual tenet — its worshippers deify and use marijuana as part of their faith. Until federal authorities charged them with possessing 172 pounds of their leafy green sacrament earlier this year, church founders Dan and Mary Quaintance say they smoked, ate or drank marijuana daily as a way of becoming more spiritually enlightened. But now, with added conspiracy charges, the Quaintances face up to 40 years each in prison in a case they call religious persecution. Federal prosecutors say religious freedom does not exempt the...

TORONTO - When Sean Erez was found crumpled and bleeding in the elevator of the Westin Harbour Castle hotel this week, shot when an alleged drug deal went awry, he could well have still been inside an American prison for his international drug trafficking enterprise. That a decade was shaved off his 15-year sentence imposed in a Brooklyn courthouse in November, 2001 -- after he applied to serve his sentence in Canada rather than in the United States -- is angering victims-of-crime advocates and police officers on both sides of the border. "He won the lottery when he was transferred...

Former Drug Czars Believe Their War Has Been Won USA -- The United States has won the war against illegal drugs. That was the conclusion of a unique gathering on June 17, which marked the 35 th anniversary of the war’s beginning in 1971 with the appointment of Dr. Jerome H. Jaffe, a psychiatrist, as the first White House drug czar. Jaffe was joined at the the anniversary gatheing in by six other former czars, Dr. Robert L. Du Pont, Dr. Peter G. Bourne, Lee I. Dogoloff, Dr. Donald Ian Mac-Donald, Lee Brown and retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey....

SAN FRANCISCO, July 3 — The newest attraction planned for Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco's most popular tourist destination, has no sign, no advertisements and not even a scrap of sourdough. Yet everyone seems to think that the new business, the Green Cross, will be a hit, drawing customers from all over the region to sample its aromatic wares. For some, that is exactly the problem. "The city is saturated with pot clubs," said T. Wade Randlett, the president of SF SOS, a quality-of-life group that opposes the planned club. "Fisherman's Wharf is a tourism attraction, and this is not the...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A recent Supreme Court ruling that Congress can ban homegrown marijuana for medical use in California led Friday to the reinstatement of an Arizona man's overturned conviction for having homemade machine guns. Prosecutors in both cases invoked the Constitution's interstate commerce clause, despite the fact that the cases centered on items that were homemade, or homegrown, and didn't involve commerce or crossing state lines. The courts ruled, however, that the items still can affect interstate commerce and therefore can be regulated by federal law. In the machine gun case, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on...

Should last week’s joint disqualify a pot smoker from driving today?A police officer pulls you over at a checkpoint and asks, "Have you been drinking?" Assuming he wants to know whether you have consumed alcohol in the last few hours, such that it might be affecting your ability to drive, you say no. "Not at all?" he asks. Well, you admit, you did have a beer the night before, whereupon he arrests you for driving under the influence. If that scenario makes sense to you, you should have no problem with Michigan's new policy regarding driving and drug use. As...

If ever a piece of legislation should pass readily through the U.S. House of Representatives, it is a measure sponsored by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., and Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., that would prevent the Department of Justice from using tax dollars to prosecute medical-marijuana patients in states that have legalized medical marijuana. Because it is a good bill, expect it to fail. Polls show that some three out of four Americans support allowing doctors to prescribe medical marijuana for patients who need it. Members must know that constituents within their districts use marijuana to control pain and nausea -- their families...

Medical Marijuana: Then and Now USA -- In 1937, the 75th Congress criminalized all parts of a plant called Cannabis sativa L. The proponents of The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, a.k.a., prohibition, represented the interests of both public and private factions. The opponents of prohibition represented house-call doctors and small farmers. The losers of this debate in 1937 were (shock) the house-call doctors and small farmers. The more things change in the 69-years-and-counting of prohibition, the more they seem to stay exactly the same, even though today does not have to be like it was back then. Back then,...

81-year-old Busted With $600gs In Pot At Border TORONTO -- An 81-year-old Niagara Falls pensioner has been arrested and charged with smuggling almost $600,000 worth of marijuana into the U.S. in the trunk of a car. "He is one of the older suspects we have ever seen," said Kevin Corsaro, of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. "We were all surprised." Regular Crosser The senior is a regular border crosser and a member of the NEXUS program, in which pre-screened drivers are provided speedy crossings, Corsaro said yesterday. The senior was sent for a random check Wednesday night at the Whirlpool...

Marijuana users can be arrested for drugged driving weeks after they toast a joint, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in a Jackson County appeal. A veteran prosecutor hailed the ruling as a correct interpretation of the zero-tolerance law that will make enforcement easier. A longtime defense attorney said the high court has opened the floodgates on overreaching government. "This goes to show the Supreme Court does not seem to care about individual rights," Jackson attorney Jerry Engle said. At issue were cases from Jackson and Grand Traverse counties. The local case involved the prosecution of Dennis Kurts for driving...

As many as nine LSD-laced candies disappeared during a gathering at a Northwest Austin apartment and, about an hour later, a 3-year-old boy was hallucinating, crying as he grasped at the air, police said. The boy spent three days in Children's Hospital, at times in intensive care, before being discharged Wednesday and placed in a foster home. His mother, 22-year-old Ashli Rene Freas, faces a state jail felony charge of abandoning or endangering a child after the incident Sunday. Police arrested Freas late Sunday outside her Cedar Park apartment on Cypress Creek Road, saying she took her child to an...

Fentanyl-laced heroin found in Ohio Mansfield, Columbus labs identify fatal combo Friday, June 16, 2006 Margaret Harding THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH MANSFIELD, Ohio — The deadly mix of drugs that has killed addicts in Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia has reached Ohio. Mansfield police have identified the powerful prescription painkiller fentanyl in six of the last 10 batches of heroin confiscated by police. Mansfield police laboratory director Anthony Tambasco said he decided to start looking for fentanyl after hearing about the deaths in Detroit just before Memorial Day. Authorities there have confirmed 100 fentanyl/heroin deaths. Another 60 were confirmed in the Chicago...

Cell Phones Link Fabrizi To Suspect Mayor's Phone Records Show 13 Calls To Accused Cocaine Dealer In 04 BRIDGEPORT -- Though Mayor John M. Fabrizi said last month that he didn't know Shawn Fardy "personally," his cell phone records show he called the accused cocaine dealer at least 13 times between October and December 2004. It's also the same time that Fardy is caught on a FBI wiretap placing a cocaine order "in code" to his accused drug connection, Juan Marrero, saying it's urgent that he get back to him because Fardy has a lot of anxious customers. Marrero, who...