Medical Marijuana May Have a Host of Advantages Over Other Treatments for Traumatized Vets, but the VA Won't Even Study Its Efficacy. "There's a lot of things I'm passionate about, but getting a prescription for my marijuana from the VA is probably at the top of my list. I'd be like a kid waiting up for Santa if I thought he might be bringing me one of those. Haha!" On top of a 100 percent disability rating with PTSD, "Charlie" -- who asked that his real name not be used -- came home from Afghanistan with a traumatic brain injury, a back injury and gastrointestinal problems. The VA pulled every magic trick out of its bag to treat him. But nothing worked. [continues 2386 words]
Why Women Have Signed Onto Marijuana Reform -- and Why They Could Be the Movement's Game-Changers. In September, ladymag Marieclaire ruffled some feathers when it published a piece about women who smoke weed. But its most interesting effect was not the "marijuana moms" chatter it unleashed, and instead the fact that it brought to the mainstream media a more open discussion of the fact that women can be avid tokers, too. Public acceptance of pot is at an all-time high, and the fact that women have drastically changed their attitudes may be what is most fascinating about the sea change in public opinion -- and policy -- regarding marijuana. In 2005, only 32 percent of polled women told Gallup they approved legalizing pot, but this year 44 percent of them were for it, compared to 45 percent of men. In effect, women have narrowed what had been a 12-point gender gap. [continues 3210 words]
Here Are 10 Stories That Contributed to the Unprecedented Momentum to End America's Longest Running War. 2009 will go down as the beginning of the end of the United States drug war. I have worked at the Drug Policy Alliance promoting alternatives to the war on drugs for 10 years, and I can say without a doubt that there was more debate and movement toward sensible drug policies this year than in the last 9 years combined! Here are 10 stories that contributed to the unprecedented momentum to end America's longest running war. [continues 1473 words]
The Government Keeps Pushing the BS That Pot Is Addictive and Has Serious Health Consequences. And No Wonder -- Lying About Pot Is a Lucrative Business. Marijuana's addiction potential may be no big deal, but it's certainly big business. According to a widely publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of "drug dependence" (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for "drug dependence." [continues 1237 words]
Marijuana Is Basically Harmless -- The Monumentally Stupid Drug War Is Not The War on Marijuana Is Insane; Our Officials Keep Sacrificing Tax Dollars, Lives, Civil Liberties, and Their Own Credibility in This Misguided and Losing Effort. You might remember Robert McNamara's stunning mea culpa, delivered a quarter century after his Vietnam War policies sent some 50,000 Americans (and even more horrendous numbers of Vietnamese) to their deaths in that disastrous war. In his 1995 memoir, the man who had been a cold, calculating secretary of defense for both Kennedy and Johnson belatedly confessed that he and other top officials had long known that the war was an unwinnable, ideologically driven mistake. "We were wrong," he wrote, almost tearfully begging in print for public forgiveness. "We were terribly wrong." [continues 2759 words]
Anti-Pot Propaganda Drives Most People to Drink Alcohol Instead. But Booze Is Far More Dangerous Than Marijuana. Professor David Nutt didn't play the game. As the chief drug policy advisor in the British Government, an unspoken part of his job description was to help maintain a public fiction about marijuana - or cannabis, as it is known in the U.K. and other parts of the world. Specifically, he was expected to further the misperception of cannabis as a substance worthy of being classified and prohibited in a manner similar to more dangerous drugs like heroin and cocaine. [continues 1332 words]
The following is the testimony NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano will deliver on Oct. 28 to the California Assembly Public Safety Committee's special hearing on "the legalization of marijuana: social, fiscal and legal implications for California." Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, sponsor of AB 390, The Marijuana Control, Regulation and Education Act, is the chairman of the committee. By any objective standard, marijuana prohibition is an abject failure. Nationwide, U.S. law enforcement have arrested over 20 million American citizens for marijuana offenses since 1965, yet today marijuana is more prevalent than ever before, adolescents have easier access to marijuana than ever before, the drug is more potent than ever before, and there is more violence associated with the illegal marijuana trade than ever before. [continues 583 words]
More members of Congress have publicly questioned whether President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii than have endorsed legalizing marijuana. This comes despite the birth announcements printed in the Honolulu Advertiser in August 1961 and marijuana's deep inroads into the cultural mainstream. Almost every voter under 65 in this country has either smoked cannabis or grew up with people who did. Among its erstwhile users are the last three presidents, one Supreme Court justice and the mayor of the nation's largest city. The pot leaf's image pervades popular culture, from Bob Marley T-shirts to billboards for Showtime's Weeds. [continues 2377 words]
Jail for Drug Offenses Is No Longer Mandatory in New York: Judges Can Send People Suffering From Addiction into a Range of Programs, Such As Treatment and Mental Health Services. This week, two essential components of Rockefeller Drug Law reform go into effect: restoration of judicial discretion and resentencing eligibility for some people currently incarcerated under the failed laws. The enactment of these hard-won reforms signals a major shift in New York's approach to drug abuse and dependency. [continues 630 words]
More Mainstream Than Ever, More Arrests Than Ever Marijuana's Coming-Out Party Is Kicking into High Gear Across America - -- but Way to Many People Still Are Getting Cuffed for It. Need more evidence that marijuana has gone mainstream in America? This morning on the Today show, Matt Lauer chatted up a piece on so-called stiletto stoners -- educated, professional women with killer careers and enviable social lives who favor marijuana as their intoxicant of choice and are increasingly comfortable admitting it. [continues 656 words]
The war on cigarettes is heating up. This week a new federal ban went into effect making flavored and clove cigarettes and illegal. The new regulation halted the sale of vanilla and chocolate cigarettes that anti-smoking advocates claim lure young people into smoking. This ban is the first major crackdown since Congress passed a law in June giving the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco. There is talk of banning menthol cigarettes next. Meanwhile, another major initiative to limit smoking wafted out of New York City last week. [continues 696 words]
Writing in the journal Science nearly four decades ago, New York State University sociologist Erich Goode documented the media's complicity in maintaining cannabis prohibition. He observed: "[T]ests and experiments purporting to demonstrate the ravages of marijuana consumption receive enormous attention from the media, and their findings become accepted as fact by the public. But when careful refutations of such research are published, or when later findings contradict the original pathological findings, they tend to be ignored or dismissed." A glimpse of today's mainstream media landscape indicates that little has changed -- with news outlets continuing to, at best, underreport the publication of scientific studies that undermine the federal government's longstanding pot propaganda and, at worst, ignore them all together. [continues 1145 words]
Phillip Northcutt started legally cultivating medical marijuana to deal with PTSD from fighting in the Iraq. It wasn't long before the police and the courts caught up with him. Phil Northcutt saw the map of Iraq on the wall and started recalling his time there. He'd been stationed in Ramadi, Al Anbar Province, in 2004. Phil Northcutt: There was this main street, 'Route Michigan,' like a 4-lane highway going through town with a 12-inch tall median painted yellow and black. When we first got there you could see big holes in the median. By the time we left, there was no median. It had been blown up along six or seven miles of roadway... [continues 5563 words]
New Research Shows Here Seems to Be Something in Pot That Actually Undermines Cancer, Instead of Causing It. -- And the Media Are Doing Their Best to Ignore It. One in three Americans will be afflicted with cancer, we are told by the government (as if it's our immutable fate and somehow acceptable). Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the U.S. and lung cancer the leading killer among cancers. You'd think it would have been very big news in June 2005 when UCLA medical school professor Donald Tashkin reported that components of marijuana smoke -- although they damage cells in respiratory tissue - -- somehow prevent them from becoming malignant. In other words, something in marijuana exerts an anti-cancer effect! [continues 1425 words]
New Study Finds That Marijuana Smokers Have a Lower Risk of Head and Neck Cancers. Among the more interesting pieces of news that came out while I was on vacation the first half of August was a new study in the journal Cancer Prevention Research, which found that marijuana smokers have a lower risk of head and neck cancers than people who don't smoke marijuana. Alas, this important research has been largely ignored by the news media. While this type of study cannot conclusively prove cause and effect, the combination of this new study and existing research -- which for decades has shown that cannabinoids are fairly potent anticancer drugs -- raises a significant possibility that marijuana use is in fact protective against certain types of cancer. [continues 251 words]
The Stats for Death and Injury Tied to Alcohol on Campus Are Staggering, Yet Students Are More Harshly Punished for Pot -- Which Is Far More Benign. Two weeks ago, we published an excerpt from the recently released Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? It was so well received, we asked the authors for a second excerpt, which is included below. If you have found one or both of these excerpts compelling, we encourage you to participate in The Great Marijuana Book Bomb http://www.marijuanabookbomb.com/ taking place today (August 20). The authors have organized a one-day campaign to drive the book to the top of the Amazon.com rankings. If you want to see it reach #1, click on the book title above and make a purchase of your own. [continues 1225 words]
There are two things that need to be understood about marijuana arrests in New York City. First, possession of less than an ounce of marijuana is not a crime in New York State. Since 1977 and passage of the Marijuana Reform Act, state law has made simple possession of less than seventh-eights of an ounce of pot a violation, like a traffic violation. One can be given a ticket and fined $100 for marijuana possession, but not fingerprinted and jailed. For over thirty years, New York State has formally, legally, decriminalized possession of marijuana. [continues 1629 words]
So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? A new book explains how we're steering people away from cannabis and toward the use of a very harmful and deadly substance: alcohol. The following is an excerpt from the just-released book, Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? by Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert (Chelsea Green, 2009). Dateline: February 1, 2009. It's Super Bowl Sunday and throughout the nation millions of Americans have stocked their shelves and refrigerators with alcohol for the big game. In living rooms across the country, guests will enjoy the libations and gawk at the humorous beer commercials sprinkled liberally throughout the telecast. Like the Fourth of July and fireworks, the Super Bowl and booze are an American tradition. There is no societal stigma associated with this excessive drinking. It is all part of the celebration. Like the old saying goes: "We don't have a drinking problem. We drink. We get drunk. No problem." [continues 991 words]
Everywhere You Look, Corporate Media Are Covering Pot Stories, Except for the Issue of Its Illegality and the Lives Ruined by Prohibition. Marijuana legalization is the hottest topic in the media these days. MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, FOX, NatGeo, and CBS News have presented special features on marijuana business, medical marijuana, and the marijuana legalization movement. Google Trends is showing double the interest in searches and news hits for the term "marijuana legalization". Showtime's hit series Weeds, about a suburban mom turned pot dealer, is entering its fifth season. Everywhere you look, corporate media are happy to profit from America's most popular herb. [continues 1744 words]
Pricey pharmaceutical-marketing newsletters have touted cannabis-derived drugs as the next blockbuster for the industry, but the biggest companies are primarily researching drugs whose effect is the opposite of the cannabis herb. Numerous drug researchers are trying to develop medications that replicate the herb's therapeutic effects without the harm of inhaling smoke and the side effect of getting people high. Others are looking into cannabinoid agonists, drugs that enhance the body's natural cannabinoid system -- or cannabinoid antagonists, which disrupt it -- and have been the pharmaceutical industry's main focus. Despite the millions of medical-marijuana users, both U.S. government restrictions and drug companies' need for exclusive ownership have limited research into herbal cannabis. [continues 2241 words]
The following is an excerpt from Ryan Grim's new book, "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley, 2009) This is the 2nd excerpt in a series from the book. Read the first excerpt here http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v09/n682/a07.html The D.A.R.E. program is now in three-quarters of all school districts, reaching more than twenty-five million American kids. It also has branches in more than fifty nations worldwide. [continues 1609 words]
Everyone knows Walter Cronkite was "the most trusted man in America" and someone whose rare expressions of personal opinion -- such as on the Vietnam War -- could powerfully influence the views of middle America. But fewer are aware of a passion of his that he came to relatively late in life -- ending the nation's disastrous war on drugs. I first learned of Walter Cronkite's interest in the drug war back in 1995, when a producer for The Cronkite Report -- an occasional series on The Discovery Channel -- called to ask for my help on a documentary that he and Mr. Cronkite were doing on the drug war. The one hour report that resulted provided a devastating critique of the nation's drug policies. [continues 771 words]
While our current economic climate has prompted many Californians to look toward legalized marijuana as a solution to our near-legendary budget woes, there are those for whom the potential revenue from marijuana is no compensation for the further erosion of our morals. In their eyes, the prohibition of marijuana must continue, lest our society drown in a tidal wave of vice. But what about the morality of prohibition? While a conceivably inexhaustible stream of revenue could be generated through the regulation of all currently illicit goods and services, few, if any, of these prohibitions has caused our society more harm in return for less good than the marijuana ban. [continues 488 words]
The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) kicked off a TV ad campaign aimed at gaining support for a California marijuana legalization bill in the legislature on Wednesday, but ran into problems with several TV stations around the state, which either rejected the ad outright or just ignored MPP efforts to place it. Still, the spots are up and running on other Golden State stations. Playing on California's budget crisis -- the state is $26 billion in the hole and currently issuing IOUs to vendors and laying off state workers -- the 30-second spots feature middle-aged suburban Sacramento housewife Nadene Herndon, who tells the camera: [continues 894 words]
The following is an excerpt from Ryan Grim's new book, "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley, 2009). In the summer of 1999, the sixties generation celebrated itself by throwing a concert to mark Woodstock's thirtieth anniversary. The do-over event was organized by the same ponytailed businessman who'd put the first one together, and typical of something organized by an aging boomer, it was a corporate shit show. Pizza sold for six dollars a slice, and in the middle of a heat wave, water cost four dollars for a tiny bottle. For those who couldn't make it to the concert in upstate New York -- at a Superfund-listed former U.S. Air Force base -- the entire festival was available on pay-per-view. [continues 1511 words]
The U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Safford Unified School District v. Redding is a sign that the High Court's drug war fever may finally be breaking. Savana Redding, a thirteen-year-old honor student, was strip-searched at school after a classmate falsely accused her of possessing prescription-strength ibuprofen (one pill is equivalent to two Advil). The school's zero tolerance policy prevents students from bringing any medication (prescription or over-the-counter) to school without administrative approval. [continues 647 words]
They say that every action spurs an opposite reaction. Well, that certainly seems to be the case in Congress. Just days after Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Barney Frank, along with 13 cosponsors, reintroduced HR 2835, the Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act of 2009 in Congress, Republican Rep. Mark Kirk (Illinois) has called for federal legislation to sentence certain first-time marijuana offenders to up to 25 years in prison. U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk to push tougher sentences for more-potent marijuana via The Chicago Tribune [continues 829 words]
The rapper Eminem recently released a new album in which he discusses the overdose that nearly killed him. At last month's Cannes Film Festival, Heath Ledger's last film was shown, reminding viewers and critics of the talent we lost when he died. We are used to hearing about drug overdoses in the context of fast-lane inhabiting film and music stars. But in fact, deaths from drug overdoses have been rising and have reached crisis levels in our country. A newly-released report by the Drug Policy Alliance documents the extent of the problem: drug overdose is now the second-leading cause of accidental death in America, surpassing firearms-related deaths. And it's not just young people who are dying of overdoses: overdose is the number-one injury-related killer among adults aged 35-54. [continues 587 words]
When it comes to addressing America's disastrous war on drugs, the Obama administration appears to be moving in the right direction -- albeit very, very cautiously. On the rhetorical front, all the president's men are saying the right things. In his first interview since being confirmed, Obama's new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, said that we need to stop looking at our drug problem as a war. "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs" or a 'war on product,'" he told the Wall Street Journal, "people see war as a war on them. We're not at war with people in this country." [continues 1154 words]
"This ain't your grandfather's or your father's marijuana. This will hurt you. This will addict you. This will kill you."- Mark R. Trouville, DEA Miami, speaking to the Associated Press (June 22, 2007) Government claims that today's pot is more potent, and thus more dangerous to health, than ever before must be taken with a grain of salt. Federal officials have made similarly dire assertions before. In a 2004 Reuters News Wire story, government officials alleged, "Pot is no longer the gentle weed of the 1960s and may pose a greater threat than cocaine or even heroin." (Anti-drug officials failed to explain why, if previous decades' pot was so "gentle" and innocuous, police still arrested you for it.) [continues 674 words]
Is a Tidal Wave of Reason About to Change Our Pot Laws? Sometime in the last few months, the notion of legalizing marijuana crossed an invisible threshold. Long relegated to the margins of political discourse by the conventional wisdom, pot freedom has this year gone mainstream. The potential flu pandemic and President Obama's 100th day in office may have knocked marijuana off the front pages this week, but so far this year, the issue has exploded in the mass media, impelled by the twin forces of economic crisis and Mexican violence fueled by drug prohibition. A Google news search for the phrase "legalize marijuana" turned up more than 1,100 hits -- and that's just for the month of April. [continues 1319 words]
4 In 10 Have Smoked It, And Millions Are Still Getting Busted The Obama administration is giving mixed signals on its pot policies despite a tidal shift in social views on legalizing marijuana. Fully 80 percent of Americans approve of the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, and fewer than one in five favor locking up non-violent adults who use pot in general. But since the inception of the disastrous "War on Drugs," politicians from across the political spectrum have found that being a dedicated drug warrior is an easy way to appear "tough on crime" without much political risk. [continues 1090 words]
Practically overnight, faster than you can say "Depression 2.0", a ballooning number of politicians, mainstream media journalists, and members of the public are acknowledging the fact that cannabis prohibition isn't drug control - it's drug chaos. In the U.S. -- where 42 percent of the adult population has used cannabis -- three-quarters of a million citizens are arrested every year for simple possession, draining limited resources from pressing issues like education, health care, and real "criminal justice". South of the border, where cannabis comprises more than half of Mexico's drug trafficking market, prohibitionist policies are fueling a grim and growing war that recently prompted the U.S. Joint Forces Command to warn that Mexico is in danger of becoming a failed state. [continues 1284 words]
As a medley of border violence, recessionary pressure, international criticism and popular acceptance steadily undermines America's decades-long effort to eliminate drugs and drug use, the U.S. movement to legalize marijuana is gaining unprecedented momentum. Once derided and dismissed by lawmakers, law enforcers and the law-abiding alike, marijuana reform is sweeping the nation, although the federal government appears committed -- at least for the time being -- to largely maintaining the status quo. A week after Attorney General Eric Holder announced in March that raids on state law-abiding medical marijuana dispensaries would end, the Drug Enforcement Agency effectively shut down a San Francisco dispensary, claiming it violated both state and federal laws. [continues 1350 words]
What could you do with an extra $14 billion dollars? Members of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and other likeminded organizations will be asking government officials that very question on Wednesday, April 15th, when they present a mock check to the U.S. Treasury Office. "We represent the millions of otherwise law-abiding cannabis consumers who are ready, willing, vocal and able to contribute needed tax revenue to America's struggling economy," says Allen St. Pierre, NORML's Executive Director. "All we ask in exchange for our $14 billion is that our government respects our decision to use marijuana privately and responsibly." [continues 650 words]
I received a text message at 11 p.m. on Saturday while I was walking to a party in Brooklyn. The message was about a "breaking story": Ashley Biden, daughter of Vice President Joe Biden, has allegedly been caught on video using cocaine. My friends know that I work at the Drug Policy Alliance, so I often get e-mails or calls when celebrities or elected officials have some drug-use drama. My first thought was shit, again? It was less than two months ago that Michael Phelps face was plastered all over the media for the Bong Hit Seen Around the World. While walking down the street, with my own vodka buzz on, a range of other thoughts started racing through my head. [continues 691 words]
We can make over 25,000 things with it. Farmers love it. Environmentalists love it. You can't get high from it. So why is it still illegal? While Uncle Sam's scramble for new revenue sources has recently kicked up the marijuana debate -- to legalize and tax, or not? --hemp's feasibility as a stimulus plan has received less airtime. But with a North American market that exceeds $300 million in annual retail sales and continued rising demand, industrial hemp could generate thousands of sustainable new jobs, helping America to get back on track. [continues 1808 words]
The horrifying drug-war violence south of our border with Mexico continues to worsen: beheadings, killings that now number several thousand at least, honest officials in fear for their lives. It's time to put an end to U.S. policies that subsidize these murderous drug gangs. According to U.S. and Mexican officials, some 60 percent of the profits that fuel these thugs come from just one drug, marijuana. While much is smuggled over the border, an increasing amount is produced in the U.S. by foreign gangs operating on American soil -- often in remote corners of national parks and wilderness areas. [continues 552 words]
As the money crunch punishes states coffers, legislators are callously pushing drug testing for welfare and unemployment recipients. With states across the country feeling the effects of the economic crisis gripping the land, some legislators are engaging in the cheap politics of resentment as a supposed budget-cutting move. In at least six states, bills have been filed that would require people seeking public assistance and/or unemployment benefits to submit to random drug testing, with their benefits at stake. In Arizona, Hawaii, Missouri, and Oklahoma, bills have been filed that would force people seeking public assistance to undergo random drug tests and forego benefits if they test positive. In Florida, a bill has been filed to do the same to people who receive unemployment compensation. In West Virginia, both groups are targeted. [continues 1424 words]
The recession is spotlighting the rationale for decriminalizing marijuana. NEW YORK -- In 1977, President Jimmy Carter asked Congress to decriminalize marijuana possession (it never did). The next year, the Ladies Home Journal described a summer jazz festival on the White House's South Lawn where "a haze of marijuana smoke hung heavy under the low-bending branches of a magnolia tree." The late 1970's may have been the high-water mark for permissiveness regarding marijuana. But advocates of decriminalized pot believe a confluence of factors, especially the country's economic malaise, are leading to another countrywide reappraisal of the drug. [continues 945 words]
Drug addiction shouldn't be a crime -- the real crime would be if reform of New York's draconian drug laws were stymied yet again The draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws represent a misguided and ineffective regime for addressing drug use and addiction -- health issues, not criminal issues. With legislation passed this week by the Assembly, New York may be ready to shift towards a more reasonable -- and affordable -- approach guided by public health and safety. Enacted in 1973, the Rockefeller Drug Laws mandate extremely harsh prison terms for the possession or sale of relatively small amounts of drugs. Supposedly intended to target major dealers, most of the people incarcerated under these laws are convicted of low-level, nonviolent offenses, and many of them have no prior criminal record. Approximately 12,000 people are locked up for drug offenses in New York State prisons, representing nearly 21 percent of the prison population. [continues 479 words]
It looks like the pot debate just got real. As the nation faces its worst economic crisis in generations, California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has introduced a trailblazing bill to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol. Hard on the heels of Michael Phelps' nationally-resonant bong demo, Ammiano's gesture is a whole lot more intentional. One hopes it will stir the long-overdue national examination of the financial and human price that we pay for criminalizing pot. The most widely used illicit drug in the western world, marijuana is a fact of life that's been sampled by upwards of 100,000,000 Americans. Officially prohibited since 1937, we finally seem on the threshold of a promising moment in our nation's tortured relationship to the drug. On November 4 alone, Massachusetts decriminalized personal pot use, Michigan became the thirteenth state to allow its medical use, and we elected a president who's openly admitted to smoking it. National polls and the yawn that greeted the Phelps media frenzy indicate that Americans are reconciled to pot's largely benign role in our culture. [continues 400 words]
As the Phelps 'scandal' proves yet again, our narcotic of choice -- creating controversy where none exists -- packs a punch. I'm not sure if it's because we're strung out on "Lost" episodes, or if it's because we're still suffering from a post-9/11 stress disorder that makes us crave "breaking news" alerts, or if it's because the economy has turned us into distraction junkies. But one thing is painfully obvious after Michael Phelps' marijuana "scandal" erupted last week: Our society is addicted to fake outrage -- and to break our dependence, we're going to need far more potent medicine than the herb Phelps was smoking. [continues 602 words]
What gives? Let's see Obama be the one who personally rains on the DEA's eight-year parade that has crushed the lives of thousands. Okay, try and stay with me if you can. While campaigning for the US presidency, Barack Obama pledged not to "use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state (medical marijuana) laws." Nearly three-quarters of the American public agrees with this position. According to a new national poll of 1,053 likely voters by Zogby International and commissioned by the NORML Foundation, seventy-two percent of voters say that President Obama should "stop federal raids against medical marijuana providers in the 13 states where medical marijuana has become legal." [continues 380 words]
This past August, House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., during a live interview with CNN, did something quite remarkable. She spoke candidly and openly about her support for marijuana-law reform. But rather than demanding her colleagues in Washington take the necessary steps to end the federal government's seven-decade war on weed, she instead called on the public to act. "We have important work to do outside the Congress in order for us to have success inside the Congress." Pelosi said. "[W]e need peoples' help to be in touch with their members of Congress to say why this (marijuana law reform) should be the case." [continues 1078 words]
President-elect Barack Obama met Monday with Mexican President Felipe Calderon to discuss bilateral issues of major importance for the two countries. In addition to NAFTA and immigration policy, Mexico's ongoing plague of prohibition-related violence was high on the agenda. More than 5,400 people were killed in the violence last year, and more than 8,000 in the two years since Calderon ratcheted up Mexico's drug war by sending thousands of troops into the fray. The multi-sided conflict pits rival trafficking groups -- the so-called cartels -- against each and the Mexican state, but has also seen pitched battles between rival law enforcement units where one group or the other is in the pay of the traffickers. [continues 1153 words]
What if we had a mechanism that stopped the spread of HIV that experts had speculated would work even before the cause of AIDS had been identified and that subsequent scientific enquiry confirmed was effective? We do, that mechanism is syringe exchange. What if we had national governments dating back to President Ronald Reagan that knew what worked and yet fought against it, lied to the public, bullied local governments and generally saw the spread of HIV as justified, purely because the population that was affected was drug users, and drug use is addressed in the United States by making it as dangerous as possible? [continues 552 words]
He Can End the Prohibition Era on Marijuana As FDR Did in 1933, Obama Must Now Help End an Utterly Failed, Socially Destructive, Reactionary Crusade Against Marijuana. The parallels between the 1933 coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama must include the issue of Prohibition: alcohol in 1933, and marijuana today. As FDR did back then, Obama must now help end an utterly failed, socially destructive, reactionary crusade. Marijuana prohibition is a core cause of many of the nation's economic problems. It costs the United States tens of billions per year to track, arrest, try, defend and imprison marijuana consumers, who pose little, if any, harm to society. The social toll soars even higher when we account for social violence, lost work, ruined careers and damaged families. In 2007, 775,137 people were arrested in the United States for mere possession of this ancient crop, according to the FBI's uniform crime report. [continues 785 words]
The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars waging its 40-year "war on drugs," responsible for the imprisonment of 500,000 of our fellow American citizens. Despite this enormous waste of money and lives, drugs are as easily available and cheap as ever. The drug-warmongers say it is all for the safety and protection of our children, yet high schoolers all over the country can easily obtain just about any illegal drug they are seeking in this unregulated market. Half of all high-school seniors will have tried marijuana before graduating. The government's latest Monitoring the Future report, released [when?], indicates that more young people are now choosing to smoke pot rather than cigarettes. [continues 1264 words]
The Next Surgeon General Needs to Stop Putting Politics Before Science. Gupta May Not Be Ready for That. If Dr. Sanjay Gupta is picked for the post of surgeon general, he would become the nation's leading medical advocate. His experience in the media would be beneficial in bringing the Surgeon General's office back to the prominence it held when C. Everett Koop was successfully battling tobacco smoking. But is Gupta ready to deliver the Obama administration's promised end to the politicization of science and medicine? More specifically, will Gupta toe the federal line that cannabis is lacking in any medical value, or will he recognize what 13 states and the past 12 years of research prove -- that cannabis is a beneficial medicine for some people and an intoxicant far less harmful than alcohol for others? [continues 2027 words]
