On November 7 a group of student activists gathered in a room on the University of Colorado campus to discuss strategies for how to run a marijuana legalization campaign in the 2012 elections. Five days earlier, voters in California had defeated Proposition 19 by a margin of seven points. Although the vote represented the largest percentage a US legalization measure has ever garnered (46.5 percent), many in the drug policy reform community were discouraged. Young activists who had spent the past several months encouraging students on California campuses to register, and who worked furiously in the final days to get out the vote, were exhausted. [continues 1674 words]
President Obama responded last week to the most popular question submitted by online voters - whether marijuana should be made legal in order to bring this huge underground industry into the legal economy - by treating it pretty much as a joke. But the time for jokes has passed. Our marijuana laws are killing people. The horrifying drug-war violence on our southern border continues to worsen: beheadings, daily killings that now number more than 6,000, and honest officials fearing for their lives. U.S. marijuana laws subsidize these murderous gangs. [continues 239 words]
Buried in the latest Monitoring the Future survey -- the major annual, federally funded survey of teen drug use -- is an astonishing finding: More 10th-graders now smoke marijuana than smoke cigarettes. Strangely, in announcing the results, White House drug czar John Walters failed to mention this evidence that our current drug policies constitute an utter train wreck. In the just-released survey, 13.8 percent of 10th-graders reported smoking marijuana in the past 30 days (considered "current use" by researchers), while just 12.3 percent smoked cigarettes. For 8th and 12th grades, cigarette use still exceeded marijuana, but the gap narrowed to insignificance. [continues 490 words]
USA TODAY's article on illegal marijuana growing on public lands completely ignored the consensus among experts that outdoor "eradication" efforts do little, if anything, to hinder the supply of this drug ("80% of pot crop invades parkland," News, Sept. 12). The Justice Department's own National Drug Threat Assessment 2008 said the main effect of such raids isn't eradication but causes "major marijuana producers ... to relocate indoors," namely to suburban neighborhoods where their activities go unnoticed. More important, the article failed to note that marijuana's prohibition is the true cause of these dangerous and irresponsible criminal activities. [continues 149 words]
