Maybe someday governments will base policy on facts and data. It sure would be nice.

That alcohol causes cancer isn’t really news, but how it does so hasn’t been fully understood. A new study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, adds an important new piece of information. Alcohol, it turns out, stimulates a type of cell transformation that turns cancer cells more aggressive and thus more likely to spread throughout the body.

As we’ve noted before, research shows that cannabinoids (marijuana’s unique, active components) interfere with tumor growth and may actually prevent cancer.

Several other advisers on the once 31-member group are rumored to be “planning collective action” against British Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who has taken to the airwaves to defend his controversial sacking of Nutt.

Johnson said Nutt publicly campaigned against government policy and “crossed the line” when he said illegal drugs such as marijuana, LSD, and ecstasy were safer than legal drugs such as tobacco and alcohol.

“Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with,” Johnson wrote in today’s Guardian.  “He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy.”

It certainly is frustrating, to say the least, (“mind-boggling” might be a better word) when the people hired to reassess flawed government policies get punished for doing just that. But now that many high-profile members of Britain’s scientific community are speaking out about the incident, there is reason to hope that more Britons will realize just how misguided their current marijuana laws are, and that they too should support a change in the way the UK classifies certain drugs.

Nutt himself has continued to speak out about his ousting and the reasons behind it, arguing that his actions—as opposed to Johnson’s—were motivated by science, not politics.

In Nutt’s own words: “When [UK Prime Minister] Gordon Brown says that cannabis is a ‘lethal drug,’ when it clearly isn’t, young people are not going to pay him any notice. You don’t reduce drug harm by lying.”

First, for reasons that aren’t clear, before performing the tests of smoking and vaporization, the researchers put the marijuana through a drying procedure that ordinary marijuana consumers don’t do. This might have eliminated some plant compounds, such as terpenoids, that are actually of interest.

A second possible flaw is that the researchers considered all “byproducts” – defined as substances other than cannabinoids –  together. They didn’t analyze precisely what they were, lumping bad stuff like the toxic combustion products contained in smoke with potentially beneficial plant compounds like those terpenoids mentioned above. That puts the finding that fewer byproducts were produced at 230 degrees Celsius than were produced at lower temperatures in a somewhat different perspective: We don’t know if the same byproducts were produced at 230 degrees as were produced at lower temperatures – and what’s in that mixture could be just as important as how much of it there is.

Just a few hours prior to his sacking, Nutt had publicly condemned British politicians for “distorting” and “devaluing” scientific research used in the debate over illegal drugs. In an article published Thursday by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Nutt said that illegal drugs such as cannabis, LSD and ecstasy were less harmful than legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco, and he called for changes in the way such substances are classified in order to better inform the public about their relative harms.

Specifically, Nutt criticized a January decision by British ministers to upgrade marijuana from a class C drug to the higher class B, a change that increased the maximum penalty for possession to five years in prison, and the penalty for dealing to 14 years.

Nutt still maintained that cannabis was “harmful,” but he made an appeal—based on reason and science—for the government to be honest with the public about marijuana and the fact that it causes no major health or social problems:

“I think we have to accept young people like to experiment, and what we should be doing is to protect them from harm at this stage of their lives,” Nutt wrote. “We therefore have to provide more accurate and credible information. We have to tell them the truth, so that they use us as their preferred source of information. If you think that scaring kids will stop them using, you’re probably wrong.”

To recap: The British Home Office asked Prof. Nutt to reexamine that nation’s drug laws and offer some suggestions based on sound scientific evidence. As requested, Nutt presented his findings and concluded—rightfully—that Britain’s 2004 decision to soften its marijuana laws was correct and should have been maintained. But because those findings contradicted government policy, he was fired. So much for free and open debate in a democratic society.

If you’re wondering if the same thing could happen here in the United States, it already has: Nutt’s predicament is eerily similar to the 1994 firing of then Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders (now a member of MPP’s VIP advisory board).

Opponents of medical marijuana love to condemn smoking, but a new study adds more data to the growing pile of research confirming that vaporization provides the benefits of inhalation without the unwanted combustion products in smoke.  In a study comparing vaporization to smoking in the journal Inhalation Toxicology, researchers from Leiden University report, “Based on the results, we can conclude that with the use of the vaporizer a much ‘cleaner’ and therefore a more healthy cannabis vapor can be produced for the medicinal use of C. sativa, in comparison to the administration of THC via cigarettes.”

The article also provides some new practical information on vaporization, suggesting that a temperature of 230 degrees Celsius is ideal, and that using smaller amounts of marijuana in the vaporizer produces more vapor, but does not extract THC more efficiently, so there is no apparent gain in using an amount less than about half a gram at a time.

The fact that 44% percent of people favor taxing and regulating marijuana is even more impressive because—in stark contrast to many other public policy issues—for once, a substantial number of Americans actually view an issue favorably.

After all, Americans are a finicky bunch. We don’t like much these days, and in 2009 it’s impressive for anything to get 44% approval ratings. In fact, according to the latest numbers from a variety of polling sources, the idea of taxing and regulating marijuana enjoys higher support among the American public than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the top Democrat and top Republican in the House of Representatives, and—perhaps not surprisingly—Congress itself.

Take a look at these figures:

Based on these numbers, as well as the growing mainstream media coverage of marijuana issues, there is no longer any doubt that Americans see marijuana policy reform as a legitimate mainstream issue worthy of national debate. Let’s keep talking!

Anyone who wants to learn about these other cannabinoids should check out this recent review published in the journal Trends in Pharmacological Sciences.

The article devotes a lot of space to cannabidiol (CBD), the most studied of these compounds, noting that “CBD exerts several positive pharmacological effects that make it a highly attractive therapeutic entity in inflammation, diabetes, cancer and affective or neurodegenerative diseases.” Notably, CBD has antipsychotic actions, but fewer side effects than “typical antipsychotics.” Lots of other cannabinoids have potentially useful properties as well. For example, cannabichromene has antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activity, plus “modest” analgesic effect.

The article tends to be a bit dismissive of THC because of its psychoactivity, and focuses mainly on cannabinoids as individual chemicals rather than as components of an herbal medicine that has proven extraordinarily useful in its natural form (biases that are pretty much typical in the medical literature), but even with these limitations, it’s an important read.