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.

The challenge, announced by MPP-NV manager Dave Schwartz with a large mock check for $10,000,  kicks off a long-term public education campaign regarding the relative harms of marijuana and alcohol, and the harm caused by marijuana prohibition.

MPP-NV is challenging Nevadans to disprove the following three statements:

1. Alcohol is significantly more toxic than marijuana, making death by overdose far more likely with alcohol.

2. The health effects from long-term alcohol consumption cause tens of thousands of more deaths in the U.S. annually than the health effects from the long-term consumption of marijuana.

3. Violent crime committed by individuals intoxicated by alcohol is far more prevalent in the U.S. than violent crime committed by individuals intoxicated by marijuana only.

To receive the $10,000 award, Nevada residents must provide peer-reviewed studies or government statistics that contradict all three of these statements. In a statement issued today, Schwartz said, “We are confident that we won’t need to pay out this $10,000.” That’s putting it mildly. Not only is marijuana safer than alcohol, there’s evidence that it may even protect against some of the damage caused by binge drinking.

The study, by researchers at the University of California San Diego, used a type of high-tech scan called diffusion tensor imaging to compare microscopic changes in brain white matter. The subjects were students aged 16-to-19, divided into three groups: binge drinkers (defined as having five or more drinks at one sitting for boys or four or more for girls), binge drinkers who also smoked marijuana, and a control group who had very little or no experience with either alcohol or drugs.

As expected, the binge-drinking-only group showed evidence of white matter damage in eight regions examined, as demonstrated by lower fractional anisotropy (FA) scores. But in a finding the researchers described as “unexpected,” the binge-drinking/marijuana group had lower FA scores than the controls in only three of the eight regions, and in seven regions the binge-drinking/marijuana group had higher scores – indicating less damage – than the binge drinkers who didn’t use marijuana (unfortunately, not all of these stats are in the summary linked above; access to the full article requires payment).

Brain white matter tracts were “more coherent in adolescents who binge drink and use marijuana than in adolescents who report only binge drinking,” the researchers wrote. “It is possible that marijuana may have some neuroprotective properties in mitigating alcohol-related oxidative stress or excitotoxic cell death.” The scientists noted that such protection has already been shown in lab and animal studies.

Indeed, the U.S. government has a patent on cannabinoids as neuroprotectants. Yes, the same government that wants you to believe that marijuana will rot your brain knows that its active components protect brain and nerve cells from many kinds of damage.

In a statement issued by MPP today, director of state campaigns Steve Fox said, “This study suggests that not only is marijuana safer than alcohol, it may actually protect against some of the damage that booze causes. It’s far better for teens not to drink or smoke marijuana, but our nation’s leaders send a dangerous message by defending laws that encourage the use of alcohol over marijuana.”

Fox is co-author of the new book, “Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?” The book is getting lots of favorable press coverage, and recently hit number 14 on the Amazon.com bestseller list.

To raise awareness about the book, the authors are coordinating a “Book Bomb” that will take place tomorrow, August 20.  The goal is to have hundreds of people order the book from Amazon.com on the same day so that it reaches #1 on the online bookseller’s rankings.  As far as we know, no book advocating for marijuana policy reform has reached that milestone.  To learn more about the book and to sign up for the Book Bomb, visit http://www.marijuanabookbomb.com If you sign up, you will get an email tomorrow reminding you about the Bomb.

Thanks in advance for participating!  And please share this blog post with any friends who might be interested.

Last November, the British government ignored the advice of its Scientific Advisory Board and moved marijuana into a more dangerous class of drugs, a move described by top scientists at the time as “a sad departure from the welcome trend … of public policy following expert scientific advice.”

Of course, here in the United States, government has been ignoring its scientific advisors on marijuana policy for decades, at least since Nixon first lined his bird cage with the two-year study he commissioned recommending marijuana’s decriminalization.

And that unwelcome trend continues to this very day here, as evidenced by drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s recent lie that marijuana “has no medicinal benefit.” Not sure who Kerlikowske’s scientific advisors are, but the one we taxpayers use, the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, says: “Nausea, appetite loss, pain, and anxiety … all can be mitigated by marijuana.”

Then again, it doesn’t take a scientist to know that it’s wrong to deny sick people medicine that eases their pain, or to arrest responsible adults because they prefer a drug that’s safer than alcohol or tobacco.

That would seem to be the implication of a new study just published online by the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence. But the study’s authors aren’t so sure.

The study measured drinking patterns in individuals who enrolled in treatment for marijuana dependence as part of a study designed to test different treatment methods. Participants greatly reduced their marijuana use, but 73 % also increased the number of days on which they drank alcohol by at least 10%. Most also increased the amount they drank on those drinking days. This seems like prima facie evidence of a substitution effect — alcohol being substituted for marijuana.

The researchers, surprisingly, don’t draw that conclusion, based on the fact that drinking behavior did not seem to change in proportion with marijuana use. Instead, they write, “We are left with a mystery.”

It seems to me that, in the absence of another plausible cause, substitution of booze for marijuana still looks like the most likely explanation, though more research is absolutely needed. Given what’s known about the much more serious health risks of alcohol as compared to marijuana, this ought to cause at least some unease regarding the 140,000-plus Americans forced into treatment for alleged marijuana problems by the criminal justice system each year.

An argument regularly raised by those who want to keep marijuana illegal is that because there is no equivalent of a breathalyzer test for marijuana intoxication, DUI laws would be impossible to enforce. The California Supreme Court just shot a very large hole in that argument.

It’s an odd argument anyway, given that tens of millions of Americans regularly take drugs that can impair driving — pain relievers, antihistamines, etc. — for which there is no simple, roadside test. For most of these drugs, and for marijuana, the old-fashioned field sobriety test works quite well.

Still, people have tended to regard the alcohol breath test as the gold standard. Now, the California Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that defendants can challenge the accuracy of these tests. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Even though experts say the standard ratio used to derive a blood-alcohol concentration from breath generally approximates or even underestimates the amount of alcohol the driver consumed, they also agree that Breathalyzer results may sometimes overestimate the amount of alcohol in the blood.”

No one — repeat, no one — should ever drive while impaired by anything. But it’s time to put aside the false notion that Breathalyzer tests are infallible, or that there’s no way to enforce laws against driving under the influence of marijuana.

From time to time we get some flack for pointing out that as a “recreational” substance, marijuana is safer than alcohol. Anyone who doubts that claim might want to look at this new study from The Lancet, one of the world’s top medical journals.

Researchers reviewed information on deaths in three major Russian cities from 1990 to 2001 and questioned family members about the decedents’ alcohol use, reporting the astonishing finding that “in several recent years, alcohol was a cause of more than half of all Russian deaths at ages 15-54 years.” Causes of death that were greatly increased by heavy alcohol use included accidents, violence, alcohol poisoning, and several types of cancer.

We’ve said it before, but we’ll keep saying it: No drug is 100% harmless, but marijuana simply does not cause anything near the wreckage that alcohol causes, even in very heavy users.

In the May issue of Current Opinion in Psychiatry, two noted researchers weigh in on the marijuana debate with an article titled, “The Challenges in Developing a Rational Cannabis Policy.”

Australian Wayne Hall and American Michael Lynskey urge that international treaties be rewritten to allow nations more freedom to experiment with policy changes, and more research aimed at weighing the costs and benefits of prohibition. Along the way, they make a number of noteworthy observations, including this:

The public health impact of contemporary patterns of cannabis use is modest by comparison with those of other illicit drugs (such as the opioids) or with tobacco or alcohol. In the case of illicit drugs, this reflects the absence of fatal overdose risk from cannabis. In the case of alcohol, it reflects the much lower risks of death from cannabis-impaired than alcohol-impaired driving, fewer adverse effects on health and lower rates of regular cannabis use to intoxication.

 Would that U.S. policies were based on such a calm, rational assessment of the facts