On Thursday night’s edition of “Anderson Cooper 360,” former drug czar John Walters and I were interviewed separately about a new government report claiming an increase in average potency of marijuana seized by law enforcement (we’ll have a video link posted soon). I pointed out an obvious fact: When the marijuana is more potent, users smoke less, just as people typically drink a much smaller quantity of bourbon than of beer. Thus, higher-potency marijuana doesn’t necessarily mean users take in more THC. And, given that the most significant health issue connected to marijuana is the respiratory harm from smoke, smoking less to get the same effect is clearly healthier.

Asked about this, Walters said flatly, “There is no evidence of that.”

He lied. I know this won’t be a huge shock to faithful readers of this blog, but I think it’s worth putting the facts on the record. [Read more →]

MPP’s Bruce Mirken will appear on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360″ tonight to add a little rationality to the latest pronouncement regarding rising THC levels in marijuana from the National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded Marijuana Potency Project.

Drug warriors love to exaggerate small increases in marijuana potency over time and make vague proclamations linking those increases to increases in marijuana’s potential danger, even though no credible research supports such a connection. Of course, if they were truly concerned about the potential danger of higher potency marijuana, then they should favor regulating the drug and requiring manufacturers to label the product’s potency, just as we do with alcohol.

The show is scheduled to air tonight at 10 p.m. EST, but the hysteria surrounding one of the drug warriors’ favorite imaginary fears is sure to last much longer.

One of our members wrote us to report that the March 9 episode of the daytime television show “The Doctors,” focusing on illegal drugs, contained a glaring bit of misinformation about marijuana. Here’s how our member described it:

At one point, one of the doctors made the statement loud and clear,”To all parents of young boys, make sure you let your boys know that…if they use marijuana they WILL grow boobs!” Then they moved on to another subject.

While we haven’t been able to verify a transcript, several commenters on the show’s Web site have referred to the issue in similar language, so all indications suggest that our member’s report is essentially correct. Unfortunately, the information these alleged experts gave out on national TV is entirely bogus. [Read more →]

You wouldn’t know it from their Web site, but it turns out the White House drug czar’s office is legally required to provide the public with facts that are, well, factual. Under the Data Quality act, all government agencies, including the Office of National Drug Control Policy, are responsible for “ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information.”

You could print out the material on ONDCP’s site, throw a dart at the printout, and probably hit an assertion that’s at least suspect. We picked one we found particularly egregious – the demonstrably false title of the drug czar’s publication, “Marijuana: The Greatest Cause of Illegal Drug Abuse.”

On Oct. 16, 2008, my colleague, Nathan Miller, an attorney here, filed a petition calling on the drug czar to correct the title, which obviously refers to the long discredited “gateway theory” fantasy (see Question 6). [Read more →]

Medical marijuana advocates often hear that marijuana can’t be a real medicine because it hasn’t been approved by the FDA. One common response to this is that the Drug Enforcement Administration continues to block the only avenue that could produce the research needed to seek FDA approval for medical marijuana, over a year and half after an administrative law judge ruled that the project should go ahead. 

But that’s just the start. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a scathing critique of the drug company research that does lead to FDA approval,  demonstrating that the system is even more fundamentally rotten than most of us suspected. The author is Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably the most prestigious medical journal on the planet, and now a professor at Harvard Medical School. [Read more →]

Drug czar John Walters isn’t really a free-exchange-of-ideas kind of public servant, so MPP’s Aaron Houston and I took the opportunity to ask him a couple questions last week at his press conference announcing the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

In Walters’ mind it’s bad that kids perceive marijuana as less harmful than methamphetamine, his disreputable anti-marijuana ads work like a charm, and the latest statistics prove that the only way to reduce drug use is by prohibiting marijuana. Oh, but great news – nobody goes to jail for marijuana, and we don’t arrest 800,000 Americans for marijuana each year.

Watch how he dodged our questions. First Aaron’s …

… and then mine:

Note to the next drug czar, if we must have one: You can do way better than this. The bar is set pretty low.