On Sunday, the British newspaper The Observer wrote, “In June 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared a ‘war on drugs.’ Drugs won.”  Read the rest here.

As summer nears its end, marijuana “eradication” efforts are in high gear – and nowhere more so than in California, whose effort is called the “Campaign Against Marijuana Planting” – CAMP for short.

And as usual, the news is filled with stories of CAMP raids like this one, in which whopping numbers of marijuana plants are seized. These are habitually accompanied by breathless tales of criminal gangs despoiling forests and wilderness areas with their marijuana growing operations.

Missing from these reports is any recognition of the evidence that CAMP actually makes these problems worse.  Maybe that’s because stories like this one from CNN and this one from the New York Times quote only government sources. [Read more →]

At least some in the international news media have belatedly discovered a study casting doubt on the purported link between marijuana use and schizophrenia. I say “belatedly” because the study was published online back in June, although the print version came out this month.

A group of British researchers examined a rather basic notion: If marijuana use  causes schizophrenia, then a major increase in marijuana use should lead to an increase in schizophrenia diagnoses in the following years. In an enormous sample of some 600,000 Britons, no such thing occurred – indeed, a spike in marijuana use beginning in the mid-1970s was followed by rates of schizophrenia that either remained stable or declined.

Of course this is not the first time that a lack of connection between marijuana use rates and schizophrenia incidence has been noted in the scientific literature. For example, a 2006 review in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry noted that “the treated incidence of schizophrenia did not obviously increase during the 1970s and 1980s when there were substantial increases in cannabis use among young adults in Australia and North America.” (Alas, that rather important discussion isn’t mentioned in the summary linked above, which is all you can get for free).

Overall, the evidence strongly suggests that marijuana may worsen or trigger schizophrenia in a few individuals with a pre-existing vulnerability, but that it is not a significant cause of mental illness in healthy people. That rather nuanced reality tends to be a bit too complicated for many in the media.

A study just published online by the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology suggests that marijuana may protect the brain from 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). [Read more →]

MPP’s director of state campaigns, Steve Fox, is the co-author of a new book entitled, Marijuana is Safer: So why are we driving people to drink? The purpose of this book is to educate Americans about the relative harms of marijuana and alcohol, and to force them to consider why we punish adults who use the less harmful substance.  The critically acclaimed book also provides supporters of marijuana policy reform with the information and talking points necessary to spread the “marijuana is safer” message to friends and family.

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.

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. [Read more →]

A huge wildfire ablaze in  Santa Barbara County over the last week has been linked to a clandestine marijuana grow operation in the Los Padres National Forest. As we often point out, prohibition is to blame for these destructive illegal gardens because it leaves this popular agricultural product in the hands of criminals with no regard for the environment instead of legitimate farmers.

Orange County Register columnist and author of “Waiting to Inhale, the Politics of Medical Marijuana” Alan Bock writes in his blog post that the proliferation of these sites on public lands is a result of misguided asset forfeiture laws:

So it’s not surprising that faced with the loss of property whether a crime was proved against them or not  or charges were even filed, marijuana growers began to use land that they didn’t own and couldn’t be seized. The best bet was not some poor innocent’s land, but government land, of which there is more than an abundance in the western states, which couldn’t be forfeited because the government already owns it. So the national forests became the preferred venues for large marijuana grows, the forests were in some cases degraded and became less useful to the public they were supposed to benefit — and now we have a major wildfire allegedly started by marijuana growers.

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.