President Obama released his budget requests for fiscal 2011 today, requesting $3.5 million less for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign than he did in fiscal 2010.

The media campaign, which is run by the drug czar’s office, has for years emptied its coffers on absurd anti-marijuana advertisements that veer so far from the truth they’re laughable. Take, for example, this ad, which insinuates that marijuana use can lead to rape. This is a particularly dishonest approach considering that alcohol, a legal drug, is a factor in a huge majority of sexual assaults. Yet no one at the drug czar’s office will say publicly that we should put responsible drinkers in jail.

The president spoke of tightening the belt in Washington, D.C. during the State of the Union address last week. He missed an opportunity today to cut $45 million (the current budget for the media campaign) that’s being wasted on ineffective advertising. The media campaign has never been anything but reefer madness, and the new administration should simply eliminate it. If you agree, you can e-mail the White House and let the president know how you feel.

On November 25, 45-year-old Kenneth R. Howe was riding in the passenger seat of a truck that was stopped by police at a sobriety checkpoint in North Andover, Massachusetts. Hours later, he was dead. The cause has been ruled a homicide, from injuries suffered while Howe “struggled with police.”

What exactly happened that night is a matter of dispute, and the subject of a federal lawsuit filed last week against state, city and county police, claiming that police officers beat Howe to death.

Family members and a fellow passenger say Howe, a father and husband, had lit a marijuana cigarette a few moments earlier and was trying to put it out as police pulled over the truck. When police saw the marijuana cigarette, the fellow passenger says, officers pulled Howe out of the vehicle.

Police claim Howe dove out of the truck’s window and assaulted a female officer.

One way or another, a struggle ensued, Howe was arrested, placed into the back of a police cruiser, and taken to the state police barracks. While waiting in a booking room, Howe slumped over, became unresponsive, and was taken to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

After an autopsy, the state’s chief medical examiner concluded that Howe’s death resulted from “blunt impact of head and torso with compression of chest” suffered when he “struggled with police.”

If the claims made in the federal lawsuit are to be believed, why would police lay their hands on someone for putting out a marijuana cigarette—something that Massachusetts voters have decided should carry a penalty of no more than a $100 fine! Howe was a passenger in the vehicle, so there wasn’t even a question about him driving under the influence. And if the police are to be believed, and Howe was truly trying to flee the scene, then he most likely did so only out of fear of punishment from having the marijuana.

Either way, there is no reason—none whatsoever—why Mr. Howe should be dead, and his family deprived of a husband and father.

How many more tragedies like this need to occur before politicians realize that our marijuana laws do far more harm than good?

On Wednesday, DEA agents raided Full Spectrum Laboratories, a lab in Denver, Colorado, that tests medical marijuana for dispensaries. Bob Winnicki, president of the lab, said the DEA issued a subpoena requesting that it turn over customer and patient records from the past six months. Winnicki said he wasn't charged with a crime, but agents seized about $10,000 worth of marijuana, some of which was going to be made into capsules for people with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease.

Winnicki said his operation isn't a dispensary, but rather a lab that tests marijuana for mold, fungus and pesticides, and tests the effectiveness of different strains of marijuana for treating various ailments for dispensaries and patients. He said he applied for a DEA license back in October to use standards needed to test the marijuana, but didn't hear from them until Wednesday.

Though the circumstances involved are still unclear, there is no doubt that federal law enforcement agents have bigger fish to fry. While this company was trying to ensure that medical marijuana—the use of which has been sanctioned by the Obama administration—is safe for patients, Mexican drug cartels are operating in 230 cities across the country. If the DEA truly cares about public safety, this is the last place they should be spending their time—and a single dollar spent on any kind of prosecution of these individuals would be one of the most egregious misuses of government resources imaginable.

Big news!

California's Tax Cannabis 2010 campaign announced today that they have submitted nearly 700,000 signatures to qualify their initiative for the November 2010 ballot. The initiative seeks to make personal possession (up to 1 oz.) and cultivation (up to 25 square feet) legal for adults 21 and up. The proposal also gives cities and counties the option to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana sales.

Supporters only needed to collect 433,971 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. Submitting such large raw numbers makes the chances very good that this bold measure will be placed before California voters in November.

President Obama has created a YouTube channel where anyone with an Internet connection and an idea can hold an “exclusive interview with the president.” The project is called CitizenTube, and it is very similar to the Open For Questions forum the Obama team unveiled one year ago. And just like last year, marijuana reform questions are by far the most popular.

Here is MPP’s entry:

You can visit the site to vote and help our question be one of the few chosen by Obama for a live YouTube event next week. Click here to help us demonstrate the importance and popularity of this issue.

President Obama has nominated the acting head of the DEA, Michele Leonhart, to take on the post permanently. We have been generally happy with the Justice Department during Obama’s freshman year, but it would be nice to see a new face at the DEA. Here’s why.

Early in Leonhart’s career, she was the Special Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Division, where she oversaw President George W. Bush’s brutal tactic of raiding and arresting medical marijuana patients. Most readers will remember the raids on dispensaries that were part of the former president’s war on drugs until 2009, but during the early years of the Bush administration, these raids were directed at individual patients, not just distributors. This show of force was a political message meant to undermine state medical marijuana laws. Bush was so smitten with Leonhart’s work fighting innocent cancer patients that he promoted her to deputy director in 2003.

In that role, Leonhart rejected the application of Professor Lyle Craker of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst to research marijuana’s medical value. Professor Craker was proposing the kind of project considered essential if marijuana is ever to be licensed by the FDA as a prescription medicine, and a DEA administrative law judge ruled in Craker’s favor. Leonhart, however, ignored the judge’s ruling and denied the application. Her reasons were transparently phony: an ideological opposition to medical marijuana dressed up in pseudoscientific language. This is precisely the sort of nonsense Obama has pledged to end.

At a news conference in April, Michele Leonhart said that legalizing drugs "would be a failed law enforcement strategy for both the U.S. and Mexico." That’s certainly not change I can believe in.

MPP assistant director of communications Mike Meno talks about marijuana prohibition and the announcement of a bill to allow medical marijuana in the state of Maryland. In this interview, he explains that the current affirmative defense for medical marijuana patients does not go far enough to protect their safety. 01/26/2010

Yesterday, a team of bipartisan Maryland legislators announced the details of two bills that would make medical marijuana legal and accessible for qualified patients in the state.

The bill’s main sponsor in the House is Del. Dan Morhaim (D-Baltimore County), who, as an internist and emergency medical physician, has been very effective at explaining why patients and doctors need access to a range of treatment options, including marijuana.

As proposed, the bill would allow patients with a “debilitating medical condition” to obtain marijuana from state-run distribution centers with the recommendation of a doctor with whom they have a long-standing relationship.

However, the new bill would not allow patients to grow their own marijuana, and they would have to try other treatment options before marijuana.

But if passed, the new law would be a vast improvement for medical marijuana patients in Maryland. Under current state law, patients are provided with a limited affirmative defense in court, but they have no protection from arrest or a criminal conviction, and no safe and reliable access to their medicine.

Under this new proposal—which has backing from a diverse and bipartisan group of legislators and has so far seen no opposition—those patients would no longer be treated as criminals, and they would have safe access to the medicine they need.

After more than two years of deliberation -- and just plain foot-dragging -- on the issue, the Los Angeles City Council voted 9-3 today to enact an ordinance regulating the operation of medical marijuana facilities in the city. It's certainly a significant milestone that the second largest city in the nation (eighth in the world) has a law on the books allowing marijuana to be sold through locally regulated storefronts. However, upon digging into the details of the ordinance, it doesn't seem to be a great boon for the seriously ill and injured Angelenos who rely on medical marijuana.

The ordinance will restrict the number of medical marijuana facilities in the city to 70, but it does grandfather in about 150 collectives which were registered with the city prior to a moratorium which went into effect in 2007. The law will also require all marijuana products to be tested for contaminants and pesticides by an "independent and certified laboratory." Testing of this nature is a great idea and indeed some in California's medical marijuana community are working on developing such practices and standards, but finding a lab equipped for this type of testing overnight will be no small chore.

What's probably the most troublesome detail is that the new ordinance institutes 1,000-foot zones around "sensitive uses" where medical marijuana collectives cannot operate legally. These include schools, public parks, libraries, and even churches. This huge 1,000-foot radius and another requirement that facilities may not be located adjacent to residential zones -- which is not required of alcohol vendors -- will force nearly all to move.

Meanwhile, patients looking for a safe and open place to acquire their medicine in Los Angeles may just be finding life that much more difficult.

Yet another myth about marijuana takes a beating thanks to some splendid research out of Scandinavia. Although it’s no surprise to MPP’s fans, marijuana use has no link to suicide. A thorough study of Swedish military men confirms that those who use marijuana are no more likely to take their own lives than those who don’t. Prohibitionists often grab results like these and squeal “the sample is too small to mean much,” but this research focused on more than 50,000 people. If you can’t get marijuana to link to suicide in 50,000 people, you can’t get marijuana to link to suicide.

Prohibitionists also often shout “Well, you didn’t follow them up long enough. They would have killed themselves eventually.” This study followed the participants for 33 years. If you can’t link marijuana to suicide after 33 years, you can’t link marijuana to suicide.  If there’s no smoke, there’s no fire. This study also showed markedly smaller links between marijuana and depression than folks thought.

Clearly, the biggest bummer about marijuana doesn’t stem from its use; it’s from arrests. At 800,000 per year, our current rate,  we’d have 26,400,000 more arrests for the next 33-year follow-up. Let’s not let that happen. It’s just too depressing.

Dr. Mitch Earleywine is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where he teaches drugs and human behavior, substance abuse treatment and clinical research methods. He is the author of more than 100 publications on drug use and abuse, including “Understanding Marijuana” and “The Parents’ Guide to Marijuana." He is the only person to publish with both Oxford University and High Times.