A group of local leaders in Santa Barbara seems to have been stricken by a particularly nasty form of Reefer Madness.  Last week, the “Don’t Cannabis Our Kids” campaign (huh?) held a press conference to tell the world about a very disturbing “public health threat” to the local children.  I had the (apparently) silly notion that they were going to raise awareness about the relative dangers of marijuana versus alcohol, given that alcohol abuse kills more than 70,000 people a year and marijuana kills zero.  I thought that perhaps they were going to express concern about the number of licensed alcohol vendors in the county (more than 1,000), and the fact that our federal government’s policies toward marijuana would have you believe that it’s far more dangerous than alcohol and has no valid medical applications.

Sadly, though, it turns out that the “Don’t Cannabis Our Kids” campaign is actually trying to convince us that medical marijuana collectives are a public health threat to children and should therefore be banned.  So, let me get this straight …  Allowing people to buy medical marijuana in an establishment that is regulated by its local government, pays taxes, and is so forthright about its operations that it has brick and mortar location, is somehow MORE harmful to children than forcing those transactions to take place in the shadows of the black market?

I’m sorry, Santa Barbara, but you’re really asking me to toss out my critical thinking skills on this one.  Here’s a little advice: if you want to send children helpful messages about drug use, don’t lie to them.  Because if you lie to them about marijuana, they might not believe whatever you tell them about alcohol, cocaine, or methamphetamines. And then you’ve really failed them.

A new Rasmussen telephone poll released over the weekend shows that 49% of Colorado voters support taxing and regulating marijuana, while 13% are still undecided.

The findings come just days before Colorado’s governor is expected to sign a bill that would regulate the state’s booming medical marijuana industry. Some local patients groups protested the proposed regulations last week, since roughly half of the state’s estimated 1,100 dispensaries are not expected to be able to comply with the changes. However, once approved, the regulations would also grant new legal status to 500 or more existing dispensaries, making Colorado home to the largest number of law-abiding, state-regulated marijuana dispensaries anywhere in the United States. If future demand increases, even more could follow.

Stay tuned to the blog for developments, as Gov. Bill Ritter (D) is expected to sign this new law any day.

Drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has stated on many occasions that his vocabulary does not include the word “legalization.” Now today, we learn that our nation’s top drug warrior doesn’t know the meaning of the word “prohibition” either.

Sadly, I’m not making this up.

In an online video interview today with the Washington Post, Kerlikowske says the Obama administration is “very much opposed” to taxing and regulating marijuana because—get this—he says the taxes paid on alcohol do not make up for the “criminal justice, health care, [and] social costs” of alcohol consumption. Oh, and he just assumes taxes on marijuana wouldn’t either, though he doesn’t bother to mention the billions of dollars we could save on law enforcement, prison, judicial and environmental costs by calling for an end to the futile and unwinnable war the government wages against our country’s largest cash crop and the millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans who use it.

This bizarre answer prompts Post editor Fred Hiatt, the interviewer, to ask an obvious question: “So … are you looking at the prohibition of alcohol?”

The drug czar chuckles. “No,” he says, “we’re not exploring prohibition.”

Actually, Mr. Kerlikowske, you’re enforcing prohibition (defined as a “law, order or decree that forbids something”). It’s the same prohibition—on marijuana—that the federal government has kept intact for more than 70 years, despite its undeniable failure to meet any of its stated goals, and of which you are now the chief overseer.

Your prohibition, Mr. Kerlikowske, leads to the arrest of more than 750,000 Americans every year, all for mere possession of a substance that is demonstrably safer than alcohol, the very notion of (again) prohibiting you yourself find laughable. Marijuana prohibition, meanwhile, has deprived countless sick people of potentially live-saving medicine, endangered peaceful families in terrorizing and unnecessary SWAT raids that murder their pets, and killed more than 22,000 people in Mexico in less than four years of prohibition-fueled violence.

There’s nothing funny about prohibition, Mr. Kerlikowske. You might want to stop laughing, pick up a dictionary, and think long and hard about what it means.

Nevadans for Sensible Marijuana Laws spokesperson Dave Schwartz is interviewed regarding the effort to put an initiative on the 2012 ballot to tax and regulate marijuana in the state of Nevada. 05/11/2010

Doctors at Oregon’s two organ transplant centers will not provide organs to people who have marijuana compounds in their blood, even if they are legal medical marijuana patients, The Portland Tribune reports today.

This restriction has had dire consequences for patients like Jim Klahr, a Portland medical marijuana patient who suffers from hepatitis and cirrhosis, but hasn’t been able to take his medicine since 2004 because he’s on the waiting list for a liver transplant at Oregon Health and Science University and wants to remain eligible.

A director at OSHU defended such discrimination by saying medical marijuana is still illegal under federal law and that doctors are afraid of fungal infections in patients who use marijuana.

But those fears are baseless, says Stuart Youngner of Case Western Reserve University, a major transplant center. “This is unconscionable,” he told the Tribune,  “unless they have good medical evidence that there’s a significant risk to the transplant, (or) that it makes a recipient a poor steward of the organ.”

According to the Tribune:

“Years ago, Michigan surgeons discovered about 10 percent of transplant patients had marijuana compounds in their blood. The surgeons provided livers to many of the marijuana smokers anyway and then followed them post-surgery and found that they did as well as non-smoking patients.”

As it turns out, according to one of those surgeons, marijuana use does not matter all that much in organ transplants. What matters is how well the patient takes care of their body. This related 2009 Michigan study found that "patients who did and did not use marijuana had similar survival rates."

An official at one of the discriminating centers said he didn’t think such a harsh policy was costing lives -- but sadly he may be wrong. Two years ago in Washington state, 56-year-old Timothy Garon died after being denied a liver transplant. He had twice been denied the operation because he legally used doctor-approved medical marijuana to combat the symptoms of advanced hepatitis C.

Those Oregon centers need to understand that patients can’t be discriminated against because of their condition and the treatments that doctors find work best for them. More importantly, they need to end their senseless ban on transplants for medical marijuana patients before a similar tragedy occurs in Oregon, if it hasn’t already.

After the outrage that followed the release of a video showing the Columbia, Missouri police using deplorable tactics during an ultimately fruitless marijuana raid, the city's police department has announced that they will be changing their SWAT policies.

While the officers involved have not been disciplined, future raids will be conducted immediately after the warrant is obtained, and every effort will be taken to determine the level of force necessary. Supposedly. There was no indication, however, that SWAT raids would be discontinued in the enforcement of marijuana laws.

So does this policy change go far enough? While it is certainly a step in the right direction to have more transparency and accountability for law enforcement, the fact that military-style tactics can still be used against American citizens, whose sole crime is possession of a relatively harmless plant, is unacceptable. Killing family pets is unacceptable.  Putting a child at risk to make sure some unspecified amount of marijuana doesn’t get “flushed” is unacceptable.

The Columbia City Council is meeting May 17 to hear from community members who recognize the need for change.

Law enforcement officials from all over the nation have descended upon San Diego, California this week to attend a conference for the National Marijuana Initiative (NMI) and the California Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP). We’ve been pointing out the futility of marijuana “eradication” campaigns like CAMP and NMI for years but don’t expect conference attendees to spend any time rethinking their failed prohibitionist policies while enjoying their stay in sunny San Diego.

The agenda for the publicly funded conference, held at the prestigious U.S. Grant Hotel from May 10 through May 13, is not available to the public. In fact, the conference is under the close guard of about a dozen San Diego Police officers and even some military personnel.

We do know that former U.S. Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey was a featured speaker. According to his press release, McCaffrey laid out talking points against California’s Tax Cannabis 2010 initiative. That’s right, your tax dollars are essentially being used to hold an anti-reform campaign rally behind closed doors.

There’s also no doubt that conference attendees are patting themselves on the back for their work in the largest and most expensive weed abatement project of all time. Since 2003, CAMP’s marijuana plant seizures have grown by 500% but nevertheless have had no effect on marijuana’s availability or cost, which has actually decreased slightly since CAMP’s inception in 1983. Programs like CAMP are actually making matters worse by driving illegal marijuana operations deeper into harder-to-reach and environmentally sensitive areas on our public lands.

Yesterday, MPP held a press conference across the street from the marijuana eradication love fest to call out these officials for supporting a program that, at best, is a costly failure. Former deputy sheriff and current LEAP speaker Leo Laurence and Rev. Mary Moreno-Richardson, an Episcopol priest from San Diego, joined me in calling for a new direction in our marijuana policies.

Our event was originally to take place in a room across the hall from the prohibitionist conference but the hotel reneged on our contract at the last minute, forcing us to move across the street. Clearly, marijuana warriors don’t want to risk hearing from those questioning the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. To protect these prohibitionists' bubbles from being burst by reality, our original meeting room at the U.S. Grant was left empty while conference attendees enjoyed their taxpayer-supported echo chamber across the hall.

As the upcoming "eradication" season unfolds, let’s hope that the mainstream media won’t let the staggering imagery of helicopters being used to uproot marijuana plants distract them from asking the important question of whether or not these programs are actually working.

At a time when law enforcement budgets are strained to their limits and hundreds of thousands of violent crimes are going unsolved, the last thing we need is for cops to spend their time pulling up weeds. The only way to effectively control marijuana and eliminate the illegal grow operations from our public lands is to take it out of the hands of criminals and regulate it like we do alcohol.

For all of us who have always hoped to see a mainstream politician have the courage to unabashedly call for an end to marijuana prohibition, our days of waiting seem to be over.

Last night on The Colbert Report, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson – who is widely considered to be a likely candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination — dedicated the entirety of his appearance to explaining why prohibition is a waste and new policies are needed.

“I think that marijuana should be legalized,” Johnson began. “I think 90 percent of the drug problem today is prohibition related.” And it just got better from there.

Watch the clip below, and you won’t be disappointed:

In January, Johnson was a featured speaker at MPP’s 15^th anniversary gala in Washington, D.C.

MPP director of communications Mike Meno appears on Russia Today to talk about the medical marijuana law recently approved by the Washington DC City Council, and how this will affect the way people view the nation's capitol. 05/05/2010

The brutal methods used by SWAT teams throughout the country are not news in the war on drugs. This steady militarization of our police forces in the pursuit of drug seizures has largely gone unnoticed in the press until recently, when some high-profile incidents highlighted some of the uglier tactics used when raiding potential drug dens.

Two such cases were those of Tarika Wilson, who was killed while holding her baby, and Cheye Calvo, the mayor of a small Maryland town who had his home raided and two black Labradors killed by local SWAT because a package of marijuana was sent to his house without his knowledge.

A similar incident occurred on Feb. 11 in Columbia, Missouri, resulting in the death of one dog and the shooting of another during a raid on the home of Jonathan Whitworth, who police suspected of selling marijuana. Police stormed into his house and immediately opened fire on the dogs, before they realized that there was a 7-year-old child in the house.  A grinder, a pipe, and a small amount of marijuana were found, but no evidence of distribution.

Watch the video below, keeping in mind that police later tried to charge Whitworth with child endangerment, as if having a little marijuana in the home is more dangerous to a child's wellbeing than storming into their house with automatic weapons and killing their dogs.

Spokesperson Officer Jessie Haden defended the decision to commence the raid without verifying who was in the home by saying, “If you let too much time go by, then the drugs are not there.”  Well they weren’t.  But no one paid too much attention until the video surfaced that showed the raid in detail. Now people are paying attention.

It’s a little sad that it requires graphic video of dogs yelping as they die and a child being rushed out the door to get people to ask questions about something that happens all too often in every state in this country because of the government's war on marijuana.