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.

"Drug companies now finance most clinical research on prescription drugs," Angell writes, "and there is mounting evidence that they often skew the research they sponsor to make their drugs look better and safer." Angell walks readers through a depressing litany of conflicts of interest, showing how researchers, the academic institutions they work for, and even members of FDA review panels are financially in bed with the drug companies whose products they test and evaluate. Drug company control of research on their products is now so complete, she explains, that the companies "often design the studies; perform the analysis; write the papers; and decide whether, when, and in what form to publish the results."

Companies controlling research on their products not only skew that research to produce positive results, they suppress negative results that would interfere with marketing -- suppression that, Angell explains, has often only been uncovered as a result of lawsuits or congressional hearings. The bottom line, this esteemed physician and journal editor writes, is that bias in favor of drug company products "permeates the entire system. Physicians can no longer rely on the medical literature for valid and reliable information [italics mine]."

Natural marijuana, of course, has no drug company sponsor. And yet we're told it can't be a real medicine because it hasn't been fully run through this broken, biased, dysfunctional system.

This is the story of Rachel Hoffman, a young girl who has now become just one more victim of the government's war on marijuana users. A casual marijuana user, Rachel became embroiled with the Tallahassee Police Department, forcing her into a dangerous situation as an untrained informant.

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On Wednesday evening, the U.S. House of Representatives endorsed nearly all of MPP's arguments for regulating and taxing marijuana as we now regulate beer, wine, and liquor. But don't get your hopes up too much: The word "marijuana" never appears in the resolution hailing 75 years of successful alcohol regulation and the end of Prohibition.

Nevertheless, try reading the following excerpts and mentally substituting the word "marijuana" for "alcohol":

Whereas passage of the 18th Amendment, which prohibited 'the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors' in the United States, resulted in a dramatic increase in illegal activity, including unsafe black market alcohol production, organized crime, and noncompliance with alcohol laws ...

Whereas development of a transparent and accountable system of distribution and sales, an orderly market, temperance in consumption and safe practices, the efficient collection of taxes, and other essential policies have been successfully guided by the collective experience and cooperation of government agencies and licensed industry members throughout our geographically and culturally diverse Nation;

Whereas regulated commerce in alcoholic beverages contributes billions of dollars in Federal and State tax revenues and additional billions to the economy annually ...

Whereas members of the licensed alcoholic beverage industry have created and supported a wide range of national, State, and community programs to address problems associated with alcohol abuse, including drunk driving and underage drinking: Now, therefore, be it

      Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress--

            (1) celebrates 75 years of effective State-based alcohol regulation since the passage of the 21st Amendment;

            (2) recognizes State lawmakers, regulators, law enforcement officers, the public health community and industry members for creating a workable, legal, and successful system of alcoholic beverage regulation, distribution, and sale; and

            (3) continues to support policies that allow States to effectively regulate alcohol.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

One of the arguments raised regularly by opponents of marijuana law reform is the claim that any lessening of penalties will lead to higher rates of marijuana use, and from that all sorts of terrible consequences will flow. This argument has already been raised against Question 2 in Massachusetts. It's one of those claims that makes intuitive sense, but research suggests it's simply not true.

That's not just my opinion. A few years ago the White House asked the National Research Council to look at the data being collected about illegal drugs in order to better understand how that data could be used to inform policy. The NRC report, "Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us," looked in some detail at what research tells us about the effect of drug laws.

Here's a bit of what they had to say, from pages 192-193 of the report:

The issue most extensively studied has been the impact of decriminalization on the prevalence of marijuana use among youths and adults. Penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use were significantly reduced in 11 states in the 1970s (Bonnie, 1981b). All of these laws preclude incarceration for consumption-related marijuana offenses, making the offense punishable only by a fine, and most also classify the offense in a category (typically a civil infraction) that does not carry the stigmatizing consequence of having been convicted of a crime— hence the term 'decriminalization.'

Most cross-state comparisons in the United States (as well as in Australia; see McGeorge and Aitken, 1997) have found no significant differences in the prevalence of marijuana use in decriminalized and nondecriminalized states (e.g., Johnston et al., 1981; Single, 1989; DiNardo and Lemieux, 1992; Thies and Register, 1993). Even in the few studies that find an effect on prevalence, it is a weak one. ...

In summary, existing research seems to indicate that there is little apparent relationship between severity of sanctions prescribed for drug use and prevalence or frequency of use, and that perceived legal risk explains very little in the variance of individual drug use.

The most recent state-level data from the federal National Survey on Drug Use and Health continue to show little difference in use rates between states that have decriminalized marijuana and those that haven't.

For example, in Mississippi, a decrim state, 8.45% of those aged 12 and up say they've used marijuana in the past year. In neighboring Louisiana and Alabama, both of which continue to arrest and jail people caught possessing marijuana, the rates are 9.58% and 7.99%, respectively. Some decrim states, like Oregon, are above the national average of 10.37%, while others are below. Overall, the difference between decrim and non-decrim states is well within the survey's margin of error.

The lesson: Just because something seems like it should be true -- or makes a good sound bite -- doesn't make it so.

The latest Crime in the United States report from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program is out, and the news is disturbing. Marijuana arrests set another all-time record in 2007, totaling 872,720 -- that's a marijuana arrest every 36 seconds.

Arrests for marijuana possession totaled 775,138, greatly exceeding arrests for all violent crimes combined, which totaled 597,447.

Bizarrely, at his recent press conference announcing new drug use survey data, White House drug czar John Walters stated, "We didn't arrest 800,000 marijuana users," and called that figure, when raised by MPP's Aaron Houston and Dan Bernath, a "lie."

Well, he was sort of right. Dan and Aaron were low by 72,000.

Today's Los Angeles Times has a story on the rise of prescription drug abuse based on stats from the just-released National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The Times story expresses alarm at the rise in recreational use of prescription drugs, and understandably so, but misses a key point:

In recent years, the Office of National Drug Control Policy has spent well over a billion dollars on broadcast and print ads which have overwhelmingly emphasized the dangers of marijuana as compared with prescription drugs (or other substances) that are far more addictive and toxic than marijuana. This disproportion has somewhat lessened in the last year or so, but during Walters' first five or six years as drug czar the skewing of priorities was truly remarkable. Ads specifically targeting prescription drug abuse from ONDCP were nearly unknown until about a year ago.

Indeed, the ad featured on ONDCP's home page this morning is an anti-marijuana ad, albeit a strangely cryptic one.

Does this not send an unspoken message to both kids and parents? After all, if the ads are all demonizing marijuana and say nothing about those pills in the medicine cabinet, then those pills -- which, after all, are legal -- must be safe, right? Kids aren't stupid. They pick up on what we don't say as much as what we do.

Prescription drug abuse is not a new problem, and if one looks at the NSDUH stats going back to 2002, the increase has been fairly small (see table G.4 in the link above) -- real, yes, but it's not like this was an unknown problem that suddenly exploded. ONDCP chose to ignore it in favor of Walters' marijuana obsession, and we are now seeing the results. 

Because the "expert" sources cited by the Times were all either from government or government-allied think tanks, that perspective was missing from the story.

Join MPP-TV's Noah Brozinsky as he reviews five of the 2008 presidential candidates' positions on marijuana policy.

Scott Day, a friend of MPP and a Montana medical marijuana patient who suffered from a rare, painful degenerative disease, died Tuesday at 34.

Scott and his wife Summer were raided in February and charged with possession, manufacturing, and distributing marijuana. Summer believes the stress of prosecution had a great deal to do with the deterioration of Scott's health this year.

Legally, prosecutors may have been justified in pursuing the couple under state law. The two were not registered medical marijuana patients at the time of their arrest, although Montana law allowed them to present an affirmative defense that their marijuana use was medically necessary and therefore justified under the law.

Morally, however, there is absolutely no excuse for the nightmare state law enforcement inflicted on Scott and Summer. It's too late for Scott now, but Beaverhead County Attorney Jed Fitch has a moral imperative to use his prosecutorial discretion to drop Summer's charges and allow her to tend to her health and her grief.

If you agree, please let Mr. Fitch know.

MPP-TV has released a Marijuana Policy Presidential Video Voter Guide.  Want to see and hear what the candidates' positions on marijuana policy are?  Here's your chance.  Head on over to MPP-TV and check it out.

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.