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.

Other than completely failing to “eradicate” marijuana, how does “eradication” make problems associated with marijuana cultivation worse? Take a look at the charts at the bottom of the CAMP page linked above. As the number of plants seized skyrocketed starting in 2002, a key shift occurred: Where once the majority were seized from private land, in recent years the overwhelming majority of seizures have been on public lands – those very national forests the “eradicators” claim to want to protect.

The charts only go through 2006, but the trend has continued. In 2008, CAMP seizures set an all-time record of nearly 3 million plants, with 70 percent seized on public lands.

“Eradication” campaigns appear to have literally driven the growers into the hills.

Two years ago, MPP challenged California Attorney General Jerry Brown – who oversees CAMP -- to provide evidence that the program reduces marijuana availability, cultivation in dangerous or environmentally sensitive areas, availability of marijuana to young people, or involvement of criminal gangs in marijuana production and distribution.

He did not respond.

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.

We’ve all heard the claims before – from federal officials, police groups opposing state medical marijuana bills, etc. – that there is no evidence that marijuana is a legitimate medicine. Readers of this blog know that’s nonsense, but there’s been a need for an article in the peer-reviewed scientific literature that lays out the scientific case in a clear, tightly-focused way.

Recently, a group of scientists published a review article in the Journal of Opioid Management that does just that. The article, “Medicinal Use of Cannabis in the United States: Historical Perspectives, Current Trends, and Future Directions,” is one every medical marijuana activist should keep handy.

The authors, led by  Sunil Aggarwal of the University of Washington, walk readers through the massive body of medical evidence for marijuana’s safety and efficacy, including “the 33 completed and published American controlled clinical trials with cannabis.” They note that “nearly all of the 33 published controlled clinical trials with cannabis conducted in the United States have shown significant and measurable benefits in subjects receiving the treatment.”

They also point out that the federal government has conducted only one long-term study of medical marijuana, the IND program that still provides marijuana to four patients. But it's a study in name only, as “no clinical response data in the patient cohort have ever been systematically collected or disseminated.”

Translation: If officials don’t know that marijuana is a safe, effective medicine, it’s because they don’t want to know.

Earlier this week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) launched MyIdea4CA.com, a website which encourages Twitter users to “tweet” their ideas for how to “move California forward” and then allows visitors to give each of those ideas an up or down vote. The site has only been live for a few days and already the top three most popular “tweets” involve making marijuana legal, taxed, and regulated in California.

It is encouraging that high-level pols like Gov. Schwarzenegger and President Obama are turning to the Web for new, out-of-the-box ideas but it’s a shame that they have yet to embrace the one proposal which is consistently the most popular.

Nevertheless, those of us yearning for an effective and just marijuana policy will continue to speak truth to power – and it’s only a matter of time before our elected leaders will be forced to listen.

The Obama administration’s official position on the movement to decriminalize drug use in Latin America is to take a “wait-and-see attitude.” However, San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne was willing to share his thoughts with the Associated Press:

"Now they will go [to Mexico] because they can get drugs. For a country that has experienced thousands of deaths from warring drug cartels for many years, it defies logic why they would pass a law that will clearly encourage drug use."

His quote illustrates one of the most baffling positions held by drug prohibitionists … that sending people to treatment instead of jail encourages drug use.

The logic Lansdowne can’t see is that drug use is not a criminal justice problem; it’s a public health problem. And when viewed in that light, it’s understandable why he got it wrong -- Lansdowne isn’t a doctor; he's a cop.

The impetus behind Mexico, Argentina, Switzerland, and Portugal (likely to be joined soon by Brazil and Ecuador) changing their drug laws is a decision to focus on treating addiction rather than punishing it. In doing so, they hope to free up law enforcement resources that are better spent fighting violent criminals (like the drug cartels in Mexico). Portugal, which changed its policy in 2001, has had great success -- and without becoming a destination for drug tourism.

Argentina is expected to remove criminal penalties for marijuana possession today, according to the Buenos Aires Herald:

Supreme Court Justice Carlos Fayt said the court has reached a unanimous position on an expected ruling that would decriminalize the possession of drugs for personal consumption, which would be announced analyzed today.

If the court rules as expected, Argentina will become the second Latin American country in the last four days to allow the personal use of marijuana.

Last week, Mexico passed a new law decriminalizing simple possession of marijuana and other drugs. Perhaps our neighbor to the south will now consider the possibility of full legalization (regulating marijuana like alcohol, as opposed to simply removing penalties for possession). A number of people in Mexico are calling for a debate, with  former President Vicente Fox as one of the most prominent voices in that chorus. However, others are wondering if legalization in Mexico would make a difference. The answer, as I see it, is unfortunately no.

The World Health Organization’s 2008 report on drug use found that more Americans use marijuana than people in any of the other 16 countries studied (which included Mexico). The report, along with many other sources, concludes that America is the largest illicit drug market in the world. The cartels in Mexico cater almost exclusively to customers in the U.S., pulling in huge profits every year (70% of which are from marijuana sales). If Mexico were to legalize marijuana, the cartels’ business would continue as usual. They would still smuggle marijuana into the U.S. and continue to profit from doing so.

No, the answer to the cartel problem does not lie in Mexico; it lies here in the U.S.

The U.S. alone has the power to wipe out the cartels, and it can do so with a simple change in policy. Were we to abolish marijuana prohibition and replace it with a system of taxation and regulation based on alcohol laws, a new, legal marijuana industry would put the criminal competition out of business overnight. We did it once before. In the 1930s, following our failed experiment with alcohol prohibition, the fledgling alcohol industry took over, producing a safer product and putting money into the economy rather than taking it out. And it happened without the moral degradation prohibitionists predicted.

This is precisely why the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy released a report in January calling on the U.S. to change its marijuana laws. Drug producing countries in Latin America have first-hand experience with the devastating effects of America’s war on drugs. The violence and organized crime feeding the U.S. market have been rooted there for decades, with disastrous results. The U.S., on the other hand, has never faced these realities on its own soil – not to the same scale and severity as our neighbors in Mexico or those who lived through the reign of Pablo Escobar in Columbia.

But that is beginning to change. Violence in Mexico is spilling over into Texas, Arizona, and southern California. The cartels now operate in 230 American cities – think about what that means. 230 means more than New York, Los Angeles, and other large metropolitan areas, it means Bismark, N.D., Wichita, Kan., and even Kalamazoo, Mich., small towns where Americans are feeling the impact of bad drug policy. More directly, it means that the U.S. government can no longer ignore the failures of its war on marijuana.

The sensible solution is right in front of us. We just need the political will to see it through.

If you’d like to help make a change, write your member of Congress and ask him or her to support marijuana policy reform. More information on how to do so can be found at mpp.org/federal-action.

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).

Brain white matter tracts were “more coherent in adolescents who binge drink and use marijuana than in adolescents who report only binge drinking,” the researchers wrote. “It is possible that marijuana may have some neuroprotective properties in mitigating alcohol-related oxidative stress or excitotoxic cell death.” The scientists noted that such protection has already been shown in lab and animal studies.

Indeed, the U.S. government has a patent on cannabinoids as neuroprotectants. Yes, the same government that wants you to believe that marijuana will rot your brain knows that its active components protect brain and nerve cells from many kinds of damage.

In a statement issued by MPP today, director of state campaigns Steve Fox said, “This study suggests that not only is marijuana safer than alcohol, it may actually protect against some of the damage that booze causes. It’s far better for teens not to drink or smoke marijuana, but our nation's leaders send a dangerous message by defending laws that encourage the use of alcohol over marijuana.”

Fox is co-author of the new book, “Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?” The book is getting lots of favorable press coverage, and recently hit number 14 on the Amazon.com bestseller list.

Mexico enacted a law decriminalizing possession of marijuana (and other drugs) yesterday, according to the Associated Press.

The new law defines 5 grams of marijuana as a “personal use” amount. People caught in possession of less than that amount will face no penalty until their third offense, at which point the law requires them to enter addiction treatment. The change is part of the Mexican government’s efforts to fight a very hot war against drug cartels along its border with the U.S. By decriminalizing marijuana, Mexico seeks to free up law enforcement resources that have been wasted arresting non-violent marijuana users.

A similar law, proposed during former president Vicente Fox’s administration, was defeated following significant opposition from President George W. Bush. We have not seen the same pressure from the Obama administration this time around. In fact, current Mexican president Felipe Calderón has used this new law to send a message north about the need for a similar debate to take place on our side of the border. Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan, for example, called for such a debate to be taken seriously by the U.S. in April, and the Mexican Senate scheduled discussion of the new law to coincide with President Obama’s first trip to Mexico.

Taking these events in context -- especially considering the chorus of high-profile former Latin American leaders calling for the U.S. to change its heavy-handed drug policies -- a clear message emerges: our neighbors are paying a heavy price for our marijuana laws, which account for 70% of the cartels' profits.

In a sense, we’ve been exporting the worst consequences of prohibition to our southern neighbor by forcing marijuana to remain a business for thugs and criminals. Just like alcohol prohibition, marijuana prohibition causes more harm than the drug itself. The violence in Mexico has forced its government to face that reality; our politicians should pay close attention.

H.R. 2943, legislation in Congress that seeks to remove federal penalties for marijuana possession, is currently in committee. Please visit mpp.org/federal-action to ask your member of Congress for his or her support.

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.