MPP Director of Government Relations Aaron Houston appeared on the Today Show to discuss the benefits of taxed and regulated marijuana sales, the failures of prohibition, and the comparitive safety of marijuana over other drugs. 07/09/2009

MPP spokesperson Dan Bernath speaks about the failure of marijuana prohibition on Fox & Friends. This segment was produced the day after MPP released an ad in California promoting the taxation and regulation of marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol. Several California TV stations refused to run the ad, drawing criticism from many sources. Also appearing on the segment is prohibitionist John Lovell of the California Peace Officers Association. 07/09/2009

Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), one of the most powerful Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, yesterday joined the list of cosponsors for Rep. Barney Frank’s bill to remove penalties for marijuana possession.

Rep. Miller is the chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, a position that awards him a lot of sway on Capitol Hill. Miller joins Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Representatives Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), Ron Paul (R-Texas), Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), and Jared Polis (D-Colo.) in sponsoring this important legislation.

If you live in Chairman Miller’s district, please thank him. If you don't, you can help out by visiting mpp.org/federal-action and asking your members of Congress to support this legislation.

MPP Director of Communications Bruce Mirken talks about the benefits of taxing and regulating marijuana like alcohol as a way to help California's budget problems. He also criticizes the rejection of ads promoting this reform by several California TV stations in the wake of Governor Schwarzenegger's call for open debate on the subject. Debating him is Calvina Fay of the Drug Free America Foundation. 07/08/2009

Last night, voters, patients, and advocates in Washington, D.C. moved one step closer to implementing a medical marijuana law that’s been 10 years in the making.

Since 1999, Congress has used its unique authority over D.C. affairs to block a local medical marijuana initiative passed by 69% of D.C. voters. The legislation responsible for blocking the will of D.C. voters is known as the Barr amendment, and it lives in the annual D.C. appropriations bill.

Last week, the congressional subcommittee in charge of funding D.C. announced the removal of the Barr amendment and other social issue riders. While this was great news, we weren't surprised when medical marijuana opponents mounted an attack.

During a full committee hearing last night, Congresswoman JoAnn Emerson (R-Mo.) attempted to have the Barr amendment put back in the bill. Her efforts were defeated after passionate speeches from Congressman Dave Obey and Jose Serrano. Ultimately, the committee voted to protect the rights of D.C. voters and keep the Barr amendment out of the bill. The legislation must move through the remainder of the legislative process and be signed into law by President Obama before the changes will take effect.

Washington, D.C. is the only place where Congress intervenes so directly in local affairs, and the Barr amendment is the most offensive example of this behavior. Hopefully, this is the year that 69% of D.C. voters will see their votes finally hold the weight of law.

In the shadow of California's historic budget crisis, MPP is airing a TV ad calling for an end to marijuana prohibition in the state.

The 30-second spot features a marijuana consumer who - along with millions of others in in the state - wants to pay taxes to help bridge California's massive budget gap. Nadene Herndon, 58, declares that "instead of being treated like criminals for using a substance safer than alcohol, [marijuana consumers] want to pay our fair share."

The ad will be running on cable and network TV all over California beginning today:

There's a litany of reasons to end marijuana prohibition, but the financial benefits have recently amplified calls for reform in California. In February, State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill that would make marijuana legal for adults over 21, and tax and regulate it comparably to alcohol. The annual state tax revenue from legal marijuana sales is estimated at about $1.3 billion - enough to pay the salaries of 20,000 California schoolteachers.

Not everyone in California wants both sides of the debate aired. Some networks actually refused to run the ad based on the bizarre assertion that it somehow supports illegal drug use

Five months after breakfast cereal maker Kellogg's axed Michael Phelps as an endorser after a photo of him appearing to smoke out of a bong surfaced, Subway has released its first ad featuring the Olympic champion.

Not only does Subway's ad demonstrate an understanding that Americans care way more about Phelps' amazing accomplishments than they do about his very ordinary controversy, but it actually articulates that sentiment: "You can always be yourself at Subway."

Kellogg's apparently found it inconvenient that a marijuana user should also be wildly successful, but Subway's approach is far more sensible and smart. I mean, what kind of advertising honcho would recommend condemning an American icon for committing an act nearly half your target audience has committed?

ProCon.org, whose goal is to "promote critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship" by presenting information on controversial issues "in a straightforward, nonpartisan, primarily pro-con format," did an interesting experiment recently. They filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Food and Drug Administration seeking information on reported deaths due to marijuana and 17 FDA-approved prescription drugs. Five of those drugs were chosen because they are widely used and well known, while the other 12 are used to treat many of the symptoms for which medical marijuana is also used.

The folks at ProCon.org took the FDA's figures and put them into a detailed report, and the results don't look good for the pharmaceutical industry.

The approved drugs, which included anti-nausea drugs, anti-spasmodics, anti-psychotics, and such well-known drugs as Vioxx, Ritalin, and Viagra, were suspected as the primary cause of 10,008 deaths and as a secondary cause in 1,679 more. Marijuana was the primary suspect in zero deaths and a suspected secondary factor in 279.

A few disclaimers are needed here: First, the FDA's reporting system does not attempt to prove definitively that a given drug caused a particular death. It's designed to warn of possible dangers, and physicians are encouraged to report suspected reactions. The numbers may well be overestimates of actual deaths related to various drugs.

Second, the list of drugs compared by ProCon.org doesn't completely reflect the pharmaceuticals for which marijuana might substitute. Some might complain, for example, about the inclusion of Vioxx, which was taken off the market due to health risks and which was the suspected main cause of some 4,500 deaths. On the other hand, plenty of other pain drugs that can be toxic weren't included, including acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol), a drug about which an FDA advisory committee recently sounded a warning and which is reported to cause hundreds of overdose deaths annually.

A few weeks ago a TV network news producer told me she found published studies of medical marijuana "unpersuasive" because "they didn't show marijuana was better than the other drugs." I don't know about you, but I think "less deadly" pretty definitely qualifies as "better."

Okay, let me say right up front that a) I know that headline is provocative, and b) neither I nor anyone can answer the question with any certainty given what we know and don't know so far about Michael Jackson's death. But the question needs to be asked.

It needs to be asked because suspicions that prescription painkillers may have been involved in Jackson's death are strong enough that the federal Drug Enforcement Administration has been brought into the investigation. And we know that he had a documented history of battling pain and at least some acknowledged problems with prescription painkillers.

We don't know yet what pain drugs Jackson was on or what they were prescribed for. But if he was addicted to prescription painkillers, that addiction almost certainly started with legitimate and needed treatment for real pain. And that's where medical marijuana might have helped.

We know -- repeat, we know -- that marijuana can be effective against certain types of pain. As The Lancet Neurology put it a few years ago, "cannabinoids inhibit pain in virtually every experimental pain paradigm." We know that human clinical trials such as this one have found marijuana to be effective, particularly for neuropathic pain.

And there is considerable evidence that marijuana and cannabinoids can act synergistically with opioid painkillers, providing better pain relief at lower doses than either class of drugs by itself. For example animal studies such as this one have reported that such combination therapy avoids the development of tolerance and allows effective relief with lowered opioid doses -- avoiding the pattern of escalating doses that can lead to addiction and overdose risk.

And there is evidence that this same effect occurs in people. For example, in a series of cases reported in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management (which, alas, you can only access by paying for it -- sorry!), patients on morphine and other narcotics were able to cut their doses roughly in half when smoked marijuana was added to their regimen.

At MPP, we hear similar stories from patients all the time: Again and again, patients tell us that use of medical marijuana allows them to cut back or eliminate the heavy doses of narcotic painkillers they'd been taking, while obtaining equal or better relief. There is enough science corroborating these accounts that they deserve to be taken seriously.

We can't yet say that medical marijuana could have saved Michael Jackson, and we may never know that for sure. But there is simply no reasonable doubt that marijuana can help some chronic pain patients reduce both their suffering and their consumption of addictive and potentially deadly narcotics. If the U.S. government acknowledged that reality instead of denying it, lives could be saved -- maybe lots of them.

An FDA panel just recommended reducing the maximum dose of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. Taken by millions of Americans every day as either a stand-alone medication or as an ingredient in various over-the-counter cold remedies, acetaminophen is the leading cause of liver failure in the U.S., resulting in hundreds of deaths by overdose every year.

And they say marijuana is too dangerous to be medicine?