U.S. marijuana arrests declined somewhat in 2008, according to figures released by the FBI today. According to the just-released Uniform Crime Reports, U.S. law enforcement made 847,863 arrests on marijuana charges last year, 89 percent of which were for possession, not sale or manufacture – more arrests for marijuana possession than for all violent crimes combined. One American was arrested on marijuana charges every 37 seconds.

Marijuana arrests peaked in 2007 at over 872,000, capping five years of all-time record arrests.

The new report comes on the heels of the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released Sept. 10, which showed an increase in both the number and percentage of Americans who admit having used marijuana. In  2003, when marijuana arrests set what was then an all-time record of 755,186, 40.6 percent of Americans aged 12 and over said they had used marijuana. In 2008, that figure was 41 percent, or 102,404,000 Americans willing to tell government survey-takers that they had used marijuana.

Apparently, massive numbers of arrests didn’t curb marijuana use.

“This slight dip in the number of marijuana arrests provides a small amount of relief to the tens of millions of American marijuana consumers who have been under attack by their own government for decades,” said Marijuana Policy Project executive director Rob Kampia in a statement issued by MPP today. “It’s time to stop wasting billions of tax dollars criminalizing responsible Americans for using a substance that’s safer than alcohol, and to put an end to policies that simply hand this massive consumer market to unregulated criminals.”

To put that arrest figure in perspective, it’s equivalent to arresting every man, woman and child in the city of San Francisco – plus about 23,000 more people from nearby suburbs – in just one year. Do you feel safer?

According to the San Diego County District Attorney's Office -- the agency that led yesterday’s multi-jurisdictional raids on local medical marijuana providers -- warrants were served at 14 dispensing collectives and six associated residences. So far, 23 people have been arrested in connection with the raided facilities.

The D.A.’s press release attempts to justify the actions using an extremely narrow interpretation of state law relating to the role of a “primary caregiver.” It does not address whether or not the facilities in question were operating as “collectives” – a more common state-legal model for dispensing medical marijuana.

One thing that's clear about this case is that San Diego would have been better served if its leaders had moved to properly regulate medical marijuana facilities rather than resisting any effort to do so before resorting to brute force to shutter legal access to local patients.

If you've had any doubt that these raids are being carried out by heartless thugs, just look to the image below from video captured by San Diego’s KFMB News showing an officer manhandling a wheelchair-bound patient into the back of a patrol car. Remind me again, how is this serving the interest of public safety?

The new National Survey on Drug Use and Health is out, and it puts the final nail in the coffin of the war on marijuana conducted by George W. Bush’s drug czar, John Walters.

Walters’ fanaticism about marijuana is epitomized by a November 2002 letter sent to the nation’s prosecutors by his deputy, Scott Burns, claiming that “no drug matches the threat posed by marijuana.” Walters carpet-bombed the nation with anti-marijuana propaganda – TV, radio and print ads, reports, press conferences, news releases, etc. – and quickly began to follow up with exaggerated claims of success.

That game is now over. Compare the just-released 2008 data to the 2002 survey, the first to reflect Walters’ policies:

In 2002, 94.9 million Americans admitted having used marijuana at some point in their lives. In 2008, that figure had grown to 102.4 million. In percentage terms, that’s an increase from 40.4 percent in 2002 to 40.6 percent in 2008 – unchanged, statistically speaking. For current (past 30 days) use, the pattern is similar: 14.6 million or 6.2 percent in 2002, 15.2 million or 6.1 percent in 2008. The slight declines of a couple years ago have now been entirely erased and were likely no more than statistical noise.

The drug war industrial complex will never admit it, but the most intensive anti-marijuana campaign since the days of “Reefer Madness” produced exactly nothing.

Several San Diego-area medical marijuana collectives were raided today in a county-wide sweep apparently coordinated by the district attorney's office. It's unclear at this time whether or not any arrests have been made or exactly what -- if any -- state law violations are being alleged in these cases.

Given San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis' dismal record of circumventing California's medical marijuana laws and prosecuting patients, this recent action is unfortunately not very surprising. MPP is continuing to keep a close watch on the situation in San Diego; we'll provide an update if more relevant information becomes available.

In Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Jon Carroll went off on an ad that’s run lately in his paper and others promoting a drug to treat rheumatoid arthritis. The drug is called Humira, and Carroll is aghast at warnings in the ad, which advise that people taking this drug might be at risk for fatal infections, heart failure, and “certain types of cancers.”

“I look at the risk-benefit ratio, and I worry,” Carroll concludes, and understandably so.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease, characterized by inflammation of the lining of the joints. It can be painful and even disabling.

Of course, there’s a drug that’s a well-documented pain reliever and anti-inflammatory, and there is already some evidence that it may work for rheumatoid arthritis. It doesn’t cause fatal infections, cancer, or heart failure. But you won’t see major drug companies advertising it. Can you name this drug?

On Sunday, the British newspaper The Observer wrote, "In June 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared a 'war on drugs.' Drugs won."  Read the rest here.

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.