One thing that drives me crazy is the tendency of the media and others to refer to THC as “the active ingredient” in marijuana. While THC is indeed responsible for marijuana’s “high,” it is one of about 80 unique compounds, called cannabinoids, that are not seen in any other plant. Many of these have interesting, potentially significant, medical applications, and are not psychoactive.

Anyone who wants to learn about these other cannabinoids should check out this recent review published in the journal Trends in Pharmacological Sciences.

The article devotes a lot of space to cannabidiol (CBD), the most studied of these compounds, noting that “CBD exerts several positive pharmacological effects that make it a highly attractive therapeutic entity in inflammation, diabetes, cancer and affective or neurodegenerative diseases.” Notably, CBD has antipsychotic actions, but fewer side effects than “typical antipsychotics.” Lots of other cannabinoids have potentially useful properties as well. For example, cannabichromene has antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activity, plus “modest” analgesic effect.

The article tends to be a bit dismissive of THC because of its psychoactivity, and focuses mainly on cannabinoids as individual chemicals rather than as components of an herbal medicine that has proven extraordinarily useful in its natural form (biases that are pretty much typical in the medical literature), but even with these limitations, it’s an important read.

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The Los Angeles Times reports today that L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley thinks California's medical marijuana collectives are breaking state law. Cooley vowed to prosecute all the medical marijuana facilities in his county, estimated to have nearly 1,000 medical marijuana collectives. Cooley can say that these collectives are illegal all he wants, but that doesn't make it true.

Last year, the state's attorney general issued a legal opinion that clearly stated that "a properly organized and operated collective or cooperative that dispenses medical marijuana through a storefront may be lawful under California law." Maybe Cooley didn't get the memo.

If Cooley is somehow successful in eliminating L.A.'s medical marijuana facilities, the effect would be disastrous for patients forced to find their medicine in the underground market and would be a boon to the violent drug cartels that often supply that market. Voters in Los Angeles -- who overwhelmingly support medical marijuana -- are probably scratching their heads trying to figure out why their district attorney wants to enrich criminal drug dealers at the expense of patients.

Cooley's priorities are dangerously misguided. Los Angeles County maintains a backlog of more than 3,000 untested rape kits (evidence collected from a sexual assault). This means that these rapes have been reported but are still not being investigated due to limited resources. I guess Cooley thinks law enforcement efforts would be better spent terrorizing seriously ill patients and the people who provide their legal medicine than solving violent crimes like sexual assault.

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It seems yet another California official refuses to recognize that state’s medical marijuana law, and instead wants to deny patients the treatment that’s recommended by their doctors and protected under state law.  Barely a week after the police chief of Redding, California sent a warning to local dispensing collectives about their defiance of federal law, a superior court judge in Fresno County today issued a two-week restraining order that temporarily shuts down all nine medical marijuana collectives that have opened in Fresno this year.

Judge Alan M. Simpson sided with city officials, who since August have been trying to shut down the collectives through a nonsensical zoning ordinance that requires the businesses to obey both state law (under which they’re legal) and federal law (under which they’re not). Such an ordinance is essentially impossible for the collectives to obey as long as medical marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

Lawyers for the collectives say they will argue at an Oct. 22 hearing that because state laws permit medical marijuana, local governments can’t use zoning ordinances to ban the collectives. Until then, medical marijuana patients in Fresno will be unable to safely or legally obtain their recommended treatment within city limits.

“The real winners in that will be the drug dealers and the drug cartels,” said Sean Dwyer, owner of California Herbal Relief Center, one of the closed collectives, which itself caters to 800 patients. “Because rather than being able to get their medication from us legally, they will be forced to buying it illegally off the street.”

When will California officials understand that their job is to enforce California’s laws, not the federal government’s? Medical marijuana has been legal in California since 1996. Sadly, as attorney William Logan told a local ABC affiliate, “here we are 13 years later, [still] trying to figure out how to get medicine to patients.”

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As a result of the media attention that the social networking site Twitter has been receiving, many members of Congress have become active tweeters, some updating and reading their pages personally. This means that we have a new forum to interact with our representatives in Washington, D.C., one that's quick, easy, and increasingly effective.

If you use Twitter, please send a tweet asking your member of Congress to end marijuana prohibition today. In keeping with Twitter's real-time nature, we’re asking you to tweet about this great article from The Washington Post and tie it to your support for ending marijuana prohibition. Please see the message and steps below for help.

Step 1: Sign in to Twitter.

Step 2: Visit tweetcongress.org/. After you enter your zip code, the site will display your member of Congress’s Twitter account. (Note that some members don’t have accounts. If this is the case, tweetcongress.org allows you to petition them to join.)

Step 3: Post a Twitter message that “mentions” your member’s account. You can do this by beginning your tweet with “@[your member's account]” with out the quotes. For example, Congressman Jim Moran would be “@Jim_Moran” with out the quotes. Do this, and your message will appear on your legislator's Twitter page.

Sample Message:

@[your member's account] Read http://tinyurl.com/ydwf2uj (WaPo). Legal marijuana will cut cartel violence where law enforcement has failed.

Just copy and paste the above into Twitter and customize it with your member of Congress’s account name.

Please also also follow MPP on Twitter at twitter.com/MarijuanaPolicy.

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As reported on the front page of today’s Washington Post, domestic marijuana production is cutting into the bottom line of Mexican drug cartels while decades of police enforcement have failed to curb their growth.

The article states, "Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico ... Illicit pot production in the United States has been increasing steadily for decades. But recent changes in state laws that allow the use and cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes are giving U.S. growers a competitive advantage, challenging the traditional dominance of the Mexican traffickers.”

Now imagine for a moment if we encouraged this trend, rather than fought it. If the U.S. adopted new policies giving states the option to create legally regulated domestic markets for marijuana, we could go a long way toward eliminating the violence and corruption along our southern border entirely -- and in the 230 American cities in which the cartels operate.

Under a legal and regulated system, the marijuana market -- which is already thriving -- would be safer, contribute billions to the American economy, and free up billions more in law enforcement resources.

Click here to read the article in today’s Washington Post.

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The International Association for Cannabis as Medicine just concluded its 5^th Conference on Cannabinoids in Medicine in Cologne, Germany. The conference included significant new evidence that marijuana is a safe, effective medicine for certain conditions, some of which can be found in the conference abstracts, now available online.

Canadian researcher Mark Ware presented results of a yearlong safety study known as the COMPASS study, which compared 215 patients who used marijuana to manage chronic pain with comparable control patients who did not use marijuana. Ware and colleagues report “no difference in serious adverse events” between the two groups, concluding, “Cannabis use for chronic pain over one year is not associated with major changes in lung, endocrine, cognitive function or serious adverse events.”

A much-awaited study came from the University of California, San Francisco, where Donald Abrams and colleagues tested the effects of adding marijuana to the therapeutic regimen of chronic pain patients on long-term morphine or oxycodone therapy. Unfortunately, because the researchers were crunching numbers right up until the conference, the abstract doesn’t include a lot of details. But the study shows that marijuana did indeed add significant pain relief on top of that already provided by the narcotic painkillers. The scientists conclude, “Cannabinoids may augment the analgesic effects of opioids, allowing longer treatment at lower doses with fewer side effects.”

Meanwhile, British researchers added to the body of evidence indicating that marijuana can aid the treatment of multiple sclerosis. Two-hundred and seventy-nine patients received either a standardized cannabis extract, given orally, or a placebo. Patients receiving the extract were twice as likely to experience relief of muscle stiffness, and also reported relief of body pain, spasms, and sleep problems.

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The number of fatal poisonings involving opioid painkillers more than tripled from 1999 to 2006, from 4,000 to 13,800 in one year, according to a new report from the CDC. These drugs – Vicodin, OxyContin, fentanyl, and their relatives – now account for 37 percent of poisoning deaths, up from 21 percent in 1999. And the Associated Press reports that drug deaths now exceed auto accident fatalities in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

The drugs that killed nearly 14,000 people in 2006 are, of course, legal medicines. They have been approved for sale by the same federal government that bars medical use of marijuana – for which the count of medically confirmed overdose fatalities remains zero.

This gets even crazier when you consider that – as we’ve pointed out before – there is evidence that use of medical marijuana can help some pain patients reduce their doses of these dangerous and addictive narcotics.

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The federal law barring medical use of marijuana has already cost Mara Lynn Williams her husband, and may now cost her her home as well.

Williams, 56, said she had no idea her husband, Royce, was growing marijuana on their 40-acre property in Chilton County, Alabama until federal authorities raided their land and found 408 plants growing several hundred yards from their house.

Then in May, Royce Williams committed suicide, rather than serve a potentially lengthy prison sentence for the federal drug charges he was facing. His wife, who works as a nurse at a Montgomery hospital, said Royce smoked marijuana because it was the only medication that helped ease the chronic pain he suffered as a result of several surgeries.

Now the Montgomery Advertiser is reporting that the U.S. attorney’s office plans to seize the Williams’ property – including the house still occupied by Mara Lynn, who in 2003 was diagnosed with breast cancer that spread to her liver, lungs and bone, but is now in remission.

“It is not morally right,” the Advertiser quoted Mara Lynn Williams as saying. “My husband paid with his life. What else do they want?”

According to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, “[Royce Williams’] death, which ended the criminal case, had no effect on the ongoing civil case … The bottom line is, we don’t want people to benefit from criminal activity.”

Benefit? I suppose seeing her husband suffer a bit less because of the relief he got from medical marijuana might count as a benefit, but doesn’t driving him to suicide make up for that? Must she be made homeless, too – on top of losing more than $18,000 cash, vehicles, computers and other belongings the Advertiser says were seized by the Feds?

To help us change these cruel laws, go to MPP’s Federal Action Center.

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Here’s one for the “Cops Unclear On the Concept” file: The Record-Searchlight in Redding, California is reporting that the town’s police chief, Peter Hansen, has sent a warning letter to local medical marijuana dispensing collectives. Hansen’s letter warns dispensary operators that they are in violation of federal law, that “federal law takes precedence over State law,” and, “Violation of this law is a felony crime that carries with it a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.”

While the chief has every right to dislike California’s medical marijuana law, it is his job to enforce state law, not attack it. That’s something the courts have made unmistakably clear, most notably in a case known as Garden Grove v. Superior Court. In that case, city police had improperly seized medical marijuana from patient Felix Kha, and then insisted they couldn’t return his medicine to him because federal law takes precedence over state law. The state appellate court ordered the return of Kha’s marijuana, stating, “[I]t is not the job of the local police to enforce the federal drug laws as such.”

Memo to Chief Hansen: Is there something about the phrase, “it is not the job of the local police to enforce the federal drug laws” that’s hard for you to comprehend? Is Redding so completely free of robberies, rapes, murders, auto thefts, and other actual crimes that you have nothing else better to do?

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve had several opportunities to attend Q & A sessions with the Obama administration’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske. Increasingly, the audiences are asking him about the cartels in Mexico.

A typical question goes something like this: “Wouldn’t ending marijuana prohibition in the U.S. wipe out the drug cartels like the 21^st amendment wiped out the illegal liquor trade in the 1930s?”

His typical response, which I practically have memorized at this point, goes something like this: “The liquor trade was not wiped out in the 1930s. They might have taken a step back, but the violence and criminal activity persisted. They just moved into other areas like kidnapping and drugs.”

I read an article in Reuters today that got me thinking about his response (Mexico cartels kidnap, kill migrants headed to U.S. -- September, 23). Kerlikowske’s point is that ending prohibition would not solve the cartel problem because they would shift to other illegal activities. But the Reuters article shows that the cartels are already engaged in just about every evil deed imaginable: kidnapping, extortion, murder … you name it! And these behaviors have developed over the last decade under a system of prohibition. So what do we really have to fear from taking away the biggest chunk of their business, marijuana sales in the U.S.?

Another one of Kerlikowske’s favorite lines demonstrates his true motives: “Legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary and it is not in mine.” Why, you might ask, is America’s top drug policy official refusing to even listen to one side of this argument? The answer is in United States Code § 1703 (b)(12), which is a federal law that requires the drug czar to “take such actions as necessary to oppose any attempt to legalize the use of a [Schedule I] substance.” Yes, federal law requires the drug czar to blindly oppose half of the policy arena he oversees. It’s like telling the secretary of state to ignore everything south of the equator.

The argument that ending marijuana prohibition in the U.S. would wipe out the cartels is sound -- marijuana alone makes up 70% of their U.S. profits. The official government response is attenuated and dishonest. As a result, they are losing ground. The more we talk about Mexico, the more people are beginning to see the logic behind our arguments.

So go out there and have this conversation with a friend or family member who doesn’t support legalization. Show them the Reuters article, and ask them if the status quo is worth defending.

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