On March 17, 1999, the Institute of Medicine -- in a report commissioned by the White House -- declared, "Nausea, appetite loss, pain, and anxiety are all afflictions of wasting and all can be mitigated by marijuana."

The report acknowledged the drawbacks of smoking and urged creation of a "rapid-onset, nonsmoked cannabinoid delivery system," but added, "In the meantime, there are patients with debilitating symptoms for whom smoked marijuana might provide relief." Studies published since 1999 have verified that marijuana vaporizers provide just the sort of rapid, nonsmoked delivery the IOM suggested.

Federal officials disregarded -- and sometimes baldly misstated -- the findings, prompting co-author Dr. John Benson to tell the New York Times in 2006 that the government "loves to ignore our report. ... They would rather it never happened."

Now, we have a new president who speaks regularly of letting scientific data, not ideology, drive policy, and who has said he would put an end to Drug Enforcement Administration raids aimed at undermining state medical marijuana laws. Is a new and more rational day finally dawning?

Those in the Washington, D.C., area can catch what should be a lively discussion of the IOM report and its impact hosted by the Cato Institute on March 17, featuring MPP executive director Rob Kampia and University of California researcher Dr. Donald Abrams, whose studies have further documented marijuana's medical value, and medical marijuana opponent Robert Dupont. Click here for details and reservation information.

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MPP Director of Communications Bruce Mirken discusses marijuana policy and the new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, with Rachel Maddow.

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Suddenly the folks in TV newsland are very interested in marijuana policy. Lots and lots of stuff coming up, starting tonight:

I'm scheduled to be interviewed on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" tonight, at around 9:45 p.m. Eastern/6:45 Pacific, discussing the newly appointed drug czar.

Then, on Friday, ABC's John Stossel looks at medical marijuana and the appalling prosecution of Charles Lynch. Lynch's case will also be discussed in an Al Roker special for MSNBC, which also includes an interview with MPP executive director Rob Kampia, airing Sunday, March 15.

And on CNN, "D.L. Hughley Breaks the News" is doing a segment on the growing calls for reform of marijuana laws, for which I was just interviewed. Current word is that this will air on Saturday, March 28, with a repeat that Sunday. But TV schedules do change, sometimes at the last minute, so none of the dates/times above should be considered chiseled in stone.

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One of our members wrote us to report that the March 9 episode of the daytime television show "The Doctors," focusing on illegal drugs, contained a glaring bit of misinformation about marijuana. Here's how our member described it:

At one point, one of the doctors made the statement loud and clear,"To all parents of young boys, make sure you let your boys know that...if they use marijuana they WILL grow boobs!" Then they moved on to another subject.

While we haven't been able to verify a transcript, several commenters on the show's Web site have referred to the issue in similar language, so all indications suggest that our member's report is essentially correct. Unfortunately, the information these alleged experts gave out on national TV is entirely bogus.

There were a few case reports in the early '70s of breast enlargement (gynecomastia) in males who smoked marijuana, but these did not adequately control for other possible causes, and later studies failed to find a connection. A search of the Medline database using the keywords marijuana and gynecomastia turns up only 12 articles, none of which is a controlled study finding a correlation, but one of which is a review that terms the data "contradictory."

We've said it before, but we'll say it again. Lying to kids about drugs is dangerous. When you tell them that smoking marijuana will make boys grow female breasts or turn them into heroin addicts, sooner or later they'll figure out they've been lied to -- and then, understandably, distrust anything you say.

There are plenty of good reasons that kids shouldn't use marijuana or other drugs. And the best way to explain to them is the old-fashioned way: Tell the truth.

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It's nice to see Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck has sobered up on marijuana policy reform a bit since his Feb. 25 interview with MPP's Rob Kampia, in which he seemed to have a case of the giggles.

Here's Beck with former deputy foreign minister of Mexico Andres Rozental March 3 discussing how ending marijuana prohibition might be the only way to curb the devastating violence in Mexico over the illegal marijuana trade.

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After MPP passed the medical marijuana ballot initiative in Michigan and the marijuana decriminalization ballot initiative in Massachusetts -- both on November 4 -- I thought the MPP staff might get a little downtime to regroup for the 2009-2010 election cycle. Not so.

In the last four months, the MPP staff and our allies have been working almost nonstop to respond to -- and take advantage of -- the many opportunities that have been presenting themselves across the country. I've never seen so much evidence of positive change in such a short amount of time ...

1.  MARIJUANA THE BIGGEST ISSUE:  Two huge surveys of citizen activists across the country -- one on Change.gov on December 12 and one on Change.org on January 15 -- showed that the number-one issue on people's minds is ending the government's war on marijuana users.

2.  BONG HIT SEEN AROUND THE WORLD:  On February 1, the world learned that Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps had used marijuana a few months before, demonstrating yet again that using marijuana is compatible with being wildly successful in our society. When Kellogg's dropped its endorsement contract with Phelps -- and MPP and other organizations responded by calling for a boycott of Kellogg's -- the public's perception of Kellogg's took a nose dive.

3.  EL PASO RESPONDS TO MEXICAN VIOLENCE:  Responding to the prohibition-caused violence just over the border in Mexico, on January 6 the El Paso City Council unanimously passed a resolution calling for "an honest, open national debate on ending the prohibition of narcotics," which drew the ire of some Texas politicians but also sparked a great deal of positive media coverage nationwide.

4.  NATIONAL POLLING HIGHEST EVER:  Between January 11 and February 14, three different national polls indicated that either 40%, 41%, or 44% of the American people now support ending marijuana prohibition. This is the highest level of support since marijuana was first prohibited in 1937, with support having risen by 1% a year since 1995.

5.  REVOLT IN LATIN AMERICA:  On February 12, a commission led by three former presidents from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico released a long-awaited report that blasted the U.S. drug war and called for the decriminalization of marijuana.

6.  ENDING THE DEA's RAIDS IN CALIFORNIA:  On February 25, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the DEA would no longer be raiding medical marijuana clinics in California and the 12 other states where medical marijuana is legal.

7.  MEDICAL MARIJUANA BILLS MOVING:  MPP's medical marijuana bills are moving through the Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and New York legislatures, and the Drug Policy Alliance's similar legislation is moving in New Jersey. We have a real chance of making medical marijuana legal in four of these six states this year and -- in the meantime -- it's very possible that Montana and Rhode Island will expand their existing medical marijuana laws, too.

8.  BROADER MARIJUANA BILLS MOVING:  California shook the nation when a bill to tax and regulate marijuana was introduced on February 23. And even before that happened, the Hawaii, Montana, Vermont, and Washington legislatures had already begun considering bills to decriminalize marijuana.

9.  MPP DOMINATING ON YOUTUBE:  As of today, MPP's channel on YouTube.com is the 10th most subscribed of all nonprofit channels, and MPP's videos are consistently in the top 10 most-viewed of all nonprofit videos in any given week. (And our 65,000 friends on MySpace.com place MPP among the top 10 most popular nonprofit organizations there, too.)

10.  ONGOING MEDIA EXPLOSION:  According to the weekly reports we get from Google, MPP has been getting its message into the news in the last month at 10 times the volume of previous months. And four different national TV specials are tentatively scheduled to look at marijuana over just a two-month span: CNBC looked at the marijuana industry in northern California on January 22, NBC's "Dateline" covered the Rachel Hoffman tragedy in Florida on January 23, ABC's "20/20" with John Stossel will be looking at medical marijuana on March 13, and MSNBC with Al Roker will be looking at the multi-billion-dollar marijuana industry on March 15.

Thank you for anything and everything you've done to help bring all this attention and success to our movement. If you'd like to help even more, please make a donation today so that we may continue with the onslaught of work that continues to pile up on our plates.

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Has the dam finally broken on medical marijuana? It sure seems like efforts to protect medical marijuana patients are on the march across the U.S.

In Illinois, where medical marijuana legislation has failed to pass for several years running, this year's bill just got out of committee in the state House of Representatives for the first time ever. Medical marijuana bills are also steadily advancing in Minnesota and New Jersey.

Meanwhile, in Rhode Island, which has had a medical marijuana law since 2006, legislators are looking seriously at expanding the law to allow patients to obtain their medicine from licensed dispensaries, called "compassion centers" -- and the proposal is proving remarkably uncontroversial.

Why so much progress now? Maybe it was the massive, 63% "yes" vote for medical marijuana in Michigan last November. Maybe it was the blessed sanity of the Obama administration saying it will stop raiding medical marijuana patients and providers who are following state law. Or maybe it's just science, compassion, and common sense finally winning out over ideology and superstition.

Whatever it is, we'll take it.

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Marijuana Policy Project's Aaron Houston, Director of Government Relations, is interviewed on Russia Today about the benefits of taxing and regulating marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol.

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On Sunday night, CBS's "60 Minutes" did a grimly fascinating piece on the escalating drug war in Mexico. Reported by Anderson Cooper (whose day job, of course, is at CNN), the piece was as notable for what it didn't cover as what it did. Like most recent media coverage of the growing carnage along our southern border, the "60 Minutes" story carefully tiptoed around the proverbial elephant in the room.

That elephant, of course, is prohibition. Here is a piece of what I wrote in a letter to Cooper after watching his report:

There is nothing about the trade in marijuana or any other drug that is inherently violent. The violence is entirely an artifact of prohibition, a policy which consciously relegates a highly popular and valued product such as marijuana to the criminal underground. We experienced this dramatically during the U.S.'s experiment with Prohibition of alcohol: From 1919 to 1933, the liquor trade was fraught with violence, the murder rate soared, and prisons were jammed -- while gangsters got very, very rich. As soon as Prohibition ended, the bootleggers disappeared and the alcoholic beverage business returned to the hands of licensed, regulated, law-abiding businesspeople.

Of course, Cooper and CBS are far from alone. News media accounts of the catastrophe in Mexico have been disturbingly consistent in their avoidance of the central issue. Like "60 Minutes," many have avoided including, even briefly, anyone willing to question prohibition.

This is especially shocking after the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy (co-chaired by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo) urged decriminalization of marijuana and a broader rethinking of the drug war for precisely this reason. "We are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs," the commission wrote in its recent report. "It is imperative to review critically the deficiencies of the prohibitionist strategy adopted by the United States."

U.S. policies on marijuana -- by far the largest cash cow for Mexican drug gangs -- are directly adding to the carnage taking place literally walking distance from San Diego and El Paso. It would be nice if our news media at least started asking the relevant questions.

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The National Academy of Public Administration just released a devastating Senate-commissioned report detailing the failures of the drug czar's office during the Bush administration.

Here are a few key findings from the report:

1) That the drug czar's obsession with youth marijuana use hindered the office's ability to construct a more coherent overall strategy for drug policy



2) That the drug czar's office manipulated data to exaggerate -- and in some cases fabricate -- progress in reducing drug use and drug trade violence



3) That the drug czar's office established a political litmus test in hiring interns



4) That the drug czar's office refused to make itself accountable to Congress



5) That the drug czar's office failed to staff key positions with the kinds of policy experts who may have been able to develop effective strategies

Many of the findings echo what the Marijuana Policy Project has been saying for years, namely that the drug czar's irrational and singular focus on marijuana has damaged both the credibility of U.S. drug policy and its ability to reduce the harm caused by drugs and the drug trade.

Let's hope those President Obama taps to clean up the mess left by Walters and his crew take heed.

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