With over 600,000 votes cast and thousands of questions posted, Barack Obama’s “Open for Questions” tool has closed its first round of questioning.  Topping the list is the following:

"Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?" (link)

This is a clear indication that visitors to Obama’s transition Web site want to see a change in America’s marijuana policy.  After decades of failed prohibition, rising marijuana use, and the recent surge in drug trade violence along the Mexican border, it makes sense that Americans are ready for a new approach.

The Web site’s blog will post responses to this and other questions over the next few days.

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U.S. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) penned a letter to the DEA requesting answers about the agency's raids of and threats to California’s state-legal medical marijuana facilities. The letter, sent in April at the request of several concerned public officials in California, asked the DEA pointed questions regarding the cost of these raids and whether attacking medical marijuana providers was a sensible use of scarce resources.

The DEA has finally replied. And, as expected, the 17-page response is so full of outright lies and hyperbole that I could go on forever picking it apart. I don’t have time to criticize all of what deserves criticizing but I thought I’d share one of my favorite highlights.

In response to the question of whether or not conducting raids on medical marijuana providers is a good use of a federal agency’s time and money, the DEA argues that all marijuana use is illegal under the federal laws that it is obligated to enforce -- as if it has no room for discretion. If this were really the case, the DEA would be working around the clock cracking down on each and every petty drug user in the country.

An even more absurd justification for the DEA's despicable activities is that it's merely responding to community concerns about these facilities. The top three items on the list of complaints it has allegedly received are “people smoking marijuana outside,” “pedestrian and automobile traffic congesting the streets,” and “illegal parking.”

That’s right. The Department of Justice lists illegal parking and traffic among one of its highest public safety priorities! And all this under the direction of an administration that supposedly believes in states' rights and smaller government.

Another irony in all of this is that a recent report from the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure charges DEA agents with brazenly ignoring municipal parking ordinances and failing to pay the associated fines. (Thanks to my colleague and namesake, Aaron Houston, in D.C. for that little tidbit.)

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The Obama transition team unveiled a new feature on its Web site yesterday that allows visitors to submit and vote on questions for the president-elect.  Called “Open for Questions,” the new tool presents a good opportunity to ask Obama if he will support marijuana policy reforms.

If you have a moment, head over to change.gov and ask a question or vote on one of the many marijuana policy questions that have already been posted.

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That's the astonishing finding from the latest Monitoring the Future survey, but strangely, it wasn't mentioned by White House drug czar John Walters or in the initial news reports. 13.8 percent of 10^th graders reported smoking marijuana in the past 30 days, while just 12.3 percent smoked cigarettes. For 8^th and 12^th grades, cigarette use still narrowly exceeded marijuana, but the gap narrowed to insignificance.

The Associated Press reported, "[T]he White House says the sustained trendline is the key." Makes sense to me.  According to the new survey, current (i.e. past 30 days) marijuana use has nearly doubled among  8^th graders since 1991, from 3.2 percent to 5.8 percent, with big increases among 10^th and 12^th graders,  too. During that same period, cigarette use dropped like a rock, with current cigarette smoking dropping from 14.3 percent to 6.8 percent among 8^th graders, and dramatic drops in the older grades as well.

Amazingly, Walters touts the new results as proof that his policies are working, saying, "What we see here is a very good trend for the youth of the country." In fact, what the data show is that prohibition for adults is neither necessary nor effective at reducing use among kids. Last year over 775,000 Americans were arrested for possession of marijuana while zero were arrested for possession of cigarettes.

Legal cigarette vendors are regulated. They can and do face fines or even loss of their license to operate if they sell to kids. Prohibition guarantees we have no such control over marijuana.

Addicts commonly rationalize and excuse destructive behavior rather than recognize that their addiction has gotten out of control. By that standard, John Walters is an addict and his drug is prohibition.

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Okay, I'm a bit behind in my reading, but a study published last month in the journal Addiction casts an interesting light on the so-called "gateway effect" -- the idea that use of one drug, usually marijuana, somehow leads to use of others.

Gateway associations have regularly been found between tobacco and marijuana: Young people who use one are pretty consistently more likely to use the other as well. But does tobacco cause kids to smoke marijuana, marijuana cause kids to use tobacco, or are both tendencies the result of other factors entirely?

The new study, by researchers in Queensland, Australia, and St. Louis, suggests that genetics, not the effects of any particular drug, are at the heart of these associations. The researchers studied over 500 pairs of twins, some identical and some fraternal, and did a lot of advanced number crunching to tease out connections between "early cannabis use" (use before age 17), later nicotine dependence, and the factors that may contribute to these outcomes.

Teens who had used marijuana early were indeed more likely to later become dependent on nicotine than those who did not. But, the researchers wrote, that increased risk "can be attributed largely to the effects of common genetic factors. ... [T]here remains no compelling evidence for causal processes linking EC [early cannabis use] to ND [nicotine dependence]."

This study only examined the relationships between marijuana and tobacco, not other drugs, but it's clearly another hit to claims that marijuana use somehow causes people to use other substances.

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An editorial calling on President-elect Obama to stop DEA raids on California’s medical marijuana patients and providers ran in today’s Sacramento Bee – the state government’s paper of record.

California voters overwhelmingly support their 12-year-old medical marijuana law and vehemently oppose federal attempts to undermine it. It’s about time we had a presidential administration that respected the wishes of this important constituency (and the 55 electoral votes they control).

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Germany is about to become the fifth country to allow at least some patients to use natural marijuana as medicine. According to a report from the International Association for Cannabis as Medicine, the German government recently notified four patients that they would be allowed to receive medical marijuana produced under the Dutch government's medical marijuana program. The German program remains limited to special cases.

Other German patients have been allowed to use a liquid extract made from Dutch cannabis, but for some patients the extract proved unsatisfactory. The patients are expected to receive their supply of whole marijuana around mid-January.

Other than the Netherlands, nations that have some sort of medical marijuana program sanctioned by their national governments -- with varying levels of restrictions and limitations -- include Canada and Israel. Oh, and the U.S., which still provides medical marijuana to a handful of surviving patients in a program that was closed to new enrollment in 1992.

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Join MPP's Dan Bernath as he takes a look at the failures of Alcohol Prohibition and examines how we have still not learned our lesson. Prohibition doesn't work. Taxation and regulation does.

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^*Prohibition of alcohol, that is.

Prohibition was a disaster, and no one regrets that it ended. The press has taken some notice of this, with varying degrees of perceptiveness. Earlier this week, Reuters columnist Bernd Debusmann nailed the parallels between prohibition of alcohol and current marijuana policies.

Amazingly, this morning's San Francisco Chronicle splashes a Prohibition repeal story across its front page and fails to even consider any possible echo in current policies. "When booze became illegal, gangsters took over the booze business, and it became fashionable to break the law," reporter Carl Nolte writes. Uh, does this sound familiar at all? Hello?

And in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, columnist Patt Morrison considered taxing marijuana like alcohol,  but -- misled by a RAND Corp. researcher -- gets nearly everything wrong. She writes that "teasing out marijuana's health effects and associated costs is almost impossible," when in fact marijuana is arguably the most-studied drug on the planet, and researchers have consistently found any harmful health effects to be far less than tobacco and alcohol. And she assumes that "more people would smoke it regularly if it were legal," though a recent World Health Organization study found no reason to believe that's true.

Meanwhile, on AlterNet, MPP executive director Rob Kampia gives his thoughts on the two prohibitions. 

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Last night I had the opportunity to debate medical marijuana policy with the White House drug czar's chief counsel, Ed Jurith. Scott Morgan of StopTheDrugWar.org did a great job covering the event.

Nobody expected a drug czar official to get up on stage, slap his forehead and say, "Oh, you're right, arresting patients for using a safe, effective drug recommended by their doctors is shameful and immoral." Still, I thought there were signs in the debate that there could be some common ground somewhere. Or at least the possibility of civil discussion.

Mr. Jurith – who served as acting drug czar before John Walters' appointment – is certainly a drug warrior, but he's also a career bureaucrat, not a political appointee like his boss.

Considering that Walters will soon be gone (wait for applause), I thought it was appropriate for a senior career government guy like Jurith to represent his office's position. I also couldn't help but notice how different it was interacting with him over marijuana policy rather than his boss.

Unlike the drug czar, Jurith didn't lie, bully, or accuse me of secretly trying to get children hooked on marijuana. His arguments at least had some basis in legal fact, although I believe they were far too narrow to justify denying seriously ill patients access to safe, effective medicine, let alone arresting them for it. But he was civil and thoughtful. I liked him.

Like Walters, Jurith is wrong on marijuana policy. But Walters is a zealot, and he's never shown much respect for the public he was supposed to serve.

But political guys like Walters come and go, and so do their personal crusades. I'd like to think that as our marijuana laws improve – and they are, right now – professional public servants like Jurith will know how to embrace and execute the people's will in good faith.

(By the way, I'd like to thank Ken Falcon, Georgetown Law School's Students for Sensible Drug Policy president, for the fantastic job he did setting this debate up.)

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