"If something is not legal, you can't regulate it very effectively."

            -- Prof. Robin Room, School of Population Health, University of Melbourne

On October 2, the Global Cannabis Commission, a group of top scientists commissioned by the Beckley Foundation, issued its groundbreaking report, "Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond Stalemate." Your faithful correspondent was able to attend the daylong seminar in which the report was discussed, held in the distinctly imposing Moses Room of the House of Lords in the Palace of Westminster.

This is a highly condensed summary of the 175-page report. I wrote a lengthier summary here, and the full document can be downloaded here.

The report was written by five leading marijuana and drug policy researchers: Benedikt Fischer of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland, and three Australians: Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland, Simon Lenton of the National Drug Research Institute at the Curtin University of Technology, and Robin Room of the University of Melbourne. A number of other important researchers joined the discussion (and contributed advice and research to the report).

Some highlights:

RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH MARIJUANA USE:

Marijuana is not harmless. Intoxication "increases the risk of motor vehicle crashes 2-3 times" -- not trivial, but "far more modest than that of alcohol." There is clearly an increased risk of bronchitis among heavy marijuana smokers, but no evidence of increased rates of emphysema, while the evidence regarding lung cancer is mixed, the report states.

Marijuana almost certainly exacerbates symptoms of schizophrenia in vulnerable individuals, but epidemiologic evidence argues against it causing psychosis in healthy people. As for worries about increased potency, more research is needed. If users adjust their intake in relation to potency, dangers are minimal. Perhaps most important, "All of these trends [toward increased potency] have been encouraged by prohibition, which favors the production of more concentrated forms."

Overall, the report finds the risks of marijuana use are "modest" compared with those of legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. 

POLICY AND REFORM:

While causing obvious harm to those arrested and convicted, criminalization of marijuana possession has not succeeded in preventing marijuana from being widely available. Contrary to wild claims being made in Massachusetts right now, decriminalization measures have not increased use rates. "If a nation chooses to use the criminal law for controlling cannabis use, there is no justification for incarcerating an individual for a cannabis possession or use offense, nor for creating a criminal conviction," the report concludes.

While not firmly advocating one policy alternative, the report lays out many advantages to a system of legal regulation like that used for alcohol. As report co-author Prof. Robin Room noted succinctly, "If something is not legal, you can't regulate it very effectively."

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A staggering $15.2 billion budget deficit in California didn’t stop Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from sending thousands of state-legal medical marijuana patients into unemployment. Last night, the “Governator” vetoed A.B. 2279, which would have made it illegal for employers to fire or deny employment to state-legal medical marijuana patients for testing positive for marijuana.

A.B. 2279 included provisions that exempted safety-sensitive positions and didn’t force employers to violate federal law. But you wouldn’t know it by listening to the bill’s opponents.

Schwarzenegger’s veto message states that he couldn’t support the bill because “Employment protection was not a goal of the initiative as passed by voters.” Apparently the governor thinks that voters want to force medical marijuana patients into unemployment rather than allow them to work and pay taxes like those who use physician-prescribed Oxycontin do.

California's medical marijuana law still enjoys overwhelming support from voters and it clearly demands that seriously ill patients not be subject to sanction for their use of medical marijuana.

Schwarzenegger, who freely admits his past use of marijuana and says he did it because he “always knew how to enjoy [himself],” just declared that if you use it as part of a physician-approved treatment, you don’t deserve to be employed.

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I don't get to say this often, so here goes: The latest statistics from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration support one of White House drug czar John Walters' most frequent claims about marijuana.

According to the just-released CARAVAN Study for SAMHSA on Addictions and Recovery, John Walters, who likes to call marijuana "the blind spot of drug policy," is correct that most Americans just don't share his view that marijuana is "The Greatest Cause of Illegal Drug Abuse."

In fact, according to the survey (Page 9), Americans rank marijuana below prescription drugs, other illicit drugs, and even alcohol among various drugs' harm to society.

If the Office of National Drug Control Policy director's obsession with marijuana puts him outside the mainstream, it's not for lack of trying. Mr. Walters has spent eight years and upwards of a billion dollars in advertising trying to scare us about marijuana, but it just hasn't taken.

Which leaves two possibilities: The world (or at least two-thirds of Americans) has gone crazy, or the drug czar has.

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I'm off to London to represent MPP at the launch of the Beckley Foundation's Global Cannabis Commission Report October 2 and 3.

This document, put together by some of the world's top researchers and drug policy analysts, promises to be of great value in efforts to base marijuana policy on facts and data rather than spin or political expediency. So you won't see me posting for a few days (outside of meetings, I will be fully occupied recovering from jet lag), but I will post a full report early next week.

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I've written before about the death of Rachel Hoffman, a recent Florida State graduate who was murdered in a botched drug sting after Tallahassee police used a petty marijuana charge to pressure her into acting as an informant.

It's at least a little comforting to see that there's now some accountability for some of the principals involved in this tragic event.

But I can't help wondering what would have happened had Rachel, through luck and grace, avoided her awful fate. What if she had safely purchased the drugs and weapons the cops had put her in harm's way for? What if this dangerous scheme had led to drug convictions for these two smalltime thugs?

Would these officers still face disciplinary action? Or would their reckless caper be rewarded? I think we all know the answer.

Real accountability in Rachel Hoffman's death won't come until we acknowledge that the petty marijuana offense that dragged her into this situation should never have been a crime in the first place.

By the way, please check out this short tribute my colleagues John Berry and Joe Haptas made for Rachel.

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On Tuesday, the Office of National Drug Control Policy sent out an email and put up a post on its blog (yes, ONDCP really has a blog, but unlike ours, they don't let readers post comments -- why, I wonder?) promoting a new "Marijuana Awareness Kit." Actually, it's mostly a rehash of old material, but still an interesting window into ONDCP's thought process.

The packet's introduction, for example, warns, "The fact is, cigarettes and marijuana are now tied as the illegal substance kids report is the easiest for someone their age (12 – 17) to buy."

That's roughly true, give or take a little and depending on what survey you look at. It also demolishes ONDCP's rationale for maintaining marijuana prohibition: that in order to "protect the children," we must keep marijuana illegal for adults, and any lessening of adult penalties will lead to an explosion of marijuana use among our kids.

But in 2007 we arrested over 872,000 Americans on marijuana charges -- 775,000 for simple possession -- and zero for possession of cigarettes. Yet not only is marijuana just as available to kids as cigarettes, the CDC reports that current use rates are statistically tied as well. 

And if you look closely at that CDC chart, teen cigarette smoking is down markedly since 1991, while marijuana use is up. One significant reason for this is the successful crackdown on cigarette sales to minors, something only possible when a product is legally regulated.

So the reason for sticking blindly with our current policies is what again?

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California's medical marijuana state ID cards protect qualified patients and caregivers from arrest, and each of the state's 58 counties is required to make them available to their residents. However, in a crusade against the voter-approved medical marijuana law, some counties have refused to implement the program.

Fortunately, most counties are respecting the rule of law – even in traditionally conservative, rural and agricultural communities. Just yesterday, the Board of Supervisors in Kings County unanimously voted to implement the ID card program and the cards will be available to local patients very soon. The decision comes only two weeks after another San Joaquin Valley county, Fresno, also moved to implement the program. These developments are significant because San Joaquin Valley voters rejected Proposition 215 twelve years ago and the region has been painfully slow in implementing the state law ever since.

Have these agricultural, Republican-dominated communities been suddenly overrun by drug legalizers? Hardly. Instead, local policymakers across California – in red and blue counties alike – are acknowledging that the state's medical marijuana law is here to stay. It's unfortunate that counties like San Diego and San Bernardino are continuing to ignore state law, but these scofflaws are increasingly looking less credible and more like isolated, rogue elements every day.

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Every year around this time,  Project Censored recognizes the 25 "most censored" news stories from the prior year -- stories of great public significance that got little or no attention from the mass media. This year, they've honored MPP and NORML's Paul Armentano for pointing out the alarming rise in marijuana arrests.

Since The Project Censored materials were written, the latest FBI Uniform Crime Reports survey has been released, showing yet another marijuana arrest record.

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On Saturday, New Bedford Standard-Times columnist Jack Spillane weighed with an eminently sensible and amusing take on the opposition to Question 2 , the marijuana decriminalization initiative on the November ballot in Massachusetts. He quotes some funny/scary dialogue from the press conference held by prosecutors and other opponents that managed to escape the notice of other reporters. The silliness begins with Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter:

And "I don't want to hear," he said, those "specious" and "bogus" arguments that marijuana is like alcohol. Alcohol, he informed the media event, can have health benefits. You know, like wine, he said.

And tobacco? Why, that takes a long time to do damage, he informed.

Ah, Sam, say it ain't so.

Not to be outdone, Fall River Mayor Bob Correia trotted out the time-tested "gateway" argument.

"Marijuana," he said, is "the one they start our children off with!"

Oh dear, where does one start? Pretty much every reputable authority who's actually looked at the data has concluded that both alcohol and tobacco are far more toxic and addictive than marijuana.

Last year, for example, a group of British scientists headed by David Nutt, a pharmacology professor at Bristol University and a member of the British government's official Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, published a study comparing the harm caused by various drugs in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. They constructed a nine-category matrix of harm, looking at physical risks to the user, the risk of addiction, and effect on users' families and society as a whole.  Marijuana scored markedly lower on the harmfulness scale than both alcohol and tobacco.

As for medicinal benefits of alcohol, a recent WebMD video explained that benefits may exist, but only if you limit yourself to low doses -- more causes harm rather than benefit -- while the beneficial components in booze can also be obtained in a number of other ways that don't risk the liver and brain damage that alcohol has been proven to cause.

In contrast, the medicinal benefits of marijuana are based on marijuana's unique components, called cannabinoids, and its use for relief of pain, nausea, vomiting, and other symptoms has been noted by such prestigious organizations as the Institute of Medicine, American College of Physicians, American Nurses Association, and many others.

As for the gateway theory, it's been debunked so often that I won't bore you with a full recitation. To quote the American College of Physicians: "Marijuana has not been proven to be the cause or even the most serious predictor of serious drug abuse."

It's definitely silly season in Massachusetts. And it's likely to get worse.

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Medical marijuana advocates often hear that marijuana can't be a real medicine because it hasn't been approved by the FDA. One common response to this is that the Drug Enforcement Administration continues to block the only avenue that could produce the research needed to seek FDA approval for medical marijuana, over a year and half after an administrative law judge ruled that the project should go ahead. 

But that's just the start. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a scathing critique of the drug company research that does lead to FDA approval,  demonstrating that the system is even more fundamentally rotten than most of us suspected. The author is Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably the most prestigious medical journal on the planet, and now a professor at Harvard Medical School.

"Drug companies now finance most clinical research on prescription drugs," Angell writes, "and there is mounting evidence that they often skew the research they sponsor to make their drugs look better and safer." Angell walks readers through a depressing litany of conflicts of interest, showing how researchers, the academic institutions they work for, and even members of FDA review panels are financially in bed with the drug companies whose products they test and evaluate. Drug company control of research on their products is now so complete, she explains, that the companies "often design the studies; perform the analysis; write the papers; and decide whether, when, and in what form to publish the results."

Companies controlling research on their products not only skew that research to produce positive results, they suppress negative results that would interfere with marketing -- suppression that, Angell explains, has often only been uncovered as a result of lawsuits or congressional hearings. The bottom line, this esteemed physician and journal editor writes, is that bias in favor of drug company products "permeates the entire system. Physicians can no longer rely on the medical literature for valid and reliable information [italics mine]."

Natural marijuana, of course, has no drug company sponsor. And yet we're told it can't be a real medicine because it hasn't been fully run through this broken, biased, dysfunctional system.

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