This week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced penalties against the Rite Aid drugstore chain for a variety of violations of the Controlled Substances Act. These included having "knowingly filled prescriptions for controlled substances that were not issued for a legitimate medical purpose" and failing to account for shortages or surpluses "of the most highly abused drugs, including oxycodone and hydrocodone products."

For these rather serious offenses involving highly addictive narcotics, Rite Aid Corporation will pay $5 million in fines. No one will go to jail or get a criminal record.

In comparison, California medical marijuana dispensary owner Charles Lynch, who scrupulously followed state and local laws to provide medicine to legitimate patients, is facing 100 years in federal prison. Unlike Rite Aid, Lynch is being treated like a dangerous drug dealer -- when he is manifestly nothing of the sort. Reason magazine has been following the case closely, and produced a compelling video available on this page. Lynch's request for a new trial was rejected earlier this month, and he now faces sentencing Feb. 23.

    The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has rejected the decision of Administrative Law Judge Mary Ellen Bittner and blocked a medical marijuana research project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst -- a project considered vital if marijuana is ever to be an FDA-approved medicine. The DEA's ruling, dated Jan. 7, was only released today.

    MPP and other supporters of research reacted with outrage. "It's no surprise that an administration that has rejected science again and again has, as one of its final acts, blocked a critical research project," said Aaron Houston, MPP's director of government relations. "With the new administration publicly committed to respecting scientific research and valuing data over dogma, this final act of desperation isn't surprising, but the true victims are the millions of patients who might benefit."

    Professor Lyle Craker had applied for permission to cultivate marijuana for use in medical research. At present, marijuana for research can only be obtained through the National Institute on Drug Abuse -- a government monopoly that does not exist for any other Schedule I drug. Because NIDA's marijuana is of notoriously poor quality and has only been inconsistently available to researchers, scientists and advocates consider Dr. Craker's project essential to the advancement of medical marijuana research.

    The long and difficult process of seeking approval culminated on Feb. 12, 2007, in a ruling by Judge Bittner that Craker should be allowed to proceed. But such administrative law judge rulings are not binding on the DEA. In the nearly two years since the ruling, several small, pilot studies have shown marijuana to safely and effectively relieve nerve pain that afflicts millions suffering from HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis and other conditions, making more advanced research -- including strains custom-tailored for various conditions, which was one of the goals of Craker and his colleagues -- vital.

    "Once again, science has taken a back seat to ideology in the Bush administration, with research that could benefit millions needlessly stalled," Houston said. "They can delay progress, but they cannot stop it."

In its December issue, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry published an essay by psychiatrist Stephen Kisely, who divides his time between Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, titled, "The Case for Policy Reform in Cannabis Control." Kisely's essay is so full of logic and common sense that the best thing to do is just quote it at length:

"The lack of evidence for prohibition is highlighted by the fact that penalties bear little relation to the actual harm associated with cannabis. The Runciman Report, commissioned by the Police Federation in the United Kingdom, no less, concluded that both alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than cannabis; nonetheless, there is no suggestion that prohibition should play a part in controlling their use. ...

"Despite the emphasis on supply reduction, a comparison of the United States, Australia, Canada, and 3 European countries showed that cannabis consumption is unaffected by expenditure on law enforcement. Changing the legislation on cannabis could produce substantial savings or redeployment of police resources to more effective areas. If anything, consumption of cannabis continues to grow irrespective of the degree of law enforcement, and the increase has not been greater in countries where laws have been liberalized. In the 11 American states that effectively decriminalized cannabis use in the 1970s, use has not risen beyond that experienced by comparable states where it is prohibited. ...

"The failure of prohibition to reduce cannabis use is in contrast to the success of strategies to reduce tobacco use. Smoking is falling in high-income countries and is now less than cannabis use in some surveys of young Canadians. ...

"Approaches to dealing with cannabis should be similar to those for tobacco and alcohol."

For several weeks now, change.org has been running a competition called "Ideas for Change in America" in response to Barack Obama’s call for increased citizen involvement in government. "Legalize the Medical and Recreational Use of Marijuana" is currently the top-rated idea.

The competition, which is now in its final round of voting, allows anyone to post an idea to the organization’s Web site and vote on ideas that matter to them. When voting ends on January 15, the top 10 ideas will be presented to President-elect Obama at an event at the National Press Club in Washington. Change.org will work with organizations like MPP to create plans for implementing the top 10 ideas and will likely receive a slew of press when voting closes.

Please head over to change.org and vote for the ideas you want to see represented.

You may have noticed that many of my reports on this blog are about how some local public officials in California are subverting the state’s medical marijuana laws. Well, today, headlines in California are telling the story of the patients who are fighting some of these scofflaws in court.

In San Bernardino - a county that refused to implement the state’s patient ID card program and sought to overturn the law requiring it to do so – medical marijuana patient Scott Bledsoe filed a lawsuit yesterday requesting that a judge order the county to follow the law.
 

Bledsoe relocated to California from Florida so that he could follow his doctor’s advice to use medical marijuana without fear of arrest. Little did he know that in San Bernardino, he wouldn’t be able to obtain an ID card to prevent his arrest because the county’s sheriff deputies are actually trained to ignore the state's 12-year-old medical marijuana law.

On the same day, on the other end of the state, patient advocacy group Americans for Safe Access filed a lawsuit against Solano County for its refusal to follow state law and implement the ID program.

California’s courts have already resoundingly sided with patients on this issue; needless to say, the odds are severely stacked against both San Bernardino and Solano counties.

People suffering from Parkinson's disease have a high rate of psychosis, which may be induced or worsened by drugs used to treat the illness. A recently published study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology suggests that a marijuana component called cannabidiol (CBD) may be a helpful treatment for this condition.

This was a small, uncontrolled pilot study, but CBD produced rapid and fairly dramatic reductions in psychotic symptoms. And the growing body of evidence regarding CBD's anti-psychotic properties has important implications beyond Parkinson's patients. For example, there is some evidence that THC can worsen psychotic symptoms, but at least one study has implied that CBD, if present in sufficient quantities, can counter this effect. 

MPP director of state policies Karen O'Keefe spoke this morning at a hearing convened by the Michigan Department of Community Health to consider draft regulations implementing the state's new medical marijuana law.

The very well attended hearing took the whole morning, Karen reports, with large numbers of patients presenting constructive criticisms of rules that in some cases go beyond the authority given the department by the voter-approved initiative. Of particular concern are rules that require participants in the program to submit a written inventory of medical marijuana plants grown, and defining "use in public" (prohibited by the law) so broadly that it would ban patients from medicating in their own living room with the curtains open.

Karen's full written comments are here.

As is probably inevitable at such an open, public forum, a few speakers veered off-topic, but very few were hostile to the law. Even the Michigan State Police gave generally constructive testimony, though one police comment having to do with a law enforcement database raises concerns about patient privacy that will require MPP to follow up.

There's already been extensive media coverage, including early-morning radio news stories, and articles in the Detroit Free Press and Michigan Messenger. Half a dozen TV cameras were present, so we expect lots of coverage on the evening news.

Massachusetts voters didn't like the old marijuana law, so they changed it. Some Massachusetts officials don't like the new law, so they're, well, pouting.

Today is the first day Massachusetts adults will no longer have to fear arrest for possessing an ounce or less of marijuana. Under the new system, approved by 65% of commonwealth voters on Election Day, violators will now be subject to a $100 civil citation and nothing more.

The question now is whether those law enforcement officials who campaigned against the decriminalization initiative will respect the will of the voters and make a good-faith effort to implement this modest reform. So far, there hasn't been much evidence this will be the case. In fact, in the months following the election, many of these officials have behaved as though the matter were still up for debate.

Also potentially troubling is a recommendation made by the commonwealth's office of public safety for cities and towns to consider passing local ordinances enhancing penalties for public marijuana use. Although it's too early to tell exactly what the implications might be, the effect could be an end-run around the will of the voters. We'll keep an eye on that.

Meanwhile, officials have relied on two main arguments as they seek to prolong a debate that should have ended on Election Day: 1) that they lack the competence to sort out the details of the law, and 2) that the voters were naïve dupes who allowed themselves to get suckered by "legalizers" intent on creating chaos with an unenforceable law.

So far, demeaning the voters and calling attention to their own incompetence hasn't won very many people over, despite the wide coverage their tantrums have received in the press. The more paternalistic and condescending they sound, the more it looks like these opponents are actually hoping for the lawless chaos they've been clamoring about for months.

If so, they're sure to be disappointed. Voters understood exactly what they were doing and simply want the penalties for small marijuana violations to match the severity of the violation. And they have confidence in the ability of Massachusetts cops to write a $100 ticket and move on, even if their superiors don't.

David Murray, the alleged "chief scientist" at the White House drug czar's office, seems determined to end his tenure in a blaze of dishonesty. In a just-published article in New Scientist that examines the excellent Beckley Foundation Global Cannabis Commission report, Murray touts recent declines in U.S. teen marijuana use and claims, "In the absence of prohibition, it would have been difficult to achieve that."

That's nonsense, as we've already pointed out. As many U.S. teens currently smoke marijuana as smoke cigarettes, which are legal for adults. Since 1991, teen marijuana use has increased while teen cigarette smoking has dropped by nearly half.A good case can be made that a major reason for this has been a concerted campaign to curtail tobacco sales to persons under 18 -- a campaign that has only been possible because tobacco is legal, allowing producers and sellers to be regulated -- but at the very least, it demonstrates that prohibition for adults is not necessary to curb misuse of a substance by children.

A few months ago, a World Health Organization survey published in PLoS Medicine found that the U.S. and New Zealand to have the world's highest rates of marijuana use, despite having some of the world's strictest laws. Both the overall rate of use and use by age 15 in the U.S. were far higher than in the Netherlands, with its famously tolerant marijuana policies.

We still don't know who president-elect Barack  Obama will appoint to replace drug czar John Walters and his gang of hacks like Murray, but it's hard to imagine how he could do worse.

As we say goodbye to the Bush Administration, we'd like to take this opportunity to give the outgoing president and his drug czar their final grades. Don't forget to subscribe!