So police discover a package of marijuana apparently shipped to the mayor of a small town in Prince George's County and respond by sending a SWAT team to pounce on the unarmed man as he returns from work, killing his two Labradors for good measure. The police then handcuff him and his mother-in-law next to their pets and interrogate them for hours as blood pools on the floor. And a PG police spokesman says the raid was carried out properly according to their policies.

I'm sure it was. Does anybody else see anything wrong with our policies?

 We distributed MPP Foundation's new radio public service announcements today to stations nationwide, aiming to educate the public about the effects of U.S. marijuana laws, and about recent developments regarding medical marijuana. The ads feature Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico, and California Superior Court Judge Jim Gray.

You can listen to the new spots here. And if you happen to work at a radio station, you're welcome to download and air them anytime.

The new spots follow a previous set of MPP Foundation radio PSAs released in 2005, featuring TV talk show host Montel Williams, author Tom Robbins, and U.S. Supreme Court medical marijuana plaintiff Angel Raich. That series of spots received over 11,000 plays on stations in all parts of the country, including seven of the top 10 markets.

This morning's press conference, at which MPP and other marijuana policy reformers joined U.S. Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) to call for an end to federal criminal penalties for marijuana possession, was a rousing success, as this CNN story shows.

And apparently it got under the skin of our overlords at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Having not gotten much media pickup on their preemptive press release issued yesterday -- filled with the usual half truths and deception they're rightly famous for -- ONDCP sent David Murray and two other staffers to the news conference to try to convince everyone that marijuana is "the greatest cause of illegal drug abuse." That CNN seems to have ignored him can't be a good sign for ONDCP, but Raw Story has this rather amusing take on Murray's appearance.

A new study just published in Archives of Internal Medicine shows a 360.5% increase in the death rate from fatal medication errors (FMEs) from 1983 to 2004, vastly outstripping most other causes of death. Notably, most of the increase in deaths took place at home, not in medical settings or other locations. FMEs are defined as deaths from mistakes involving medications: accidental overdoses, the wrong drug being taken, etc. They do not include deaths from "adverse reactions" (side effects) involving drugs taken correctly.

While the sharpest increase was among medication errors in which alcohol and/or street drugs were also involved, this figure was still well under half the number of FME deaths without alcohol or street drug involvement. While the data analyzed by researchers do not include the exact medications or other drugs involved, the researchers note that use of illicit drugs did not rise during theperiod studied, and the death rate from alcohol or street drugs increased only modestly in the period studied.

So exactly what is going on here is uncertain, but one possibility, suggested by the sharp increase in such deaths occurring at home, is noted in the Associated Press story on the study:

"The amount of medical supervision is going down and the amount of responsibility put on the patient's shoulders is going up," said lead author David P. Phillips of the University of California, San Diego.

Simply put, more patients are being sent home with powerful narcotics and other drugs to administer themselves.

Clearly, an important lesson here is that legal drugs can be deadly. Even if they're prescribed. Even if they're over-the-counter (acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, is responsible for about 500 U.S. overdose deaths each year). Even if they're legal recreational drugs like booze.

Marijuana is strikingly absent from this picture of deadly drugs. Unlike narcotic painkillers or alcohol, marijuana does not suppress breathing. As an editorial in the British Medical Journal noted, marijuana use has not been linked to higher death rates, and no fatal marijuana overdose has ever been documented. Indications of life-threatening interactions between marijuana and legal medicines are notably absent from the medical literature.

Some drugs are indeed deadlier than others, and marijuana is not among them.

MPP-TV recently had a chance to sit down with travel guru and author Rick Steves to discuss marijuana policy both here and abroad. Here's what he had to say...

ABC's "20/20" aired this story Friday about Rachel Hoffman, a young Florida woman who was murdered by drug dealers after Tallahassee police pressured her into acting as an informant to avoid minor marijuana charges.

It would be easy to blame this on the extraordinary cowardice and ineptitude of the Tallahassee Police Department, but cowardice and ineptitude are inherent in our country's war on marijuana users.

Tragedies like this one will remain routine, hideous occurrences as long as we treat innocent Americans like Ms. Hoffman as criminals.

Saturday's Los Angeles Times does a pretty good story on this unfolding medical marijuana case, focusing on the bizarre dance defense attorneys must do to help the jury understand what's really going on, having been barred from using the phrase "medical marijuana" -- which is, of course, a nonexistent concept under federal law. 

This video, from the Michigan Coalition for Compassionate Care, has Dr. George Wagoner describing the relief his wife found from marijuana in her battle against ovarian cancer.

I promise, we will not do a new post every time an ONDCP official lies. We'd never get any work done. But the falsehoods uttered by deputy Drug Czar Scott Burns in this interview in the Arcata Eye, a small northern California paper, are so blatant that they deserve mention. To avoid having to write a War and Peace-length tome, I'll focus on just two:

LIE #1:  Tough laws and enforcement are reducing marijuana use: Burns says, "drug use is down in the United States dramatically since 2001 ... So we know that when we push back, the problem gets smaller."

Actually, virtually every expert analysis has found this to be untrue. In 2001  the National Research Council, in a White House-commissioned study, found "little apparent relationship between the severity of sanctions prescribed for drug use and the prevalence or frequency of use." Just weeks ago, a new World Health Organization study found that drug laws have little if any relationship to use rates -- and that the rate of marijuana use in the U.S. is over double that of the Netherlands, where adults are permitted to possess and purchase small amounts of marijuana from regulated businesses.

LIE #2: Marijuana belongs in Schedule I, with drugs like LSD and heroin that are banned from medicinal use. Burns says, "Because of the higher potency, it is the same as cocaine and methamphetamine and heroin. ... I say you should try crack, because from what I hear, crack cocaine will make you feel really good as well. This is not about making people feel better. ... physician after physician, and scientist after scientist have said, 'You have to be kidding me.'” 

Oh dear.  First, does Burns really believe that relieving suffering (making sick patients "feel better") is somehow inappropriate for medicine? Is he unaware of the mass of clinical research documenting that marijuana does indeed relieve symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and neuropathic pain? 

Second, methamphetamine and cocaine are in Schedule 2 -- that is, they are legal medicines. And no, the approximate doubling of average marijuana potency over the last 20 years doesn't make it a whole new drug -- no more than wine is a whole different drug than beer because it has three times the alcohol level. Indeed, there is no proof that higher potency marijuana poses any danger at all. A recent analysis in the journal Addiction stated, "more research is needed to determine whether increased potency and contamination translates to harm for users."

As for what doctors think, the American College of Physicians -- 124,000 neurologists, oncologists and other internal medicine specialists -- recently called for marijuana to be taken out of Schedule I "given the scientific evidence regarding marijuana’s safety and efficacy in some clinical conditions."

Did Burns' nose grow longer as he was speaking?

MPP just released a new documentary examining the effects of marijuana prohibition on people's lives.  The piece looks at four stories (including our own Rob Kampia's) as examples of how marijuana prohibition and its consequences impact the lives of a diverse group of Americans and their families.

We've split the video up into two parts, which are available on the MPP-TV video blog: Part 1 and Part 2. This is powerful stuff, and we hope you'll watch and share it with friends.