Drug czar John Walters isn't really a free-exchange-of-ideas kind of public servant, so MPP's Aaron Houston and I took the opportunity to ask him a couple questions last week at his press conference announcing the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

In Walters' mind it's bad that kids perceive marijuana as less harmful than methamphetamine, his disreputable anti-marijuana ads work like a charm, and the latest statistics prove that the only way to reduce drug use is by prohibiting marijuana. Oh, but great news – nobody goes to jail for marijuana, and we don't arrest 800,000 Americans for marijuana each year.

Watch how he dodged our questions. First Aaron's ...

... and then mine:

Note to the next drug czar, if we must have one: You can do way better than this. The bar is set pretty low.

Fresno County's Board of Supervisors yesterday voted to become the 41st county to implement the medical marijuana I.D. card system required by a 2003 state law, making it easier for police to verify valid medical marijuana patients.

The board was waiting for the results of San Diego and San Bernardino counties' second legal challenge to the program, which the 4th District Court of Appeals tossed in a unanimous decision last month. In contrast to the Fresno boards' sensible acknowledgement of the law and their duty to obey it, San Diego's and San Bernardino's boards are stubbornly making one last futile appeal to the state Supreme Court.

So, with Fresno acknowledging reality and San Diego and San Bernardino clinging to fantasy, that leaves 15 more counties that – five years later – have yet to act. Seems like a simple call: implement a program required by law and supported by the state attorney general and the California Police Chiefs Association or break the law, make law enforcement's job more difficult, and expose legal medical marijuana patients to false arrest at taxpayer expense.

Every decision should be this easy.

It was probably inevitable: Lacking actual facts to make their case, opponents of Question 2 in Massachusetts have begun spinning fictional scare stories in order to frighten voters out of reforming that state's marijuana laws.

Question 2 would replace the current criminal penalties for possession of up to an ounce of marijuana by adults with a civil fine. Marijuana would still be illegal, but simple possession of a small amount wouldn't require arrest, booking, and all the time and expense that entails, and would not generate a criminal record. Eleven other states already have such "decriminalization" laws on the books, and they're working just fine. Notably, they have not produced an increase in rates of marijuana use, as the National Research Council has noted.

So opponents trying to frighten voters about Question 2 have no choice but to make stuff up. For example, a story in Monday's Cape Cod Today describes claims being made by local District Attorney Michael O'Keefe: "'This is not your father's marijuana of 20 or 30 years ago,' the district attorney said. He said marijuana now is far more potent, and contains substances designed to addict the user."

Research indicates that O'Keefe's claims are false.

Can marijuana be contaminated? Sure, as can any product. But no one has produced evidence that contamination is increasing, much less that sinister forces are intentionally introducing "substances designed to addict the user."

The issues of marijuana potency and contamination were addressed in a study by a group of Australian researchers, published earlier this year by the journal Addiction. They note that reported changes in potency are based on samples seized by law enforcement, which may or may not be representative of what's actually being used by marijuana consumers. But even if one accepts evidence of a rough doubling of average marijuana potency in the U.S. over the last 20 years or so, that doesn't mean users are getting more stoned: "More recent studies have reported that certain types of users may adjust the amount of cannabis smoked depending on potency," the researchers write.

One is tempted to say, "Well, duh." Drinkers consume smaller amounts of bourbon than they do of beer. Why would anyone expect marijuana users to be any different?

Let's be serious. Even a doubling of potency is far less than the difference in alcohol content between beer and wine. Could anyone claim with a straight face that wine is an entirely different drug than beer because of its higher alcohol content?

The bottom line, according to the Australian scientists, is that there is no solid evidence that any of this represents an actual danger: "Claims made in the public domain about a 20- or 30-fold increase in cannabis potency and about the adverse mental health effects of cannabis contamination are not supported currently by the evidence. ... [M]ore research is needed to determine whether increased potency and contamination translates to harm for users..."

But you can bet that the scare stories will be flying thick and fast in Massachusetts from now till November. We'll see if the voters are persuaded by science fiction.

It's been known for a while that some cannabinoids, the active components in marijuana, have antibacterial properties (one of many useful facts you won't find on ONDCP's Web site). Now, as noted by stories in the New York Times and Web MD, five cannabinoids, including THC, have been shown to be active against a particularly worrisome form of staph infection that's resistant to conventional antibiotics. It took these major media outlets a while to catch up with the study, published August 6 in the Journal of Natural Products, but at least they covered it. 

"When we push back against the drug problem, it gets smaller."

                        -- John Walters, White House Drug Czar

 Well, now we know why federal officials chose to release the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) on a day when the Republican convention's climax and a string of hurricanes is likely to keep it out of the headlines. The survey pretty much dynamites Office of National Drug Control Policy chief John Walters' claims of success in reducing marijuana and drug use during his tenure, which he'd like us to attribute to his aggressive policies , and particularly ONDCP's near-obsession with demonizing marijuana.

First, some raw numbers: The total number of Americans (aged 12 and up) who have used illicit drugs is up from 108 million in 2002, the first full year of Walters' tenure, to 114 million in 2007. And the number of Americans who've used marijuana has passed the 100 million mark for the first time -- up from 95 million in 2002.

Rates of drug use have gone up as well. In 2002, 46.0 percent of Americans had used an illicit drug at some point in their lives. In 2007 it was 46.1 percent. For marijuana, the rate went from 40.4 percent to 40.6 percent. Both the "any illicit drug" and marijuana use rates had dropped a bit in 2006 and spiked notably in the new survey. Illicit use of painkillers such as OxyContin is up notably -- a disturbing trend considering the addictive nature of such drugs, not to mention the risk of fatal overdose (a nonexistent risk with marijuana). "Current" (past 30 days) use of illicit drugs is down only marginally since 2002  -- from 8.3 percent to 8.0 percent for all illicit drugs, and the trend for marijuana is similar.

And, strikingly, despite all of Walters' huffing and puffing about marijuana, the number of Americans starting marijuana use for the first time has not budged during his tenure.

If this is success, someone please tell me what failure looks like.

But wait, there's more. ONDCP officials regularly argue that maintaining criminal penalties for marijuana possession is essential to stopping drug abuse. So what's happened with a dangerous drug whose possession is legal: cigarettes? NSDUH conveniently provides figures for past-month cigarette use, and both the number of users and the rate of cigarette use is down markedly. In 2002, 26 percent of Americans were current cigarette smokers; now it's 24.2 percent, continuing a decades-long decline. And the decline in current cigarette smoking for 12-to-17-year-olds is even more dramatic, from 13 percent to 9.8 percent.

That, of course, is with zero arrests for cigarette possession, compared with 739,000 marijuana possession arrests in 2006 (the last year for which stats are available).

The numbers are in. Marijuana prohibition is a wasteful farce. And John Walters' tenure as drug czar has been a failure.

The revelation that Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has acknowledged using marijuana -- but now thinks it should remain illegal -- prompted the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill to invite MPP to post our thoughts on this issue on the paper's blog. Previous marijuana discussions on The Hill's blog have generated heated debate, so check out the link above and join the conversation.

The first report on this major federal drug use survey is out in the form of this story from AP (which includes a short comment from MPP, dissenting from the official spin). Bottom line: Little change in drug use overall, but the drug czar and other federal officials are still claiming progress. A couple MPPers will be attending this morning's press conference at which the survey will be discussed, so watch this space for a more detailed analysis later today.

As summer winds toward an end, it's time for the government's annual drug surveys to start coming out.  The first, being released Sept. 4, is the biggest federally-sponsored drug use survey, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Typically this is followed a few weeks later by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports -- not a drug survey per se, but the definitive annual accounting of marijuana arrests (which set yet another new record in the UCR report released last fall). Then, typically in December, comes Monitoring the Future, which focuses on use by adolescents.

With release of each report, federal officials miraculously find in the results evidence that their policies are working just fine, even when an honest look at the data shows they aren't. And the media often fail to be sufficiently skeptical of the official spin.

Will that happen this year? Watch this space for updates.

Noting that his just-announced vice presidential pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has acknowledged having smoked marijuana, MPP is urging Sen. John McCain to respect states' rights to set their own marijuana policies if he is elected president.

On Aug. 6, 2006, the Anchorage Daily News reported:

Palin said she has smoked marijuana -- remember, it was legal under state law, she said, even if illegal under U.S. law -- but says she didn't like it and doesn't smoke it now.

 'I can't claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled.'

The paper quoted Palin as saying she opposed legalization of marijuana because of the "message" that would be sent to her children.

"Governor Palin is one of many millions of Americans who have used marijuana and gone on to live productive, wildly successful lives," said MPP executive director Rob Kampia said in a statement released a little while ago. "That she used marijuana is no big deal, but what is a big deal is that she thinks that the 100 million Americans who have used marijuana, including herself, belong in jail. That wouldn't be good for her kids.

"Perhaps most importantly, Alaska is one of 12 states that allow the medical use of marijuana, and one in five Americans currently live in those states. The heavy hand of the federal government has trampled state authority and tried to interfere with the implementation of these state-level medical marijuana laws. The GOP ticket should embrace the time-honored Republican principle of local control by promising to end the federal government's war on sensible medical marijuana laws in both red and blue states."

Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington have medical marijuana laws. New Mexico's is the latest, passed by the Legislature last year. Montana's medical marijuana law appeared on the November 2004 ballot, receiving 62 percent of the vote, exceeding George W. Bush's total of 59 percent.

Early in the presidential campaign, McCain seemed to support a states' rights position on medical marijuana, but later backed away from this and became overtly hostile, receiving an "F" grade from Granite Staters for Medical Marijuana.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi answered questions yesterday submitted via the popular social news Web site, Digg.com.  Digg user adroit asked Pelosi, “[a]s a taxable resource, what stops marijuana from being legalized, for medicinal or recreational purposes, throughout the country?”

“I myself have supported medicinal use of marijuana over and over again … there just isn’t enough support for it,” said Speaker Pelosi.  She then called on the public to help raise awareness about the issue, saying, “We need people’s help to be in touch with their members of Congress to say why [medical marijuana] should be the case.”

Why not take the speaker's words to heart and send a letter to your member of Congress right now?  You can take action in less than a minute at MPP’s online action center.