After a lengthy hearing, Judge George Wu once again deferred his sentencing decision in the case of the federally prosecuted California medical marijuana provider, Charles C. Lynch.

Judge Wu indicated that he's leaning toward a more lenient sentence than the five-year mandatory minimum sought by the federal prosecutor and said he needs a way around the mandatory minimum and alternatives to prison for Lynch, who operated his medical marijuana collective in compliance with state and local law.

The mayor and city attorney of Morro Bay also called for leniency as they described Lynch's commitment to following state and local medical marijuana laws.

The federal prosecutor, despite fighting to keep state law from being discussed during the trial, now claims that Lynch should be sent up the river for violating a technical aspect of California law involving his status as a primary caregiver. 

The new sentencing date is set for June 11 at the Los Angeles federal district courthouse.

On Monday, National Public Radio marked the unofficial marijuana holiday 4/20 with a story called, "What If Marijuana Were Legal? Possible Outcomes?" We were not impressed, but you can listen to the story and read a transcript here.

After reviewing it, I wrote the following e-mail to the reporter and assorted NPR honchos:

I read the transcript of this -- haven't had the chance to hear it on the radio today -- and I must say I'm profoundly disappointed. You weren't interested in talking to us for the piece, but if you had, we might have helped you avoid some factual errors and highly questionable conclusions presented effectively as uncontested fact.

For example, vaporizers such as the Volcano, are not "supposed to provide a milder smoking experience." They allow inhalation of cannabinoid vapors without smoking  -- and thus without the tars and other combustion products implicated in respiratory problems caused by smoking. A minor point? Maybe, but not when you consider that the health risks of smoking are cited regularly by proponents of prohibition as one of the great dangers of marijuana.

And the suggestion that legalization would lead to more potent marijuana stands economic reality on its head. Economic and policy experts who have studied this conclude pretty much across the board that prohibition increases the potency of whatever contraband substance is prohibited. As Dr. Stephen Kisely wrote in the Dec. 2008 Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. "Where potency has increased, this could actually be due to the drug’s illegal status. Reducing the bulk of contraband enhances logistics of supply and profitability. For instance, the major effect of alcohol prohibition in the United States was an increase in the consumption of spirits at the expense of beer."

This is not exactly rocket science, but since you had the issue addressed by a spokesman for a group of narcotics officers, you got the official law enforcement spin, not actual research. And I can't help but note that while you told me when we spoke a few weeks ago that you didn't want to use advocacy groups for one side or the other, you did end up using advocates for the pro-prohibition side, but not their opponents (and if NPR doesn't recognize that narcotics officers' groups are advocates for prohibition, you guys need to get out more).

I will not belabor you with further examples, but there are several others I could cite. Please understand that my dismay is not about MPP not being mentioned or quoted -- frankly, we get plenty of press, and one story more or less is no big deal -- it's about NPR's consistent failure to do competent reporting on marijuana issues. This is not just you, it appears to be a systemic problem with NPR's news, and it's a constant source of frustration to those of us who wish that such a large, influential, noncommercial broadcast network had higher standards.

Regards,
Bruce Mirken, Director of Communications
Marijuana Policy Project

Postscript: I did get a response from the reporter, which he asked me to keep confidential, and I will honor that request. Suffice it to say that it did not address the story's errors of fact.

In a severely disappointing move, the Department of Justice (DOJ)  issued a memo last week stating that the federal arrest and prosecution of California medical marijuana provider Charles C. Lynch was "entirely consistent" with its new policy on medical marijuana.

Charlie's sentencing had been delayed so that the DOJ could weigh in after Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement that prosecutorial discretion will be used to focus solely on marijuana cases with alleged violations of both state and federal law. The short letter from U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien and the accompanying DOJ memo didn't explain how they came to this conclusion. 

By all credible accounts, Charlie and his collective - Central Coast Compassionate Caregivers (CCCC) - did everything in compliance with state law, and Charlie was only tried and convicted under federal law. 

Outrageously, the federal prosecutor made sure that any mention of California's medical marijuana law was strictly prohibited in the courtroom during Charlie's trial, and the jury wasn't allowed to consider it during their deliberations. If there was a violation of state law taking place, you'd think Charlie could have faced those charges in a state court.

CCCC didn't provide marijuana to anyone other than legally qualified patients or caregivers and was licensed by the city of Morro Bay, where it was located. In fact, the mayor, city manager, and representatives from the Morro Bay police department had routinely visited and inspected the site for compliance.

Charlie's sentencing is now scheduled for the U.S. District Courthouse in Los Angeles on Thursday. Please contact the White House today to express your outrage that the DOJ is trying to make a martyr out of Charles C. Lynch, despite the administration's new policy on medical marijuana.

MPP's Bruce Mirken debates the benefits of taxing and regulating marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol on CNBC Reports. This policy change is being considered as a means to greatly reduce the current violence in Mexico surrounding drug cartels.

Earlier this week there was a smattering of press attention to a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, dealing with a deadly lung condition known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. "Marijuana plus cigarettes boosts lung disease risk," is how Reuters headlined the story.

The study suggested that the combination of marijuana and cigarettes may be worse than cigarettes alone. It did not find that marijuana by itself increased the risk of COPD, but Reuters went out of its way to say that the study had not proved there was no such increased risk.

As usual, the reality was a bit more complicated than the press reports.

While the study did find a suggestion of increased risk for those who smoked both marijuana and cigarettes, the risk for marijuana-only smokers was far from clear. Indeed, by some measures the COPD risk was actually less in the marijuana-only smokers than nonsmokers, but numbers were small enough that the differences were not statistically significant.

What most news accounts, including Reuters, failed to mention, is that there is a great deal of other data about marijuana and COPD, data that was summarized in an accompanying review by Dr. Donald Tashkin of UCLA, one of the world's leading experts on the effects of marijuana on the lungs. Tashkin wrote, "Given the consistently reported absence of an association between use of marijuana and abnormal diffusing capacity or signs of macroscopic emphysema, we can be close to concluding that smoking marijuana by itself does not lead to COPD [emphasis added]."

Bottom line: Cigarettes are really bad for your lungs. Combining cigarettes and marijuana might be even worse. Marijuana alone is clearly far less harmful -- but it's still a good idea to vaporize rather than smoke.

President Obama leaves soon for talks with Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Thursday. We can't help but wonder: Will they talk about marijuana policy?

Consider: Mexico's Congress has been holding an extended debate on whether marijuana should be legal for personal use or remain prohibited. And Mexico's ambassador to the U.S.  recently said this is a debate that "needs to be taken seriously" on both sides of the border.

President Obama, as everyone knows by now, addressed the issue rather less seriously  in late March. So, once the doors close and the TV cameras are left outside, will the two presidents have the sort of serious discussion that still strikes fear in the hearts of way too many American politicians? We hope so. The families of the 7,000 people killed since January 2008 by Mexican drug war violence largely funded by U.S. marijuana prohibition deserve at least that much.

Join the Marijuana Policy Project on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 for its 4th Annual Party at the Playboy Mansion! For more details, please visit https://www.mpp.org/pb2009/

In yet another sign that the debate on fundamentally shifting our marijuana policy has reached critical mass, a remarkable exchange occurred on CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday. In a discussion of violent Mexican drug gangs with Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to the U.S., host Bob Schieffer asked, "What if marijuana were legalized? Would that change this situation?"

Rather than giving the standard official response that any such discussion was absurd, Ambassador Sarukhan seemed to be walking a very delicate path, acknowledging strong feelings on both sides of the argument but pointedly not dismissing the idea, saying, "This is a debate that needs to be taken seriously." Watch the full exchange here. 

The question of why some kids start using alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and other drugs at a young age remains a source of controversy. How much of a role do genes play? The environment -- peers, parents, educational efforts? What about the "gateway theory," the idea that one drug -- marijuana is the most likely to be blamed -- leads to use of others?

A new study of twins recently published online by the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence suggests that genes may play a large role, but to some degree every drug is a gateway drug.

By studying both fraternal and identical twins (in this case, they focused on African-American teen girls, a population underrepresented in prior studies), researchers can set up mathematical models designed to probe the influence of environment and genetics. Focusing on alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana, they found that early use either of alcohol or cigarettes was associated with an increased likelihood of being an early marijuana user, and early drinking was also associated with early cigarette use.  In general, those who had never used a given substance were the least likely to report having used the others -- so in a sense, almost any drug teens try seems to be a gateway drug.

Even more interesting, though, is the more detailed number crunching designed to tease out genetic vs. environmental influences. Inherited influences explained 44% of the variance in initiation of alcohol, 62% for cigarettes, and 77% of the variation in marijuana initiation. Because the confidence intervals (statistical-speak for margin of error) were fairly wide, those numbers should not be taken as gospel, but clearly genes play a major role in susceptibility to early substance use.

There is little doubt that some kids are innately more susceptible to early drug use than others. And a teen who tries one drug -- whatever it is, legal or illegal -- is more likely than his or her peers to try others. These are real issues that parents and educators need to face, and simplistically blaming marijuana as "the gateway drug" won't help them.

Okay, I'm a bit behind on my reading, but this is worth mentioning even though it's a little late. In its December issue, the American Journal of Public Health published the final, officially sanctioned evaluation of the anti-marijuana ads that former drug czar John Walters bombarded us with during the first half of the Bush administration (the evaluation period ends in June 2004). The bottom line: "[T]he campaign is unlikely to have had favorable effects on youths and may have had delayed unfavorable effects."

Translation: The ads didn't help, and may have actually encouraged teens to try marijuana.

The researchers drew this conclusion by measuring the marijuana-related attitudes and behaviors of thousands of teens before and after seeing the ads and correlating that behavior with their level of exposure to the campaign. There was simply no sign of a positive effect. And, though the results were somewhat inconsistent, several measurements connected increased exposure to the ads with development of pro-marijuana attitudes and increased likelihood of trying marijuana.

The drug czar's office hated this evaluation, conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and a private firm called Westat. Indeed, they kept it bottled up long after it should have been released. Then, when Congress got hold of it a couple years ago, they tried to dismiss it. Spokesman Tom Riley insisted to Adweek magazine that a reported general decline in teen marijuana use was proof of the campaign's success, saying, "The most telling statistic is that adult drug use has not appreciably changed while teen drug use [the target of the campaign] has gone down dramatically. I think that's the definition of successful advertising."

But the researchers easily shred such claims, noting that a great many other factors could have influenced use rates. As evidence, they cite "even larger declines in both tobacco and alcohol use than in marijuana use" that occurred at the same time, "suggesting that all substance use was on a downward trend regardless of the campaign."

So why did the anti-marijuana ads flop so badly? The researchers suggest two possibilities: The youthful tendency to rebel against adults telling them what not to do, and the possibility that the ads caused teens to think marijuana use is commonplace.

Here's another one: Walters' ads were so preposterous (some suggested that smoking marijuana will lead to shooting your friends or running over little girls on bicycles) that they caused young people to disbelieve the anti-marijuana message entirely. MPP will keep saying this until someone listens: Lying to kids about marijuana doesn't work.