That's the astonishing finding from the latest Monitoring the Future survey, but strangely, it wasn't mentioned by White House drug czar John Walters or in the initial news reports. 13.8 percent of 10^th graders reported smoking marijuana in the past 30 days, while just 12.3 percent smoked cigarettes. For 8^th and 12^th grades, cigarette use still narrowly exceeded marijuana, but the gap narrowed to insignificance.

The Associated Press reported, "[T]he White House says the sustained trendline is the key." Makes sense to me.  According to the new survey, current (i.e. past 30 days) marijuana use has nearly doubled among  8^th graders since 1991, from 3.2 percent to 5.8 percent, with big increases among 10^th and 12^th graders,  too. During that same period, cigarette use dropped like a rock, with current cigarette smoking dropping from 14.3 percent to 6.8 percent among 8^th graders, and dramatic drops in the older grades as well.

Amazingly, Walters touts the new results as proof that his policies are working, saying, "What we see here is a very good trend for the youth of the country." In fact, what the data show is that prohibition for adults is neither necessary nor effective at reducing use among kids. Last year over 775,000 Americans were arrested for possession of marijuana while zero were arrested for possession of cigarettes.

Legal cigarette vendors are regulated. They can and do face fines or even loss of their license to operate if they sell to kids. Prohibition guarantees we have no such control over marijuana.

Addicts commonly rationalize and excuse destructive behavior rather than recognize that their addiction has gotten out of control. By that standard, John Walters is an addict and his drug is prohibition.

Okay, I'm a bit behind in my reading, but a study published last month in the journal Addiction casts an interesting light on the so-called "gateway effect" -- the idea that use of one drug, usually marijuana, somehow leads to use of others.

Gateway associations have regularly been found between tobacco and marijuana: Young people who use one are pretty consistently more likely to use the other as well. But does tobacco cause kids to smoke marijuana, marijuana cause kids to use tobacco, or are both tendencies the result of other factors entirely?

The new study, by researchers in Queensland, Australia, and St. Louis, suggests that genetics, not the effects of any particular drug, are at the heart of these associations. The researchers studied over 500 pairs of twins, some identical and some fraternal, and did a lot of advanced number crunching to tease out connections between "early cannabis use" (use before age 17), later nicotine dependence, and the factors that may contribute to these outcomes.

Teens who had used marijuana early were indeed more likely to later become dependent on nicotine than those who did not. But, the researchers wrote, that increased risk "can be attributed largely to the effects of common genetic factors. ... [T]here remains no compelling evidence for causal processes linking EC [early cannabis use] to ND [nicotine dependence]."

This study only examined the relationships between marijuana and tobacco, not other drugs, but it's clearly another hit to claims that marijuana use somehow causes people to use other substances.

An editorial calling on President-elect Obama to stop DEA raids on California’s medical marijuana patients and providers ran in today’s Sacramento Bee – the state government’s paper of record.

California voters overwhelmingly support their 12-year-old medical marijuana law and vehemently oppose federal attempts to undermine it. It’s about time we had a presidential administration that respected the wishes of this important constituency (and the 55 electoral votes they control).

Germany is about to become the fifth country to allow at least some patients to use natural marijuana as medicine. According to a report from the International Association for Cannabis as Medicine, the German government recently notified four patients that they would be allowed to receive medical marijuana produced under the Dutch government's medical marijuana program. The German program remains limited to special cases.

Other German patients have been allowed to use a liquid extract made from Dutch cannabis, but for some patients the extract proved unsatisfactory. The patients are expected to receive their supply of whole marijuana around mid-January.

Other than the Netherlands, nations that have some sort of medical marijuana program sanctioned by their national governments -- with varying levels of restrictions and limitations -- include Canada and Israel. Oh, and the U.S., which still provides medical marijuana to a handful of surviving patients in a program that was closed to new enrollment in 1992.

Join MPP's Dan Bernath as he takes a look at the failures of Alcohol Prohibition and examines how we have still not learned our lesson. Prohibition doesn't work. Taxation and regulation does.

^*Prohibition of alcohol, that is.

Prohibition was a disaster, and no one regrets that it ended. The press has taken some notice of this, with varying degrees of perceptiveness. Earlier this week, Reuters columnist Bernd Debusmann nailed the parallels between prohibition of alcohol and current marijuana policies.

Amazingly, this morning's San Francisco Chronicle splashes a Prohibition repeal story across its front page and fails to even consider any possible echo in current policies. "When booze became illegal, gangsters took over the booze business, and it became fashionable to break the law," reporter Carl Nolte writes. Uh, does this sound familiar at all? Hello?

And in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, columnist Patt Morrison considered taxing marijuana like alcohol,  but -- misled by a RAND Corp. researcher -- gets nearly everything wrong. She writes that "teasing out marijuana's health effects and associated costs is almost impossible," when in fact marijuana is arguably the most-studied drug on the planet, and researchers have consistently found any harmful health effects to be far less than tobacco and alcohol. And she assumes that "more people would smoke it regularly if it were legal," though a recent World Health Organization study found no reason to believe that's true.

Meanwhile, on AlterNet, MPP executive director Rob Kampia gives his thoughts on the two prohibitions. 

Last night I had the opportunity to debate medical marijuana policy with the White House drug czar's chief counsel, Ed Jurith. Scott Morgan of StopTheDrugWar.org did a great job covering the event.

Nobody expected a drug czar official to get up on stage, slap his forehead and say, "Oh, you're right, arresting patients for using a safe, effective drug recommended by their doctors is shameful and immoral." Still, I thought there were signs in the debate that there could be some common ground somewhere. Or at least the possibility of civil discussion.

Mr. Jurith – who served as acting drug czar before John Walters' appointment – is certainly a drug warrior, but he's also a career bureaucrat, not a political appointee like his boss.

Considering that Walters will soon be gone (wait for applause), I thought it was appropriate for a senior career government guy like Jurith to represent his office's position. I also couldn't help but notice how different it was interacting with him over marijuana policy rather than his boss.

Unlike the drug czar, Jurith didn't lie, bully, or accuse me of secretly trying to get children hooked on marijuana. His arguments at least had some basis in legal fact, although I believe they were far too narrow to justify denying seriously ill patients access to safe, effective medicine, let alone arresting them for it. But he was civil and thoughtful. I liked him.

Like Walters, Jurith is wrong on marijuana policy. But Walters is a zealot, and he's never shown much respect for the public he was supposed to serve.

But political guys like Walters come and go, and so do their personal crusades. I'd like to think that as our marijuana laws improve – and they are, right now – professional public servants like Jurith will know how to embrace and execute the people's will in good faith.

(By the way, I'd like to thank Ken Falcon, Georgetown Law School's Students for Sensible Drug Policy president, for the fantastic job he did setting this debate up.)

The Washington Post and others reported today on the marked increase in violence along the Mexican border, part of a drug war that has reached terrifying proportions over the last few months. This violent swell has stimulated debate on U.S. drug policies abroad, yet little has been said here at home.

The Bush administration’s response took the form of a $400 million aid package focused on police and military involvement in the troubled regions. While the Mexican government surely appreciates this help, President Felipe Calderón and others have been asking for something more, something that gets right to the heart of the problem. They’re asking, quite simply, for Americans to stop buying the cartels’ products. Calderón believes that changes on our side of the border could fix the problems on his side – and he is right.

We only need to look back to the 1930s for a relevant example. In the early 30s, alcohol prohibition spurred the rise of violent cartels run by the likes of Al Capone that made vast sums of money selling booze on the criminal market. Congress' response was the 21st Amendment, which repealed the prohibition of alcohol and evaporated the cartels' profits overnight by establishing the legally regulated system we have today.

Could this model work again?

If we repealed marijuana prohibition, wouldn’t the drug cartels lose a major source of income? Wouldn’t we hurt their ability to wage this devastating war?

Opponents will say that, in this scenario, cartels will shift their focus to harder drugs, prostitution, or kidnapping, and the violence will stay the same. But this argument is like saying that taking a slice of pizza leaves you with a larger, more nefarious pizza. The fact is that Mexican drug cartels already engage in a broad array of spectacularly violent crime. Marijuana prohibition simply guarantees them easy access to large sums of U.S. currency.

Now that her case is settled against the D.C. government over the 2004 death of her quadriplegic son while in prison for marijuana possession, I hope Mary Scott can find at least some comfort.

However, the D.C. prison system's incompetence and neglect are not the only culprits in Jonathan Magbie's tragic death. If it weren't for Congress continually blocking the implementation of the medical marijuana initiative 69% of D.C. voters passed in 1998, Magbie would probably be alive today.

The forces that have been working to undermine California’s Compassionate Use Act suffered another legal defeat today – this time from the U.S. Supreme Court.

The nation’s highest court refused to hear an appeal in the case of Garden Grove v. Superior Court of California, et al. In this case, the police department for the City of Garden Grove - in defiance of a court order - refused to return marijuana that an officer had seized from a state-legal medical marijuana patient. In October 2005, the city appealed the court order, arguing that it couldn’t obey state law by returning the marijuana because doing so would amount to a federal crime. The state’s Fourth District Court of Appeals sided with the lower court and ruled that “it is not the job of local police to enforce federal drug laws.”

The city was unhappy with the landmark ruling and took its case all the way to the Supreme Court, which has now officially denied that request for review.

It looks like the debate over whether state and local law enforcement officers (who conduct about 99% of marijuana arrests) need to enforce state-level medical marijuana laws has finally been put to rest.