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.

In this open letter to Barack Obama, the Marijuana Policy Project suggests just a few of the many changes President-elect Obama could take to begin creating sensible marijuana policies in America.

You give us $40, we’ll give you a shirt. We’ll even throw in an official MPP membership.

For the first time in my life, I've just been prescribed an opioid painkiller: hydrocodone/acetaminophen, commonly known by the brand name Vicodin. The occasion was a medical procedure known as brachytherapy. I'll explain more about that below, but it's pretty low on the fun meter. There can be lingering pain for a few days, hence my introduction into the fabulous world of narcotic pain drugs.

I can't help but notice some odd contrasts with medical marijuana.

My prescription bottle came with a warning label affixed by the pharmacy, cautioning me about acetaminophen (best known as the active ingredient in Tylenol): "Taking more acetaminophen than recommended may cause serious liver problems." It's rather disconcerting that the most prominent warning in one's first narcotic prescription concerns a pain drug that's handed out almost like candy, one of the most common ingredients in combination cough-and-cold remedies sold over the counter. But the warning is a good idea: Overdoses of acetaminophen, mostly accidental (due to people combining cold medications and not knowing they're getting multiple doses of the stuff), are estimated to cause 458 U.S. deaths each year due to acute liver failure.

Hydrocodone, a Schedule III narcotic, can cause physical dependence. Overdose can cause respiratory failure, cardiac arrest, and death.

Yet this useful but potentially deadly combination was handed to me in an ordinary prescription bottle, without even a childproof cap.

Now consider medical marijuana. It's far less addictive than hydrocodone or other opioids. No fatal overdose has ever been documented. And yet it's in Schedule I, so doctors are legally barred from prescribing it. In many of the states where patients are permitted under state law to grow marijuana for medical use, they are required to do so in an indoor, securely locked facility -- while my narcotic cocktail doesn't even rate a childproof cap. This is crazy.

This might be a good time to mention that if you want to help change some of this insanity, please sign up now for MPP's free email alerts.

Finally, as promised, a word about brachytherapy. It's a treatment for prostate cancer, involving the implantation of dozens (in my case precisely 85) tiny, radioactive seeds in the prostate gland. Over about six months or so, the radiation zaps the cancer and you live happily ever after. Please do not be alarmed. My little malignancy is early, localized, and non-aggressive. I'll be fine.

And at this point I don't actually have a need for medical marijuana. But dumb laws shouldn't tie my doctor's hands for no good reason.

Update to Bruce's post yesterday about the British government's effort to increase penalties for small marijuana violations over the objections of its scientific advisors: In what was really an expected formality, the House of Lords approved the move.

As Bruce pointed out, with its relatively good track record of science-based marijuana policy, it's difficult to imagine why Britain would suddenly want to ape our politically and ideologically driven approach. After all, superstition and zealotry are entrenched realities of failed U.S. marijuana policy making. But what's Britain's excuse?

Yesterday, George W. Bush began the time-honored tradition of granting pardons to convicted felons in the president’s final days in the White House. 14 pardons and two commuted sentences were announced late last night, and more are expected to be handed down before he leaves office on January 20.

Two former politicians who have been convicted of public corruption charges are looking to the president in hopes that he will shorten their prison sentences. Some pundits are even speculating that he may offer “preemptive” pardons to those involved in the unconstitutional torture of terrorism suspects after 9-11.

I wonder if President Bush has given any thought to pardoning some of the medical marijuana patients and caregivers his administration has helped to prosecute?

One such unfortunate person who comes to mind is Charles C. Lynch of Morro Bay, California.

When Charles opened a city-licensed medical marijuana collective on California’s Central Coast, the community welcomed him with open arms. The city’s mayor even helped cut the ribbon at the chamber of commerce welcoming ceremony. The collective provided a safe and legal supply of medical marijuana to seriously ill patients for nearly a year before federal agents raided the facility and arrested Charles on federal drug charges.

During the ensuing trial, federal prosecutors described Charles as a common drug dealer and blocked any mention of medical marijuana from being brought forth by his defense. As a result, a jury found Charles guilty on five counts of federal drug charges. His sentencing hearing is set for January 5 and he could face up to 100 years in prison for following his heart (and state law) by helping patients to get their medicine.

I can’t think of anyone more deserving of a presidential pardon than Charles C. Lynch and others like him whose only crime was helping to relive suffering.

For more on Charles' plight, check out this Reason.tv video.

Forces of common sense are making a last-ditch stand in Britain today. Earlier this year, the British government announced its intention to "upgrade" marijuana from "Class C," the lowest category of illicit drugs, where it's been since 2004, to "Class B": drugs considered more dangerous and subject to stiffer penalties. The move directly contradicted the advice of the government's official scientific advisers, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

Today, a last-ditch effort to delay the change is being debated in the House of Lords, a proposal supported by a group of top scientists in a letter published this morning by the Guardian newspaper. Reclassification, they argue, "would be a sad departure from the welcome trend ... of public policy following expert scientific advice unless there is new evidence."

To Americans, the notion of marijuana policy being actually based on science may seem downright quaint, but the British have, at least until recently, made fairly credible efforts in that direction. If the Lords' motion doesn't succeed, that honorable tradition will be trashed.

And it will be trashed for no good purpose. As Molly Meacher, sponsor of the motion to delay reclassification, notes in her own column about the issue, marijuana use in Britain went down after penalties were reduced in 2004. "The UK experience," she writes, "is strongly supported by several studies of the impact of reduced criminalization of cannabis which show that at a time when cannabis use was increasing across the world the greatest proportional increase in use was in countries with the most severe penalties. We can only conclude that the government's action in upgrading cannabis to Class B will, if anything, lead to increased use of the drug."

And while this drama was playing out, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was hearing from another distinguished scientist, Professor Sir Gabriel Horn, who chaired the Academy of Medical Science's working group on drugs, who urged that alcohol be brought under the same classification system as illegal drugs. "It's been recognised that [alcohol] is the most harmful recreational drug you could use," Prof. Horn said.

Join MPP's Nydia Swaby as she answers this week's question about marijuana: Is marijuana addictive?

Do you have questions about marijuana? E-mail us at socialnetwork@mpp.org with the subject line "Ask Nydia," and we'll film a response as soon as we can.

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