Senator Jim Webb (D-Va.) introduced the National Criminal Justice Act of 2009 last week, an exciting piece of legislation that will create a commission to study, among other things, America’s war on drugs.
The commission will look broadly at criminal justice reforms, with an emphasis on reducing America's rising prison population (now the largest in the world per capita). Centered in that debate is the hard truth about America’s punitive drug laws. One-third of U.S. inmates are drug offenders, and many of them are in jail for possession, not sale or manufacture.
Senator Webb's legislation calls, specifically, for a close look at our drug laws, and his remarks before the Senate show a refreshingly honest approach to the issue:
The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200% … and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses.
Webb isn’t playing it safe. Many politicians like to skirt around the edges of criminal justice reform, pursuing incremental changes and avoiding politically risky topics. Webb’s critique, on the other hand, is fundamental.
The evidence continues to mount that cannabinoids -- the unique, active components in marijuana -- fight cancer. The latest such study , just published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, shows that THC can kill glioma cells through a process known as autophagy. Gioma is a particularly deadly form of brain cancer that afflicts, among others, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
The good news is that this study got a decent amount of media attention. The bad news is that much of the coverage lacked context or presented information in a confusing or misleading way. Case in point: the April 1 story from the Reuters wire service.
Reuters reporter Michael Kahn presents the finding as if it were something brand new, failing to note the extensive evidence accumulated since the 1970s that cannabinoids fight various types of tumors. It reports that "studies have suggested" that marijuana may cause cancer, omitting the fact that the largest, most well-controlled studies have found precisely the opposite.
And finally, in a warning of possible risks of cannabinoid drugs, the article hopelessly jumbles cannabinoids -- drugs like THC and its plant and synthetic cousins -- with drugs designed to block the CB1 receptor through which these substances operate, mistakenly referring to these CB1-blocking drugs as cannabinoids. In fact, they're more like anti-cannabinoids, and if anything the harmful effects of these CB1 blockers (increased rates of depression and anxiety, for example) reaffirm that cannabinoids often have good and helpful effects.
The journal Clinical EEG and Neuroscience has just published a review of the data on the effects of substance use on the developing brains of adolescents. The unmistakable conclusion: While heavy substance use of any kind is a really bad idea for teens, the damaging effects of alcohol are clearly worse than marijuana. The researchers write:
Abnormalities have been seen in brain structure volume, white matter quality, and activation to cognitive tasks, even in youth with as little as 1-2 years of heavy drinking and consumption levels of 20 drinks per month, especially if >4-5 drinks are consumed on a single occasion. Heavy marijuana users show some subtle anomalies too, but generally not the same degree of divergence from demographically similar non-using adolescents.
Strikingly, in a couple of studies, the damaging effects of binge drinking were less if the drinker also used marijuana, suggesting -- though not proving -- a possible protective effect in some circumstances. That's actually no shock, as the U.S. government holds a patenton cannabinoids -- marijuana's unique, active components -- as neuroprotectants (substances that protect nerve and brain cells from damage).
In what turns out, sadly, to be the last episode of CNN's "D.L. Hughley Breaks the News," aired Mar. 28 and 29, D.L. devoted a large block of the show to proposals to make marijuana a legally regulated and taxed product for adult consumption. The first segment included an interview with yours truly, followed by Ronald Brooks of the Narcotic Officers Associations Coalition, who wants to keep arresting and jailing marijuana users.
MPP Director of Government Relations Aaron Houston talks about President Obama's flippant response to the question of decriminalizing marijuana at the first "Online Town Hall" on Russia Today. He also discusses how taxing and regulating marijuana will help quell the violence associated with the drug war in Mexico and provide a much-needed boost to the economy. 03/27/2009
White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs is asked to clarify President Obama's position on legalizing marijuana and on medical marijuana after he brought up the topic in the first Online Town Hall. Questions involving marijuana reform appeared in several categories and received far more votes than any other policy issue. 03/26/2009
A week after Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice would only target marijuana growers and collectives that were in violation of BOTH state and federal law, the DEA raided Emmalyn's California Cannabis