In preparation for a parliamentary hearing scheduled for October 15, a coalition of German health organizations, including the German AIDS Support Society, the German Society for Pain Therapy, and the German Epilepsy Association, have issued a statement calling on the government to facilitate access to medical cannabis for patients without threat of prosecution. The Berlin Declaration, as it's called, is in German, but the International Association for Cannabis as Medicine has provided the following…

Join MPP's Sara Cannon as she takes a look at outright lies made by the Drug Free America Foundation. Every 36 seconds, someone is arrested for marijuana in the U.S. Coincidentally, it only takes about 36 seconds to sign up to receive MPP’s free e-mail alerts and start finding out what you can do to help end the war on marijuana users.

A follow up to yesterday's post: An astute reader in Texas sent an interesting link today: a court docket from Amarillo, Texas in which eight people were sentenced to jail for simple possession of marijuana (listed below).  Texas law has a specific provision for repeat marijuana offenders that makes jail time a likely sentence, so these might not be the first offender unicorns John Walters was after, but these cases reveal two things. First, people go to jail for having small amounts of marijuana…

Two new reports by public policy expert Jon Gettman, a senior fellow at George Mason University, highlight the ineptitude of U.S. marijuana policy during the Bush Administration. The reports – one analyzing marijuana use rate statistics and the other examining the explosion in court-ordered marijuana treatment admissions – directly contradict the White House drug czar's office's frequent claims of success in reducing marijuana use rates. There's little question that this administration's Office of…

White House Drug Czar John Walters told the press last month that “people don’t go to jail for the possession of marijuana” and challenged MPP to prove him wrong.  In his words, "if you find the unicorn ... I'll buy you a steak dinner."   Well Mr. Walters, it took nearly three minutes on Google, but I found your unicorn.  Seven of them, actually. On August 13, 2008, the Clinton County Municipal Court near Jackson, Mississippi sentenced seven people, in unrelated cases, to jail for simple possession…

"If something is not legal, you can't regulate it very effectively."             -- Prof. Robin Room, School of Population Health, University of Melbourne   On October 2, the Global Cannabis Commission, a group of top scientists commissioned by the Beckley Foundation, issued its groundbreaking report, "Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond Stalemate." Your faithful correspondent was able to attend the daylong seminar in which the report was discussed, held in the distinctly imposing Moses Room of the House…

A staggering $15.2 billion budget deficit in California didn’t stop Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from sending thousands of state-legal medical marijuana patients into unemployment. Last night, the “Governator” vetoed A.B. 2279, which would have made it illegal for employers to fire or deny employment to state-legal medical marijuana patients for testing positive for marijuana. A.B. 2279 included provisions that exempted safety-sensitive positions and didn’t force employers to violate federal law.…

I don't get to say this often, so here goes: The latest statistics from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration support one of White House drug czar John Walters' most frequent claims about marijuana. According to the just-released CARAVAN Study for SAMHSA on Addictions and Recovery, John Walters, who likes to call marijuana "the blind spot of drug policy," is correct that most Americans just don't share his view that marijuana is "The Greatest Cause of Illegal Drug Abuse." In…

I'm off to London to represent MPP at the launch of the Beckley Foundation's Global Cannabis Commission Report October 2 and 3. This document, put together by some of the world's top researchers and drug policy analysts, promises to be of great value in efforts to base marijuana policy on facts and data rather than spin or political expediency. So you won't see me posting for a few days (outside of meetings, I will be fully occupied recovering from jet lag), but I will post a full report early next…

I've written before about the death of Rachel Hoffman, a recent Florida State graduate who was murdered in a botched drug sting after Tallahassee police used a petty marijuana charge to pressure her into acting as an informant. It's at least a little comforting to see that there's now some accountability for some of the principals involved in this tragic event. But I can't help wondering what would have happened had Rachel, through luck and grace, avoided her awful fate. What if she had safely purchased…