Voting on change.org’s “Ideas for Change in America” came to a close today with “Legalize the Medical and Recreational Use of Marijuana” coming in as the most popular idea. The top ten ideas will be presented to President-elect Obama during a press conference on Friday. Change.gov, Obama’s official transition Web site, has twice opened up voting in a similar feature called “Open for Questions.” Each time, a question about marijuana policy reached the top ten. And each time, the transition team brushed…

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I must not be high enough to understand what exactly the point is of this latest ad from the drug czar's office -- the behaviors depicted in it seem typical for lots of teenagers, straight or stoned. Still, I'm happy to help them get their message out, whatever it is. Feel free to use the comments section and give me your own interpretations.

This week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced penalties against the Rite Aid drugstore chain for a variety of violations of the Controlled Substances Act. These included having "knowingly filled prescriptions for controlled substances that were not issued for a legitimate medical purpose" and failing to account for shortages or surpluses "of the most highly abused drugs, including oxycodone and hydrocodone products." For these rather serious offenses involving highly addictive narcotics, Rite…

    The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has rejected the decision of Administrative Law Judge Mary Ellen Bittner and blocked a medical marijuana research project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst -- a project considered vital if marijuana is ever to be an FDA-approved medicine. The DEA's ruling, dated Jan. 7, was only released today.     MPP and other supporters of research reacted with outrage. "It's no surprise that an administration that has rejected science again and again has,…

In its December issue, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry published an essay by psychiatrist Stephen Kisely, who divides his time between Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, titled, "The Case for Policy Reform in Cannabis Control." Kisely's essay is so full of logic and common sense that the best thing to do is just quote it at length: "The lack of evidence for prohibition is highlighted by the fact that penalties bear little relation to…

For several weeks now, change.org has been running a competition called "Ideas for Change in America" in response to Barack Obama’s call for increased citizen involvement in government. "Legalize the Medical and Recreational Use of Marijuana" is currently the top-rated idea. The competition, which is now in its final round of voting, allows anyone to post an idea to the organization’s Web site and vote on ideas that matter to them. When voting ends on January 15, the top 10 ideas will be presented…

You may have noticed that many of my reports on this blog are about how some local public officials in California are subverting the state’s medical marijuana laws. Well, today, headlines in California are telling the story of the patients who are fighting some of these scofflaws in court. In San Bernardino - a county that refused to implement the state’s patient ID card program and sought to overturn the law requiring it to do so – medical marijuana patient Scott Bledsoe filed a lawsuit yesterday…

People suffering from Parkinson's disease have a high rate of psychosis, which may be induced or worsened by drugs used to treat the illness. A recently published study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology suggests that a marijuana component called cannabidiol (CBD) may be a helpful treatment for this condition. This was a small, uncontrolled pilot study, but CBD produced rapid and fairly dramatic reductions in psychotic symptoms. And the growing body of evidence regarding CBD's anti-psychotic properties…

MPP director of state policies Karen O'Keefe spoke this morning at a hearing convened by the Michigan Department of Community Health to consider draft regulations implementing the state's new medical marijuana law. The very well attended hearing took the whole morning, Karen reports, with large numbers of patients presenting constructive criticisms of rules that in some cases go beyond the authority given the department by the voter-approved initiative. Of particular concern are rules that require…