With over 600,000 votes cast and thousands of questions posted, Barack Obama’s “Open for Questions” tool has closed its first round of questioning.  Topping the list is the following: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?" (link) This is a clear indication that visitors to Obama’s transition Web site want to see a change in America’s…

U.S. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) penned a letter to the DEA requesting answers about the agency's raids of and threats to California’s state-legal medical marijuana facilities. The letter, sent in April at the request of several concerned public officials in California, asked the DEA pointed questions regarding the cost of these raids and whether attacking medical marijuana providers was a sensible use of scarce resources. The DEA has finally replied. And, as expected, the 17-page…

The Obama transition team unveiled a new feature on its Web site yesterday that allows visitors to submit and vote on questions for the president-elect.  Called “Open for Questions,” the new tool presents a good opportunity to ask Obama if he will support marijuana policy reforms. If you have a moment, head over to change.gov and ask a question or vote on one of the many marijuana policy questions that have already been posted.

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 10th graders reported smoking marijuana in the past 30 days, while just 12.3 percent smoked cigarettes. For 8th and 12th 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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…