On Thursday night's edition of "Anderson Cooper 360," former drug czar John Walters and I were interviewed separately about a new government report claiming an increase in average potency of marijuana seized by law enforcement (we'll have a video link posted soon). I pointed out an obvious fact: When the marijuana is more potent, users smoke less, just as people typically drink a much smaller quantity of bourbon than of beer. Thus, higher-potency marijuana doesn't necessarily mean users take in more…

MPP's Bruce Mirken will appear on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" tonight to add a little rationality to the latest pronouncement regarding rising THC levels in marijuana from the National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded Marijuana Potency Project. Drug warriors love to exaggerate small increases in marijuana potency over time and make vague proclamations linking those increases to increases in marijuana's potential danger, even though no credible research supports such a connection. Of course, if they…

One of our members wrote us to report that the March 9 episode of the daytime television show "The Doctors," focusing on illegal drugs, contained a glaring bit of misinformation about marijuana. Here's how our member described it: At one point, one of the doctors made the statement loud and clear,"To all parents of young boys, make sure you let your boys know that...if they use marijuana they WILL grow boobs!" Then they moved on to another subject. While we haven't been able to verify a transcript,…

You wouldn't know it from their Web site, but it turns out the White House drug czar's office is legally required to provide the public with facts that are, well, factual. Under the Data Quality act, all government agencies, including the Office of National Drug Control Policy, are responsible for "ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information." You could print out the material on ONDCP's site, throw a dart at the printout, and probably hit an assertion that's…

Medical marijuana advocates often hear that marijuana can't be a real medicine because it hasn't been approved by the FDA. One common response to this is that the Drug Enforcement Administration continues to block the only avenue that could produce the research needed to seek FDA approval for medical marijuana, over a year and half after an administrative law judge ruled that the project should go ahead.  But that's just the start. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published…

Drug czar John Walters isn't really a free-exchange-of-ideas kind of public servant, so MPP's Aaron Houston and I took the opportunity to ask him a couple questions last week at his press conference announcing the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health. In Walters' mind it's bad that kids perceive marijuana as less harmful than methamphetamine, his disreputable anti-marijuana ads work like a charm, and the latest statistics prove that the only way to reduce drug use is by prohibiting marijuana.…