Feinstein and Grassley Introduce Idiotic Law

Sometimes D.C. creates laws that are intractably idiotic.

Cash Crop Blog via The Big Money

There is an insane bill making its way through Congress that is worthy of a 1950s health-class scare film. It takes on the mythical "candy-flavored meth" menace. Last week, a change was made to the bill that offers a bit of protection to legal medical-marijuana dispensers, but still leaves them vulnerable to prosecution.

The bill, called The Saving Kids From Dangerous Drugs Act, was written by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). It is aimed at unknown people who supposedly "target our children by peddling candy-flavored drugs," Feinstein is quoted as saying. It would double the federal sentences of drug dealers who mix their product with candy.

Because while selling methamphetamine to kids is bad and all, selling them candy-flavored methamphetamine is truly evil.

UPDATE: The law passed. Quels sots.

Cash Crop Blog is an RSS feed on my sidebar - it's definitely worth reading for a voice outside of the ongoing struggle to remove prohibition, just as those who are on the front lines are well worth reading.

Medical Marijuana Now Legal in DC

Washington Post

Medical marijuana is now legal in the District after the Democrat-controlled Congress declined to overrule a D.C Council bill that allows the city to set up as many as eight dispensaries where chronically ill patients can purchase the drug.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) said in a statement the bill become law after Congress finished its business Monday night because neither the House nor Senate opted to intervene.

The council approved the bill in May, and under Home Rule Congress had 30 legislative days to review it.

"We have faced repeated attempts to re-impose the prohibition on medical marijuana in D.C. throughout the layover period," said Norton. "Yet, it is D.C.'s business alone to decide how to help patients who live in our city and suffer from chronic pain and incurable illnesses."

Even D.C. can pass laws that are useful.

DEA Targets Colorado Cannabis Center Owners

Denver Post

The DEA says 18 percent of medical-marijuana-center owners have been convicted of felonies.

"This business seems to have an inappropriate number of people with criminal backgrounds involved as business owners," said Kevin Merrill, assistant special agent in charge for the Denver field division of the DEA. "I would be hard-pressed to find any other business group where their members have so many criminal violations, arrests and convictions."

I would imagine that most business owners are not trying to move a substance from DEA-targeted zero tolerance to legalization, either. The DEA is shocked, yes, shocked to find that people running cannabis centers have had previous arrests for the same.

Many of those will be weeded out of the medical-marijuana business Sunday when new rules take effect prohibiting anyone with a drug felony conviction or anyone with a felony sentence within the past five years from obtaining a medical-marijuana-center license in Colorado.

If only those same business people had created worthless financial instruments and sold them to unsuspecting investors. Then they'd be dictating policy to the Treasury Dept.

43% in Rasmussen Poll Favor Legalization

Rasmussen Reports

Americans are evenly divided over whether marijuana should be legalized in the United States, but most expect it to happen within the next decade.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Adults nationally shows 43% believe marijuana should be legalized. But 42% think it should remain an illegal drug. Another 15% are not sure.

These results show a slight shift toward legalization from February of last year.

However, 65% believe it is at least somewhat likely marijuana will be legalized in the United States in the next 10 years. Just 28% do not expect this to happen. Those numbers include 29% who say it is Very Likely pot will be legal in the next 10 years and five percent (5%) who say it is Not At All Likely.

In the latest survey, voters were simply asked whether or not they believed marijuana should be legalized. Voters were more divided on this question than they were in May of last year, when asked whether the drug should be legalized and taxed. At that time, 41% favored the idea of legalizing and taxing marijuana, while 49% were opposed.

That's legalization, not decriminalization or merely support for medicinal marijuana. Support for medicinal marijuana tracks at over 70%

The War on Drugs in Action

Alternet

Raised in Montana and a resident of Alaska for 18 years, Robin Rae Brown, 48, always made time to explore in the wilderness. On March 20, 2009, she parked her pickup truck outside Weston, Florida, and hiked off the beaten path along a remote canal and into the woods to bird watch and commune with nature...Robin had packed a clay bowl and a “smudge stick,” a stalk-like bundle of sage, sweet grass, and lavender that she had bought at an airport gift shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Under the tree, she lit the end of the smudge stick and nestled it inside the bowl. She waved the smoke up toward her heart and over her head and prayed. Spiritual people from many cultures, including Native Americans, consider smoke to be sacred, she told me, and believe that it can carry their prayers to the heavens.

As darkness approached, she returned to her pickup truck to find Broward County’s Deputy Sheriff Dominic Raimondi and Florida Fish and Wildlife’s Lieutenant David Bingham looking inside the cab. The two men asked what she was doing and when she said she had been bird watching, Bingham asked whether she had binoculars. As she opened her knapsack, Officer Raimondi spotted her incense and asked if he could see it. He took the bowl and incense, asking whether it was marijuana. “No,” she recalls saying. “It’s my smudge, which is a blend of sage, sweet grass, and lavender.” “Smells like marijuana to me,” said Raimondi, who admitted he had never heard of a smudge stick. He then ordered Robin to stand by her truck, while he took the incense back to his car and conducted a common field test, known as a Duquenois-Levine, or D-L, test. The result was positive for marijuana.

(90 days later) She was handcuffed in front of clients and co-workers, and charged with felony possession of marijuana. She was brought to a local police precinct in the town of Davie where she was booked and held for three hours. Unable to post the $1,000 bail because she was not allowed to call her boyfriend Michael, she was transferred to the Women’s Correctional Facility in Pompano Beach. At no time was she read her rights.

Five hours after her arrest, she was finally allowed a brief phone call and left a message for Michael to post her bail. At the jail, a female officer came in and told Robin to take off all her clothes. She had already been searched at the precinct station and had her shoes, socks and bra confiscated. “I’m on my period,” she said. “I don’t care,” said the officer, who ordered her to pull her underwear down to her ankles, squat over the floor drain and cough. The following morning at 4:30 a.m. she was released onto the streets of Pompano Beach with no idea where she was.

Brown went to a lab to obtain hair and urine tests and tested negative for marijuana.

She was humiliated, harassed and imprisoned because of the "drug warriors" most frequently-used test for marijuana, the Duquenois-Levine test. Even tho its propensity for false positives has been known since the 1960s, with more than 25 plants that will generate a false positive result, the D-L test continues to be a sole method used to detect the presence of cannabis before arrest. It is promoted as "cost effective."

The article on the use of the D-L test, linked here, is a must-read for anyone who cares about the continuing erosion of civil rights in this nation.

Oakland Sets Tax Rates for Legal Cannabis

Reuters

Oakland's city council on Monday night approved the rates -- a 5 percent gross receipts tax on licensed marijuana growers and on businesses selling marijuana for medical purposes, and a 10 percent rate on sales of marijuana used for recreational purposes.

California voters in 1996 approved a measure allowing marijuana use for medical purposes and would legalize its recreational use if they approve Proposition 19 in November.

...While the vote by Oakland's city council marks another step in the city toward bringing marijuana into the mainstream, pot dispensaries that have proliferated in the city near San Francisco are worried a 5 percent levy is too high and that neighboring Berkeley will undercut it with a lower rate.

"Why go to Oakland when you can go to Berkeley and get the same thing cheaper?" Dale Sky Clare, a spokeswoman for Proposition 19 and executive chancellor for Oaksterdam University, a cannabis industry training school with campuses in Oakland, elsewhere in California and Flint, Michigan, said on Tuesday.

Veterans Affairs Office: First Federal Agency to Acknowledge Medical Benefits of Cannabis

A Statement from Cannabis Science (CO) on Monday afternoon, via Colorado Springs Indymedia:

Colorado Springs-based Cannabis Science has released a statement, supporting the V.A.'s decision:

"We see this announcement as a validation of our strategy of focusing on helping disabled vets suffering from PTSD, chronic pain, and other problems," says CEO Dr. Robert Melamede. "Nonetheless, it is shocking to think that disabled veterans in states without medical marijuana laws can still be denied 'access to prescribed pain medications in a Veterans Affairs facility.' ...good medicine and basic human decency do not change from state to state."

From a July 23rd New York Times article on this subject:

“In those states where medical marijuana is legal, the patient will need to make a choice as to which medication they choose to use for their chronic pain,” Ms. Korogi wrote. “However, it is not medically appropriate to expect that a V.A. physician will prescribe narcotics while the patient is taking marijuana.”

This is an unusual position for a doctor to take in this present era, based upon what I've seen among psychiatrists. Doctors routinely prescribe a combination of drugs to treat various manifestations of illnesses. I'm not condoning or condemning the practice - just noting this reality.

However, if cannabis can move patients from narcotics, simply considering the problems with addiction and side-effects and potential for harm, the move away from narcotic drugs might be another benefit of patient access to cannabis, as this link to recent studies shows with another substance.

This blog further notes (tho the quote is not linked or given a citation):

According to Raphael Mechoulam, Ph.D., an internationally respected expert on neuroscience aspects of marijuana explains: “Not only is it important for its pain-relieving abilities, it is also essential for PTSD patients because it can help to reduce the association between stressful stimuli in their lives and traumatic memories from wartime. While healthy people eventually do not associate the past events with stimuli in the present, PTSD patients are tortured by never-ending associations with the past, creating intense and constant reminders of the trauma they suffered.”

They, in fact, re-experience this trauma with the same levels of emotional pain. The Vets aren't drama queens - they are, recent research suggests, experiencing a physical illness (trauma to the hippocampus.)

Douglas Bremer, at the Yale School of Medicine, describes the damage in this way:

Childhood abuse and other extreme stressors can have lasting effects on brain areas involved in memory and emotion. The hippocampus is a brain area involved in learning and memory that is particularly sensitive to stress. 8,9 As reviewed in greater detail by Bruce McEwen in other Cyberounds high levels of glucocorticoids (cortisol in the human) released during stress were associated with damage to neurons in the CA3 region of the hippocampus, and a loss of neurons and dendritic branching. 10,11,12 Glucocorticoids disrupt cellular metabolism and increase the vulnerability of hippocampal neurons to excitatory amino acids like glutamate. 13 Other neurochemical systems interact with glucocorticoids to mediate the effects of stress on memory and the hippocampus, including serotonin14 and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). 15,16 Stress also results in deficits in new learning that are secondary to damage to the hippocampus. 17,18 Exciting recent research has shown that the hippocampus has the capacity to regenerate neurons and that stress inhibits neurogenesis in the hippocampus.

Interestingly, cannabinoids have also shown recent promise in research related to neurogenesis and the reduction of inflammation for the treatment of Alzheimer's.

(The blog above goes on to make recommendations for Veterans based upon pain-reducing properties of one strain of cannabis versus another.)

An earlier link to a Time Magazine Wellness Blog provides information on the way in which cannabis helped with stress and trauma:

the marijuana-like compound had made extreme stress more like ordinary stress—and this could also be seen in terms of reductions in a key stress hormone in their brains.

Importantly, it didn't matter if the rats were given the drug before or after they experienced the stress. This suggests that this drug might work either before or after someone has suffered a traumatic event. It also shows that the drug doesn't erase memory—instead, it softens it and makes traumatic memory more like ordinary memory.

PTSD triggers the same or elevated level of stress response to memory as it did in the "past present," while the cannabis synthetic, in the experiment noted here, regulated the expression of this stress response - or, specifically, the release of stress hormones.

Unlike the blog post from "mypot," the Time-linked study indicates that memory isn't eliminated. It is merely put into perspective. Studies on the effect of THC noted above indicate cannabis therapy may create neurogenesis in the hippocampus as well. This might well explain the capacity to soften trauma after the fact, but this is speculation from me on this point.

The capacity to allow a "healing space" was also recently noted in studies of MDMA (commonly known as ecstasy.)

Let us hope that prejudice created by years of propaganda from the war on drugs, including the scheduling of cannabis itself, will not interfere with possible treatments for devastating illnesses.

IMDB Preview: What If Cannabis Cured Cancer

via IMDB

Dr. Andrew Weil notes the cancer-treatment potential of Cannabis

Dr. Andrew Weil

...exciting new research suggests that the cannabinoids found in marijuana may have a primary role in cancer treatment and prevention. A number of studies have shown that these compounds can inhibit tumor growth in laboratory animal models. In part, this is achieved by inhibiting angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels that tumors need in order to grow. What's more, cannabinoids seem to kill tumor cells without affecting surrounding normal cells. If these findings hold true as research progresses, cannabinoids would demonstrate a huge advantage over conventional chemotherapy agents, which too often destroy normal cells as well as cancer cells.

As long ago as 1975, researchers reported that cannabinoids inhibited the growth of a certain type of lung cancer cell in test tubes and in mice. Since then, laboratory studies have shown that cannabinoids have effects against tumor cells from glioblastoma (a deadly type of brain cancer) as well as those from thyroid cancer¸ leukemia/lymphoma, and skin, uterus, breast, stomach, colorectal, pancreatic and prostate cancers.

So far, the only human test of cannabinoids against cancer was done in Spain and was designed to determine if treatment was safe, not whether it was effective. (In studies on humans, such "phase one trials," are aimed at establishing the safety of a new drug, as well as the right dosage.) In the Spanish study, reported in 2006, the dose was administered intracranially, directly into the tumors of patients with recurrent brain cancer. The investigation established the safety of the dose and showed that the compound used decreased cell proliferation in at least two of nine patients studied.

...Most medical doctors are not aware of this information and its implications for cancer prevention and treatment.

He includes a link to the video: What If Cannabis Cured Cancer, which I will include as a separate post.

High Finance and Corporate Pot

ABC News

Wilcox's plan includes a 7-acre site with a 100,000-square-foot growing space, a bakery, a testing lab, job training and growing equipment production at the site -- which would need to win one of the four Oakland permits to go into business. If it did, it would produce 58 pounds of cannabis a day at wholesale prices of $2,500 to $3,000 per pound and send the city more than $2 million per year in taxes if a 3 percent growers' tax were initiated.

But Oakland could complicate his math. The city is considering an 8 percent tax on cannabis farms, more than double the top rate in Wilcox's economic analysis.

...One industry source, who is still involved in illicit drug circles and requested to remain anonymous, said he recalls prices falling in Los Angeles as medical marijuana dispensaries exploded there. Early on in his career, high quality marijuana went for $6,000 to $7,000 a pound. "Now you are getting $3,500. What's going to happen when you legalize? You are going to take it a couple of states (east)," he said. Growers and vendors with expensive taste would not be able to continue to lead the high life at legal prices, he said.

Also, not everyone buys the theory that California will become a rogue drug state that can undermine national efforts to put a lid on marijuana. The free market is pitting different cities eager for marijuana revenues against one another, and small growers at the Oakland council meeting threatened to leave the city if taxes were too high.

U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in an interview cast cold water on California export potential. "I quite frankly don't see that," he said. "I just don't see it as being something that suddenly people in Kentucky say, 'Ah now marijuana can be shipped in from California.'"

I'm not an expert in this field. I'm not a part of pot culture. But I do know a few people who have inhaled in their lifetimes. Kerlikowske is, imo, somewhat naive if he thinks that those folks in KY are not already interested in the sativa x indica hybrids that are the direct result of the Reagan-inspired war on drugs.

The history of marijuana over the past three decades is all about the move from someone finding WWII-era ditchweed and being content to that same hypothetical someone seeking out hybrid strains that were cultivated in response to and because of the crack down on outdoor cannabis production. When these hybrids are regulated and labeled with percentages of indica or sativa, those folks in KY can make more informed decisions in their purchases - and I would assume they will.

Most people outside of cannabis culture don't even bother to find out about the differences in effects from various strains. But those folks in KY who do know the differences are not the rubes the uneducated might assume them to be. I would imagine there are folks in KY who also enjoy beer from microbreweries rather than PBR - just as there are folks from every other state in this nation who make the same distinctions.

With more information available for consumers, producers and/or suppliers of cannabis in other parts of the country would, I assume, be under greater pressure to provide more information to their customers - who would know they could travel to another state to obtain the product they desire if their local retailers do not meet this desire.

Those who view the production of cannabis as part of a drug war do not understand those who view the production and use of cannabis as the horticultural equivalent of "foodies."

I assume, based upon the history of wine and beer consumption in the U.S., that it is also the "gourmanibis" aspect of cannabis cultivation that will create profit for the industry. But what do I know? I predicted that Ikea would be a big hit in the U.S. back in 1985 after a trip to one of the stores while visiting relatives in Europe.

Council on Science and Public Health: Use of Cannabis as Medicine

Via Google Docs

This is the full 30 page document (CSAPH Report 3-I-09), available for downloading or printing.

Professor Lester Grinspoon Radio Interview

Professor Grinspoon originally endeavored to write Marijuana Reconsidered in order to build a case against marijuana, but as his research progressed, he realized the complexities of the plant and was moved to advocate for legalization. He has testified before Congress, and as an expert witness in various legal proceedings, including the deportation hearings of John Lennon.


Lester Grinspoon is Associate Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of several drug-related books, including Marijuana Reconsidered, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, and Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine. The first two were published during the 1970s, when it appeared cannabis was well on its way to nationwide decriminalization in the United States. The latter was published in 1993. It describes a variety of ailments for which cannabis ingestion may be indicated.

From One Radio Network via the Internet Archive

Mark Sailors: Illegal, Quasi-legal and Legal Cannabis

Arcata Eye

Since 1937, cannabis, aka “marijuana,” has been illegal in the United States. At that time it was the second most prescribed medicine in the country. The physicians did not know that this “marijuana” that the Congress was proposing to make illegal was Cannabis Sativa, one of their most effective tools. As a matter of fact, the American Medical Association opposed the act because the tax was imposed on physicians prescribing cannabis, retail pharmacists selling cannabis, and medical cannabis cultivation/manufacturing; instead of enacting the Marihuana Tax Act, the AMA proposed cannabis be added to the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. Their protest came too late. Not since alcohol prohibition has there been such a failure of policy and practice. Let’s explore the dark side of illegal cannabis.

From the 1960s and ’70s, there was a movement, a back to the land moment that brought “hippies” to the North Coast. With them came their pot. This is the picture that has come to dominate.

It is false. The illegal cannabis trade is not full of hippies. These are business people out to make a buck, pure and simple.

...On November 5, 1996 things changed. Proposition 215 became the law of the land in California. No longer would patients have to fear arrest, or imprisonment for cultivation or use of medical marijuana, at least that is what we were promised. Since then we have had an INCREASE in marijuana-related offenses, not a decrease. We have seen police, DAs and entire counties DISREGARD the law that the voters enacted. Some, like San Diego, fought the law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and lost.

Former San Jose Police Chief Stunned by Feinstein's Opposition to Prop. 19

True Slant

In spite of Democratic opposition, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a drug policy reform group made up of former cops, judges and federal agents, seems to stand perhaps the best chance of swaying the state’s drug policy establishment. They’ve put forward a ballot argument in favor of Prop. 19, and three of their most prominent members from California law enforcement have signed it.

In an exclusive interview, the former police chief of San Jose and the former deputy police chief of Los Angeles County — both members of LEAP — took to task those favoring continued prohibition, insisting that both Sen. Feinstein and MADD level an “emotional, unreasoned” argument for keeping pot illegal.

“Their argument is specious and I don’t think it’s based on any emperical evidence,” contended Steven Downing, the former Los Angeles County deputy police chief. “It’s kinda like, we make things up in order to pass laws. Well, come up with the facts.”

He and McNamara insist there is no evidence to support the [MADD/Feinstein] assumption that officers or public officials could not enforce laws against driving while intoxicated. They argue that Prop. 19 has nothing to do with laws requiring sobriety while driving, and that it’s impossible to say, as MADD does, that legalization would turn California’s highways into a nightmare.

“I think one of the strongest points to make is that there were no studies when these drugs were outlawed,” Downing said. “It was religious fervor and prejudice. Fear. We all know that’s how it all got started. That’s how alcohol prohibition got stated. It’s the same today for marijuana, which is kept illegal by emotional, unreasoned arguments.”

From The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan

What... was the knowledge that God wanted to keep from Adam and Eve in the Garden? Theologians will debate this question without end, but it seems to me the most important answer is hidden in plain sight. The content of the knowledge Adam and Eve could gain by tasting of the fruit does not matter nearly as much as its form--that is, the very fact that there was spiritual knowledge of any kind to be had from a tree: from nature. The new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky. Yet Jehovah couldn't very well pretend the tree of knowledge didn't exist, not when generations of plant-worshipping pagans knew better. So the pagan tree is allowed to grow even in Eden, though ringed around now with a strong taboo. Yes, there is spiritual knowledge in nature, the new God is acknowledging, and its temptations are fierce, but I am fiercer still. Yield to it, and you will be punished.

So unfolds the drug war's first battle.

The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan (2002) p. 176

Fox News, Dedicated to Stereotypes, Finds Rational Republican Amazing

Fox News, Houston

Ann Lee is 80 years old and lives in Houston, Texas. She's a life-long Republican, as is her husband. She's also volunteering to help generate support for Proposition 19, on the California ballot in November. She is doing this work because her son, Richard, uses medical marijuana to deal with the effects of a spinal cord injury suffered 20 years ago that causes uncontrollable spasms.

[Richard's] mother was 60 when her son told her he was using pot to alleviate his symptoms. Ann Lee remembers the moment.

“He looked at us and he said, ‘Mom and Dad, marijuana helps me.’ And I didn't want to hear that. Because I thought marijuana was the weed of the devil.”

But Ann Lee changed her mind.

Now, Fox News might want to ask itself why Ann Lee had the mistaken notion that marijuana was not just a bad thing, but an evil thing. Fox News might want to look at its own broadcasts when it asks this question.

...Richard Lee is putting his efforts and his money behind Proposition 19. He believes marijuana should be legalized, regulated and taxed. Proponents estimate it could pump up California’s cash-starved coffers by almost $1.5 billion a year.

His mother, Ann, is a believer too. And this opinion, she says, fits comfortably with her conservative values: smaller government, fiscal responsibility.

“It is not fiscally responsible,” says Ann Lee, “to spend all this money on the drug war and not achieve a single goal.”

Not only is it fiscally irresponsible to waste taxpayer dollars on prohibition (hyperbolically recast as a "war on drugs" by right wing sound biters), it is morally reprehensible to make American citizens criminally liable for choosing to use the most affordable and accessible medicine that provides the best relief of symptoms with the least side effects.

"Research on the chemistry and pharmacology of cannabinoids and endocannabinoids has reached enormous proportions," the journal states. "[A]pproximately 15,000 articles on Cannabis sativa L. and cannabinoids and over 2,000 articles on endocannabinoids" are available in the scientific literature. From the journal Medical Research Reviews

But Fox News has its go-to guy to make sure the demon weed meme continues.

“It has a risk of lung cancer associated with it,” says Fox News Medical “A” Team contributor Marc Siegel, M.D. “A risk of psychiatric problems, anxiety, depression, dissociation, and suicide.”

Dr. Siegel's specialty is contagions and the fear that surrounds them, his web site notes. How many of those 17,000 papers has he read, I wonder? If he had read the literature, he would know there has never been a single death attributed to marijuana.

He would have learned that an older British study that speculated there was a link between cannabis and schizophrenia was disproven by a statistical analysis of the use of marijuana and the number of cases of schizophrenia. He would have read that problems with anxiety, depression and dissociation, all symptoms of PTSD, may be alleviated in patients suffering from those symptoms.

In fact, Dr. Siegel should have read this information:

"Nearly all medicines have toxic, potentially lethal effects. But marijuana is not such a substance. There is no record in the extensive medical literature describing a proven, documented cannabis-induced fatality.

This is a remarkable statement. First, the record on marijuana encompasses 5,000 years of human experience. Second, marijuana is now used daily by enormous numbers of people throughout the world. Estimates suggest that from twenty million to fifty million Americans routinely, albeit illegally, smoke marijuana without the benefit of direct medical supervision. Yet, despite this long history of use and the extraordinarily high numbers of social smokers, there are simply no credible medical reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a single death.

By contrast aspirin, a commonly used, over-the-counter medicine, causes hundreds of deaths each year.

Drugs used in medicine are routinely given what is called an LD-50. The LD-50 rating indicates at what dosage fifty percent of test animals receiving a drug will die as a result of drug induced toxicity. A number of researchers have attempted to determine marijuana's LD-50 rating in test animals, without success. Simply stated, researchers have been unable to give animals enough marijuana to induce death.

At present it is estimated that marijuana's LD-50 is around 1:20,000 or 1:40,000. In layman terms this means that in order to induce death a marijuana smoker would have to consume 20,000 to 40,000 times as much marijuana as is contained in one marijuana cigarette. NIDA-supplied marijuana cigarettes weigh approximately .9 grams. A smoker would theoretically have to consume nearly 1,500 pounds of marijuana within about fifteen minutes to induce a lethal response.

In practical terms, marijuana cannot induce a lethal response as a result of drug-related toxicity."

Source: US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration, "In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition" (Docket #86-22), September 6, 1988, p. 56-57. http://druglibrary.net/olsen/MEDICAL/YOUNG/young4.html

(edited to add)

Siegel must not be aware of this 2006 study that showed no risk of lung cancer from smoking marijuana:

Pot Smoking Not Linked to Lung Cancer. Study Shows No Increased Risk for Even the Heaviest Marijuana Smokers

The heaviest marijuana users in the study had smoked more than 22,000 joints, while moderately heavy smokers had smoked between 11,000 and 22,000 joints.

While two-pack-a-day or more cigarette smokers were found to have a 20-fold increase in lung cancer risk, no elevation in risk was seen for even the very heaviest marijuana smokers.

The more tobacco a person smoked, the greater their risk of developing lung cancer and other cancers of the head and neck. But people who smoked more marijuana were not at increased risk compared with people who smoked less and people who didn’t smoke at all.

...Cellular studies and even some studies in animal models suggest that THC has antitumor properties, either by encouraging the death of genetically damaged cells that can become cancerous or by restricting the development of the blood supply that feeds tumors, Tashkin tells WebMD.

Or this 2007 study that found Marijuana Cuts Lung Cancer Tumor Growth In Half

The active ingredient in marijuana cuts tumor growth in common lung cancer in half and significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread, say researchers at Harvard University who tested the chemical in both lab and mouse studies.

The only recent study to dispute the claims made from studies of humans and mice have been done on bacteria and cell cultures - tho, to his credit, maybe this was the study that led to Siegel's claim.

Siegel should have read this study:

Martin Frisher, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Health Services Research at Keele University, et al., stated the following in their Sep. 2009 article titled "Assessing the Impact of Cannabis Use on Trends in Diagnosed Schizophrenia in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 2005," published in Schizophrenia Research:

"The results of this study indicate that the incidence and prevalence of diagnoses of schizophrenia and psychoses in general practice did not increase between 1996 and 2005...

This study does not therefore support the specific causal link between cannabis use and the incidence of psychotic disorders...

The most parsimonious explanation of the results reported here are that the schizophrenia/psychoses data presented here are valid and the causal models linking cannabis with schizophrenia/psychoses are not supported by this study."

He should have read the Journal of Neuroscience report on the efficacy of cannabinoids for the relief of PTSD symptoms.

Time summed up the findings this way:

[the] marijuana-like compound had made extreme stress more like ordinary stress—and this could also be seen in terms of reductions in a key stress hormone in their brains.

Importantly, it didn't matter if the rats were given the drug before or after they experienced the stress. This suggests that this drug might work either before or after someone has suffered a traumatic event. It also shows that the drug doesn't erase memory—instead, it softens it and makes traumatic memory more like ordinary memory.

Even with these useful attributes, there may be risks to certain members of any population -- as is true with any substance, like aspirin, mentioned above, or peanut butter or penicillin, for those with allergies to those things. However, as a rational society, we decided that the benefits of those substances outweighed the risks for the small number of people who must be wary of them. Those decisions were relatively simple because we did not have 73 years of propaganda and misinformation to contend with when assessing the value or danger of those things.

...or news outlets making stereotypical assumptions about those who support the legalization of cannabis.

(And just a little remark here for journalists: please lay off the lame stoner references with every mention of medicinal marijuana. You look foolish.)

Marijuana study (again) indicates relative safety

Alternet, from the American Journal of Emergency Medicine

Investigators concluded, “[M]arijuana was by far the most commonly used (illicit) drug, but individuals who used marijuana had a low prevalence of drug-related ED visits.”

A 2009 Swiss study published in journal BMC Public Health previously reported that the use of cannabis was inversely associated with injuries requiring hospitalization.

A prior case-control study conducted by the University of Missouri also reported an inverse relationship between marijuana use and injury risk, finding, “Self-reported marijuana use in the previous seven days was associated … with a substantially decreased risk of injury.”

Most recently, a RAND study published this month reported that fewer than 200 total patients were admitted to California hospitals in 2008 for “marijuana abuse or dependence.” By contrast, there are an estimated 73,000 annual hospitalizations in California related to the use of alcohol.

the abstract is here

Dane Country, Wisconsin to Vote on Medical Marijuana

Wisconsin State Journal

An advisory referendum will ask Dane County voters in November whether they think the state should legalize medical marijuana after the County Board voted unanimously to place it on ballots.
The move made the county the state’s first to introduce a medical marijuana resolution. The question would ask: “Should the Wisconsin Legislature enact legislation allowing residents with debilitating medical conditions to acquire and possess marijuana for medical purposes if supported by their physician?”
Sup. John Hendrick of Madison, who introduced the resolution on Thursday, said he was surprised at the board’s unanimous vote but wouldn’t be surprised if the referendum passed by a 70-30 margin or better.
Hendrick said he personally supports the legalization of medical marijuana because he has known people with disabling conditions who have benefited from it. He added he’s aware that some people believe the law is being abused in the 14 states and the District of Columbia, where pot is legally distributed.

The Wisconsin Medical Society tried to get a similar referendum on the ballot eighteen years ago. When the Marijuana Tax Act was railroaded through the House in 1937, the American Medical Association Journal came out in opposition to the Act. The Act created barriers for doctors and patients to hinder prescription of marijuana as a way to full prohibition.

From David Solomon's introduction to the full text of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937:

Physicians who wish to purchase the one-dollar tax stamp so that they might prescribe it for their patients are forced to report such use to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in sworn and attested detail, revealing the name and address of the patient, the nature of his ailment, the dates and amounts prescribed, and so on. If a physician for any reason fails to do so immediately, both he and his patient are liable to imprisonment-and a heavy fine. Obviously, the details of that regulation make it far too risky for anyone to have anything to do with marijuana in any way whatsoever.

Regulations No. 1 was more than an invasion of the traditional right of privacy between patient and physician; it was a hopelessly involved set of rules that were obviously designed not merely to discourage but to prohibit the medical and popular use of marijuana. In addition to the Marihuana Tax Act and Regulations No. 1, the Bureau of Narcotics prepared a standard bill for marihuana that more than forty state legislatures enacted. This bill made possession and use of marihuana illegal per se, and so reinforced the federal act.

Seventy-three years is a long time to wait for justice.

National Geographic Channel: Marijuana

Libertarian Stoner: US Governments Ok With Ecstasy To Treat PTSD But N...

Libertarian Stoner: US Governments Ok With Ecstasy To Treat PTSD But N...: "'Testing by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in California was limited but the results were significant enough fo..."

No Trademarks for Cannabis Entrepreneurs For Now

Wall Street Journal

On April 1, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office created a new trademark category: "Processed plant matter for medicinal purposes, namely medical marijuana." The patent office, part of the Department of Commerce, posted the new category on its website.

The patent-office change set off a land rush by pot dealers in the 14 states where laws permit medical-marijuana sales. Some staked claims on rights to long-used names like Maui Wowie and Chronic. Others applied to trademark business names such as Budtrader and Pot-N. Two companies applied to trademark psychoactive sodas named Keef Cola and Canna Cola.

"It looked like a positive step to me. We don't have many steps by the federal government legitimizing medical cannabis," said Steve DeAngelo, executive director of the Harborside Health Center medical marijuana dispensary in Oakland, Calif., who hired an intellectual-property lawyer to trademark his company name before the patent office created the new trademark category.

But last week the patent office snuffed out the promise of federal recognition. On Tuesday, after questions about the new pot-trademark category from a Wall Street Journal reporter, a patent-office spokesman said the office planned to remove the new pot classification by week's end, and the category is now off the website.

The issue is trademark, not patent - attempts to lay claim to certain strains as a trademark of your business product versus someone else's. The business side of the legalization issue brings to the fore a little truth-in-advertising about American society. Laws exist not merely to protect, but also to exclude others when no protection is necessary. This is how prohibition laws work, as well.

The coming cannabis industry needs regulations to provide useful information to patients and connoisseurs. Trademarks don't provide information. They provide protection from competitors by perhaps, in this case, manipulating the use of well-known strains and terms. That's not what people need. We need information about the chemical composition of specific strains, with percentages of THC and other cannabinoids, with standards for how all strains are grown for legal sale and consumption so that people can make informed choices.

While I appreciate the value of legitimizing the legalization push if the Patent and Trademark office had chosen to acknowledge the existing industry, the cannabis industry needs to set terms, like wine growers, for the use of words like "kush," in the same way that a wine is a "pinot noir" because of the grape. Let the cannabis capitalists fight out the trade wars on those terms first, please.

Democratic Politicians Reveal Further Spine Degeneration

California Democrats demonstrate, yet again, their spinelessness in the face of ridiculous right wing laws.

L.A. Times

"If we endorse Proposition 19 and take a courageous position to support reform, just as we took courageous positions on same-sex marriage and other contentious issues, we will win the moral argument, we will win Proposition 19 and we will win races in November," Cruickshank said. (Cruickshank is the public policy director for the Courage Campaign, an organization that lobbies for progressive causes.)

I think it can be safely said that few Democrats currently in office or currently seeking office choose courageous or morally just positions on issue after issue that concern the well-being and personal freedom of American citizens.

The party's executive board, which includes elected officials and party representatives from across the state, voted 101 to 85 against an endorsement. But the Democrats, despite taking a cautious stance, appeared solidly behind the initiative, cheering and whooping much more raucously for the pro-endorsement speakers.

Dan Rush, an official with Local 5 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, who is running the legalization campaign's labor outreach, said an endorsement would have been a "great boost" but that a neutral position was still a victory. "We could have gotten a resounding no," he said.

In other words, Democratic politicians must be forced to do the right thing by the people at the ballot box. People of California, are you ready to show them the way to peace after the drug war?

Drug War Rant re: Kleinman's "CA Can't Legalize" Op Ed

Drug WarRant.com

The point is that the federal government has to be pushed into doing the right thing, and merely writing your Congresscritter ain’t going to do it. It takes pressure from a lot of directions, and California passing legalization is one of those directions that could have a lot of push.

Kleiman has worked hard to establish himself as the go-to academic on drug policy, along with the almost incestuous group of think-tank folks whose name appears on every drug policy paper that comes along (and of course, on his list of favorite books on drug policy). Well, if you want to be in the inner circle, it just won’t do to promote legalization publicly. If you want to be invited to chat with the drug czar, you can criticize prohibition, but you can’t suggest that there should be an alternative.

This puts Kleiman in the rather ridiculous position of opposing every aspect of prohibition, yet still looking around for some way to make it work better (like doing it “less”). Or, instead of really dealing with the whole problem, picking one tiny aspect and focusing totally on it (like his promotion of the HOPE program — a worthwhile program that should be promoted, but which has as much likelihood of solving prohibition’s destruction as increasing the budget for the USO would have in instituting world peace).

Regarding his prejudices… the biggest one is against the people who are for legalization.

Kleinman responds to this OP in comments. Insults all around. This is a good thing - at least the war on drugs is getting the same level of discourse that we see about issues like social security and health care reform. ahem.

Feel Free?

The War on Drugs has accomplished none of its goals

MSN, May 13, 2010

After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked. "In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."

Nevertheless, [the Obama] administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.

A Guide to Medical Marijuana Laws by State

From the site, http://itsokaytogrow.com/laws-ethics/

Mark Kleinman Claims CA cannot legalize cannabis

L.A. Times

There's one problem with legalizing, taxing and regulating cannabis at the state level: It can't be done. The federal Controlled Substances Act makes it a felony to grow or sell cannabis. California can repeal its own marijuana laws, leaving enforcement to the feds. But it can't legalize a federal felony. Therefore, any grower or seller paying California taxes on marijuana sales or filing pot-related California regulatory paperwork would be confessing, in writing, to multiple federal crimes. And that won't happen.

the feds can afford to take a laid-back attitude toward California's medical marijuana trade because it's unlikely to cause much of a trafficking problem in the rest of the country. Because dispensaries' prices are just as high as those for black-market marijuana, there's not much temptation to buy the "medical" sort in California and resell it out of state.

By contrast, the non-medical cannabis industry that would be allowed if Proposition 19 passed would quickly fuel a national illicit market. According to a study issued by the RAND Corp.'s Drug Policy Research Center this month, if the initiative passes, the pretax retail price of high-grade sinsemilla marijuana sold legally in California is likely to drop to under $40 per ounce, compared with current illicit-market (or dispensary) prices of $300 an ounce and more. Yes, the counties would have authority to tax the product, but even at a tax rate of $50 an ounce — more than 100% of the pretax price — the legal California product would still be a screaming bargain by national standards, at less than one-third of current black-market prices.

As a result, pot dealers nationwide — and from Canada, for that matter — would flock to California to stock up. There's no way on earth the federal government is going to tolerate that. Instead, we'd see massive federal busts of California growers and retail dealers, no matter how legal their activity was under state law.

Don't want to make the federal baby Jesus cry, I suppose, by forcing the federal govt. to acknowledge the racist and unscientific basis for the current federal law.

p.s. Drug Laws Have Little Impact on Cannabis Use. So says this abstract from the American Journal of Public Health

Cornell Study Indicates New Yorkers Support Legalization

Cash Crop

Cash Crop (via Slate and Big Money) is a blog that is keeping track of the changes in marijuana legislation.

A wide majority of New York State residents support legalizing pot for medicinal use, according to a poll conducted by Cornell University. The support cuts across geographic, demographic, and, to a lesser degree, political lines.

More than two-thirds of New Yorkers want medical pot legalized, a fact that could help push a forward a proposal in the state legislature to approve it. According to High Times, bills to allow medical pot have come up several times over the past dozen years, and have even passed the state assembly twice, only to be shot down in the Senate.

The legislature might yet pass a bill this year, though, since the state's budget, now three months late, is being debated in Albany. The state could raise between $10 million and $15 million a year from legalizing pot. Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried, the Democrat sponsoring the bill, told the Poughkepsie Journal that his law, if passed, would be the "most narrow and restrictive of any law in the country."

Toronto Hosted Its First Medical Cannabis Expo This Month

UPI

Organizers of Toronto's International Medical Marijuana Expo say they want to attract people tired of taking pharmaceutical drugs with adverse side-effects.

CBC

A view from 2009 about medical marijuana in Canada.

In 2001, Ottawa came up with a solution to the problem, becoming the first country to adopt a formal system to regulate the medicinal use of marijuana — the Marijuana Medical Access Regulations.

The policy allowed people suffering from terminal illnesses or severe conditions such as epilepsy, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and cancer to use the drug if it eased their symptoms.

Some people would be able to grow marijuana themselves under strict guidelines. Others would be allowed to buy it from companies licensed by the government. Ottawa awarded the first (and so far, the only) federal licence to supply marijuana to a Saskatoon-based company, Prairie Plant Systems. The pot is grown in an underground mine in Flin Flon, Man.

In early 2003, the Supreme Court of Ontario ruled that the medical access regulations were unconstitutional because they were failing to provide a legal supply of the drug. Ottawa responded later that year with a plan to provide dried marijuana or seeds to Canadians authorized to take marijuana for medical reasons. That plan — occasionally tweaked — remains largely intact to this day.

Who qualifies for medical marijuana authorization?
Condition Symptoms
Multiple sclerosis; spinal cord injury; spinal cord disease Severe pain, persistent muscle spasms
Cancer; AIDS; HIV infection Severe pain, cachexia, anorexia, weight loss, severe nausea
Severe arthritis Severe pain
Epilepsy Seizures
People with terminal illnesses
People suffering from symptoms of medical conditions other than those above (assessment by specialist required)
Source: Health Canada

NAACP Backs Legalization

Capitol Weekly

...the California State Conference of the NAACP announced its “unconditional endorsement” of a November initiative that would legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

On Tuesday, the NAACP said why. According to a just-released study by the Drug Policy Alliance, blacks are far more likely to be arrested for pot possession than whites — even though statistically, blacks use marijuana at lower rates than whites. The Alliance, a national advocacy group, favors treatment rather than arrest or imprisonment for people suffering from drug dependency.

At a press conference at the California NAACP’s Sacramento headquarters, the group’s president, Alice Huffman, portrayed marijuana laws as a means of criminalizing young black men. She was joined by several other African-America leaders, including Aubry Stone, president of the California Black Chamber of Commerce, and Neil Franklin of the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).

“It is time for them to stop using my community to fill the prisons,” Huffman said. “Once you get into the system, the next time you get arrested, they bump you up [to more serious charges].”

First DEA Raid on Medical Cannabis Grower in Utah

Ukiah Daily

"I don't know why this came up on the DEA's radar," Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman said, adding that none of the other approximately 10 applicants had been raided by the DEA.

"I'm sure when the case is unsealed by the judge we'll know a whole lot more," Allman said.

The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors finalized changes in the county's ordinance governing the cultivation of medical marijuana earlier this year - codified as section 9.31 of the county code. Among the changes is an exemption to the county's 25-plants-per-parcel rule for cooperatives that apply for a permit with the Sheriff's Office.

The changes were effective in May, and the county adopted permit and garden inspection fees June 22. The permit requires applicants to buy a zip tie for each of their plants from the Sheriff's Office, which are intended to signify that the plants were inspected for compliance with state and local law.

Rand Corporation Predicts Plummet in Price of Cannabis

with the advent of legalization. Of course, if the state taxes cannabis, like alcohol, the money would go to the state, not just the supplier.

WLNS/AP

The researchers said legalization could bring substantially more revenue if California sees an influx of "marijuana tourism" similar to Amsterdam, where pot is legally sold at coffee shops, and if out-of-state dealers purchase California cannabis to sell back home.

"You would certainly guess that if it's cheaper to produce it in California legally than to import it from Mexico, it would reduce imports from Mexico," Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon University who also worked on the study, said. "Presumably, it would decrease them a lot."

Yet intervention from the federal government, which classifies marijuana as an illegal drug, or regulations limiting marijuana sales to California residents, as is the case now with medical marijuana, easily could defeat dreams of tourists flocking to the coast on pot vacations, Caulkins noted.

Consumer prices for pot would rise to about $91 an ounce if local governments adopt that same $50 an ounce tax scheme following passage of the ballot measure - still substantially lower than what Californians pay now but high enough to create incentives for growers to sell the drug under the table to avoid paying the government duty.

Michigan Returns to its Roots

WXYZ (ABC) News

Nick Tennant opened Med Grow Cannabis College in Southfield about a year ago. Since then he says he’s watched nearly one thousand students go through the program. It’s a diverse group, including people who really need an income.

Nick told us, “You have laid off autoworkers that have come in looking for a new means of viability for their career path. There are people from age 21 to 81 learning to grow medical marijuana.”

Nick himself used to work in the auto industry. But when opportunities started drying up he saw growth potential as a legalized marijuana supplier and educator. “It was a new industry, something Michigan had never seen.”

At Med Grow Cannabis College, potential suppliers attend six weeks of classes. For a fee of $475 they learn how to start a medical marijuana business.

Market Watch

Ghosts of Michigan Past This Halloween: Medical Marijuana meet up in the Pontiac Center

Henry Ford's Hemp Car

BBC: Requiem for Detroit

A View of the Future City, circa 1926

Why Does the U.S. Have a Synthetic Fetish?

UPI

A marijuana component could provide pain relief, minus marijuana's other effects, U.S. researchers say.

Researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston find this pain relief component zeroes in on a particular nerve receptor so the other mental and physical side effects associated with marijuana, also known as cannabis, are avoided.

The study, published in Anesthesia & Analgesia, says the synthetic cannabinoid or cannabis-related compound, called MDA19 -- which acts more narrowly on a on a subtype of cannabinoid receptors -- is located in the brain but also in the peripheral immune system.

Naguib and colleagues conducted experiments analyzing the pharmacology and effects of the synthetic cannabinoid MDA19. It affected two subtypes of cannabinoid chemical receptor -- CB1, found mainly in the brain, and CB2, found mainly in the peripheral immune system -- the study says.

If cannabis is grown for the effects of cannabinoids other than C1, the thc effects would be minimized. Why bother with a synthetic? Oh, to maintain the war on drugs...that are not offered by large pharmaceutical companies.

An Interview with Dr. Raphael Mechoulam

Smart Publications

Raphael Mechoulam, Ph.D., is the Lionel Jacobson Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has been working on cannabinoid chemistry (a term he coined) for over forty years. Throughout this time Dr. Mechoulam and colleagues have made some of the most important contributions to the field of cannabinoid research. His lab was the first to identify and synthesize delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive compound in cannabis. This discovery in 1964 (with Dr. Yehiel Gaoni) opened the door to a whole new field of medical research that began exploring, not only the therapeutic potential of THC (marketed as Marinol in America), but other natural and synthetic cannabinoids as well, and offered exciting new insights into how the brain functions.

It turns out that the brain actually has a whole family of cannabinoid neurotransmitters and receptors. Just as the active compound in opium (morphine) led to the discovery of the endorphin (endogenous morphine) system in the brain, the active compound in cannabis (THC) led to the discovery of the brain's endocannabinoid system. Later Dr. Mechoulam and colleagues identified the THC metabolites and, more recently, along with Dr. Lumir Hanus and Dr. Shimon Ben-Shabat, he discovered a second endocannabinoid known as 2-arachidonylglycerol (2-AG). These findings have profoundly advanced our understanding of cannabinoid systems.

Endocannabinoids function as neuroprotective agents. They are part of the brain's reward system, and they help with the reduction of pain.

Vigorous exercise stimulates the release of anandamide, and the sense of euphoric well-being that comes with a healthy workout—what jogging enthusiasts refer to as a "runner's high"—is due to elevated levels of endocannabinoids. The endocannabinoid system in the brain is also believed to help mediate emotions, consolidate memory, and coordinate movement. In fact, cannabinoid receptors are found in higher concentrations than any other receptor in the brain, and the endocannabinoid system acts essentially in just about every physiological system that people have looked into.

Scientists Test Cannabis as Treatment for MS, Inflammation and Cancer

Science News

...Research now suggests that multiple sclerosis could join the growing list of cannabis-treated ailments. More than a dozen medical trials in the past decade have shown that treatments containing THC (and some that combine THC with another derivative called cannabidiol, or CBD) not only ease pain in MS patients but also alleviate other problems associated with the disease. MS results from damage to the fatty sheaths that insulate nerves in the brain and spinal cord.

CBD, the same cannabis component that proved beneficial alongside THC for MS, may also work on other hard-to-treat diseases. Tests on cell cultures and lab animals have revealed that CBD fights inflammation and mitigates the psychoactive effects of THC.

...Crohn’s disease, which can lead to chronic pain, diarrhea and ulcerations, could be a fitting target for CBD. In Crohn’s disease, inflammatory proteins damage the intestinal lining, causing leaks that allow bacteria in the gut to spread where they shouldn’t. This spread leads to a vicious cycle that can trigger more inflammation.

...Biochemists Guillermo Velasco and Manuel Guzmán of Complutense University in Madrid have spent more than a decade establishing in lab-dish and animal tests that THC can kill cancer of the brain, skin and pancreas.

THC ignites programmed suicide in some cancerous cells, the researchers reported in 2009 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The team’s previous work showed that THC sabotages the process by which a tumor hastily forms a netting of blood vessels to nourish itself, and also keeps cancer cells from moving around.

Fora TV: Marijuana Economics

For the Economy, Help is Not on the Way

Common Dreams

If there's some new technological innovation--like the Internet in the early 1990s--waiting in the wings, no one has heard or seen it.

Forget about Congress. The feds wasted hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out banks, insurance companies and big automakers who used our taxpayer money to give raises to their top executives and remodel their offices. Meanwhile, the stimulus that needed to happen--bailing out distressed homeowners, small businesses and individuals who lost their jobs--never happened. Now Congress is worried about the deficit. So read my lips: no new bailouts, not even one that might actually work.

Some think the U.S. could export its way out of the depression. But a radical restructuring of trade agreements and manufacturing infrastructure would have to come first, followed by years of expansion. U.S. policymakers haven't even begun to think about the first move. Moreover, the rest of the world isn't in a position to buy our stuff. The rate of expansion of the economies of China and Japan is slowing down. Germany and other EU nations are imposing austerity measures.

Globalization is key. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, John H. Makin argues that the actions of individual G20 nations threaten to bring the whole system crashing down in a Keynesian "paradox of thrift."

22 Statistics That Prove the Middle Class is Being Systemically Wiped Out of Existence

Business Insider

The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.
The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-statistics-that-prove-the-middle-class-is-being-systematically-wiped-out-of-existence-in-america-2010-7#ixzz0uAVrZv7m

M. Ward: Post War

Against the War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex

Alternet

...it is only three and a half months left until the mid-term elections on November 2, 2010 when California voters will decide whether to end the senseless marijuana prohibition and the destructive war that the United States government wages against its own people, the infamous and tragic “drug war”. While Cannabis freedom activists and their supporters lead this new Civil Rights struggle, while the DEA and its prohibitionist allies do everything they can, often resorting to the unimaginable theatrics, to prevent the sick people from gaining access to medicinal Cannabis in State after State, while politicians engage in their usual long-winded grandstanding aimed at showing that it is “I and not the next person” who is the “toughest” on drugs, it is certainly interesting to see where exactly does scientific community stand on all these issues and how it envisions moving forward from this artificially created “dead-end”.

...in the words of Dr. Barry Zevin of Waddell Health Center in San Francisco, ... “If something does not work and we keep doing it, what can we expect” ...clearly referring to the old, rigid “abstinence-based”, disciplinarian approaches to drug treatment that were prevalent in addiction treatment until recently, and are still advocated by some authorities, but which proved ineffective in reducing drug use, despite being quite congenial to the “well-being” of what the Conference participants exposed as the “prison-industrial complex” in the United States.

...Fatima Trigueiros, Senior Adviser to the Executive Board of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction in Portugal...told the participants that the proposal to decriminalize drug possession for “personal use” was being discussed in Portugal since 1976 and, as usual, the right-wing parties in Parliament were against it, while more left-leaning politicians were for it, until the personal possession of “illegal substances” in the amounts of up to ten days supply was finally decriminalized in 2001. Just like in the United States, the “right-wingers” in Portugal had predicted an “Armageddon” of an exploding drug use that would follow the decriminalization of drug possessions for “personal use”. However, as Mrs. Trigueiros pointed out, since the decriminalization of such “possessions” the drug use in Portugal actually DROPPED by 10%, and the new legislation proved so successful as to presently command the support of all political parties in Parliament, a situation “quite rare for any European Parliament”.

It's All About the Wages

Alternet

Missing from almost all discussion of America's dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June's decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent.

In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.

Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Americans' earnings are back in the stratosphere: Wall Street traders and executives, hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers, and top corporate executives. As hiring has picked up on the Street, fat salaries are reappearing. Richard Stein, president of Global Sage, an executive search firm, tells the New York Times corporate clients have offered compensation packages of more than $1 million annually to a dozen candidates in just the last few weeks.

...America's median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped.

...Each of America's two biggest economic downturns over the last century has followed the same pattern. Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928 -- with 23.5 percent of the total.

The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism

Truth Out

We live at a time that might be appropriately called the age of the disappearing intellectual, a disappearance that marks with disgrace a particularly dangerous period in American history. While there are plenty of talking heads spewing lies, insults and nonsense in the various media, it would be wrong to suggest that these right-wing populist are intellectuals. They are neither knowledgeable nor self-reflective, but largely ideological hacks catering to the worst impulses in American society.

...In a media scape and public sphere that view criticism, dialog and thoughtfulness as a liability, such anti-intellectuals abound, providing commentaries that are nativist, racist, reactionary and morally repugnant. But the premium put on ignorance and the disdain for critical intellectuals is not monopolized by the dominant media, it appears to have become one of the few criteria left for largely wealthy individuals to qualify for public office. One typical example is Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who throws out inanities such as labeling the Obama administration a "gangster government."

...With the advent of neoliberalism, or what some call free-market fundamentalism, we have witnessed the production and widespread adoption throughout society of what I want to call the politics of economic Darwinism. As a theater of cruelty and a mode of public pedagogy, economic Darwinism undermines all forms of solidarity while simultaneously promoting the logic of unrestricted individual responsibility. But there is more at stake here than an unchecked ideology of privatization.[10] For example, as the welfare state is dismantled, it is being replaced by the harsh realities of the punishing state as social problems are increasingly criminalized and social protections are either eliminated or fatally weakened. The harsh values of this new social order can be seen in the increasing incarceration of young people, the modeling of public schools after prisons and state policies that bail out investment bankers, but leave the middle and working classes in a state of poverty, despair and insecurity.

Woody Guthrie

Incomes Gains for Richest Greater than Any Time Since 1928

The Center on Budget and Policy

The gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007 (the period for which these data are available), according to data the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued last week. Taken together with prior research, the new data suggest greater income concentration at the top of the income scale than at any time since 1928.

While the recession that began in December 2007 likely reduced the income of the wealthiest Americans substantially and may thereby shrink the income gap between rich and poor households, a similar development that occurred around the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the 2001 recession turned out to be just a speed bump. Incomes at the top more than made up the lost ground from 2003 to 2005.

Sheldon Whitehouse: Clean Out Corporations From Government | Video Cafe

Sheldon Whitehouse: Clean Out Corporations From Government | Video Cafe

Why Our Nobles Betray Us

from Cenk Uygur

"They have much to lose." You see, those nobles profited from the status quo of that time. Wallace means to upend that status quo. It's naïve to think that they will help him because they love their country. Of course, they will work against him because they don't want to lose their status, power and riches. That status quo might suck for everyone else, but it's great for them.

And so it is with our nobles today. We keep expecting the politicians and the mainstream press to do the right thing. That is profoundly naive. Why is a television anchor making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year going to look to change the system? He loves the system. The system pays the bills.

That's even truer of our politicians. The status quo got them elected. The status quo will get them -- and their staffers -- great salaries when they retire and become lobbyists. They'd have to be crazy to change the system that put them up on top.

That's why change must come from outside the system. We keep waiting for the Obama administration to bring us the change they promised. What are we, children? The current system got Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, etc. where they are. They have gotten to the pinnacle of power by playing within that system. They've made millions in that system. That's why they have no intention of actually upending it. They just want to tweak it and do exactly what Obama said he wouldn't do if he got elected -- play the Washington game just a little better.

U.S. govt. demonstrates its lack of concern for American health

U.S. is, once again, last in healthcare among 6 western nations, via Reuters

Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries -- Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found.

(from June 23rd)