On Tuesday, a group of doctors held a news conference to announce the support of nearly 250 Illinois physicians for allowing patients with serious illnesses to obtain and use medical marijuana if their doctors recommend it.

Specifically, the doctors signed on to the following statement:

Licensed medical practitioners should not be punished for recommending the medical use of marijuana to seriously ill people, and seriously ill people should not be subject to criminal sanctions for using marijuana if their medical professionals have told them that such use is likely to be beneficial.

Their endorsement comes just as the Illinois House of Representatives prepares to vote on House Bill 1, which would allow patients with serious illnesses to use medical marijuana with recommendations from their physicians.

The bill would also establish a network of state-regulated cultivation centers and dispensaries to provide marijuana to qualified patients.

If passed, Illinois would become the 19^th state to legalize medical marijuana.

Pennsylvania will again consider making medical marijuana legal. The Governor Raymond P. Shafer Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act, or House Bill 1181, was introduced Monday at the State House, and it has since been assigned to the House Health Committee for consideration.

The bill would allow anyone with a debilitating condition such as HIV/AIDS or cancer to use medical marijuana provided they obtain a written recommendation from a doctor with whom they have a “bona-fide doctor-patient relationship.”

The bill also addresses the Department of Health’s role in patient registry and the issuing of identification cards to medical marijuana patients and their primary caregivers.

There is already a Senate companion bill to this (SB 770). If you are a resident of Pennsylvania, please contact your lawmakers and ask them to support medical marijuana legislation.

In 1976, the idea that marijuana could be a medicine was generally taken as laughable. Then a glaucoma patient named Robert Randall won a court ruling that he needed the drug to keep from going blind. His case started a movement that could finally make headway here. The Illinois House is set to vote this week on a bill to allow the therapeutic use of cannabis.

Illinois is not exactly on the cutting edge here. California took this step in 1996, and 18 states now grant access. Polls have consistently found a large majority of Americans believe that pot has medical uses and should be available for doctors to prescribe for treating illnesses.

They have good reason for those convictions. In 1999, a panel of the federal Institute of Medicine concluded, “Scientific data indicate the potential therapeutic value of cannabinoid drugs . . . for pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation.” The American Medical Association has urged the federal government to allow research on the medical uses of marijuana.

Illinois legislators have repeatedly declined to let patients gain access to a drug that many say offers relief they get from nothing else. But lawmakers finally may be ready to pass a bill sponsored by Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie, creating a process to allow access to those with serious medical needs.

The nice thing about the delay is that Illinois has had the chance to learn from the good and bad of policy in other states. Under this measure, patients whose doctors prescribe cannabis would be able to get it, but under sensible controls.

In California, often decried for lax regulation and wide-open access, patients can grow their own pot, get prescriptions from doctors who work at marijuana dispensaries and qualify for vague ailments. Lang’s bill is designed to make sure legalization of medical marijuana does not amount to de facto legalization of recreational marijuana.

To that end, it requires patients to obtain prescriptions from doctors with whom they have pre-existing and ongoing relationships, and only for specific conditions, including cancer, HIV and multiple sclerosis, but excluding pain and mental illness. Patients would have to register with the state health department, undergo a background check and get an ID card.

The number of dispensaries would be limited to avert an explosion of storefront outlets, and they would be barred near schools, playgrounds and churches. Patients would not be allowed to grow their own pot, unlike in California. They would be permitted only 2.5 grams every two weeks — also unlike the Golden State, which imposes no limit. The bill requires drivers suspected of using pot to submit to field sobriety tests, on pain of having their licenses suspended.

It’s important to give doctors and patients the freedom to use cannabis for whatever medical value it has. It’s also important to treat it as a potent drug whose unchecked proliferation can bring troublesome side effects. This bill does both, and it deserves to pass.

Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Published: April 16, 2013
Copyright: 2013 Chicago Tribune Company, LLC
Website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Ralph Miller was barely 30 years when he was hand-picked to lead a Canadian commission on whether marijuana should be legalized.

As research director, it was his job to guide a small army of scientists to investigate the nonmedicinal impact of a much-demonized drug during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

On May 29, 1969, then-prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau appointed Gerald Le Dain, a former dean of Osgoode Hall Law School and a future Supreme Court justice, to lead the inquiry. Le Dain hired the Miller — one of the few scientists who had a foot in both academia and the alternative culture. He was working at McMaster University at the time and had come to Canada a few years earlier from his native Detroit.

It has been described as one of the most comprehensive royal commissions ever conducted. The inquiry lasted almost four years. Nearly 30 public hearings took place across the country. Miller’s group oversaw 120 projects examining the physiological, psychological and behavioural effects of marijuana and other illegal drugs. They looked at extent and patterns of use, the social context of these drugs, how they played in mass media, legal and illegal sources of distribution, their role in law enforcement and the correctional system, among other things.

Around the same time, research funded by Ontario’s Conservative government was underway in Toronto to study the long-term effects of marijuana smoking in male and female volunteers. Dr. C.G. (Bill) Miles’ series of studies for the Addiction Research Foundation fed into the commission’s work though only portions of the results from the male studies were ever published.

By the time the commission issued its last of four reports in 1973, the perceived “drug crisis” in Canada was already waning. The commissioners were divided on whether pot should be legalized or decriminalized and much of the innovative research was left unanalyzed, according to Miller. The material was packed into boxes bound for the national archives. Miller says he would be willing to advise keen graduate students on how to start unpacking some of that rich data.

the Toronto Star spoke with Miller by email at an ashram in Rishikesh, India, and later by phone in West Vancouver, B.C., where he still consults on the impact of marijuana as well and holistic psychology.

“I have gotten a lot of mileage (kilometerage?) out of my Le Dain cannabis research,” he quipped by email.

Here is an edited transcript of his remarks on the collision of marijuana, science and politics from that time.

What prompted the commission?

“There was a lot of talk that drugs were destroying our youth, that hospitals were full of young people gone crazy on the use of drugs and that crime had gone up from drugs.

That was the crisis that caused Trudeau to say what is going on here.

All it was originally going to be was a departmental inquiry about marijuana issues. And then of course concern about LSD, psychedelics and so on.

At that point, coke hadn’t really reared its head in Canada much and heroin was entirely restricted to the West Coast.

Their great mistake, the Cabinet’s, is that they didn’t specifically exclude anything. They didn’t consider alcohol and tobacco to be drugs because in the general population it isn’t.

I made a point on logical grounds and in terms of physiological and socioeconomic effects, we had to include alcohol.

So the interim report did include alcohol, but not tobacco.

But I wrote all the tobacco stuff and stuffed it in the final report with only general approval at the end because they didn’t want to tackle that as well.

But when you look at the alcohol and drug research, it makes everything else a bad joke.

That’s why I quit working in the area.

They weren’t interested in the problem, in terms of the socio-economic impact of drugs, which means alcohol and tobacco. Added up, everything else is nothing compared to alcohol and tobacco problems.”

How did you land the job?

“They couldn’t find anyone in Canada qualified who also had a foot in the alternative culture.

I had given a talk on the non-medical use of drugs as part of a university conference. Le Dain heard about that and called me personally at McMaster to meet with him.

At that time, I had a giant Afro (dark brown, black) and had recently escaped from the U.S. to McMaster.

I purposely didn’t spiff myself up.

Le Dain himself was a conservative man, but brilliant, funny and intellectually honest.

I thought this was going to be just another government blah, blah, blah and I wasn’t really interested.

In my interview he never mentioned my hair.

Now my hair is trimmed up. I have my vice-president Biden hairdo on now.

No one else had ever been paid to work full time in these areas. Not only doing the original research, but surveying anyone who had ever done any LSD or any cannabis research. No one else had ever been in a position to do this before.

I was easily the world expert in cannabis.

What were some of the highlights of your research?

There were some amazing and funny things.

We got permission to use the RCMP airport at Rockcliffe. We wanted to see how fast stoners could drive around, what they would run over, if they could park.

That’s where the first driving studies were done.

We tested marijuana and alcohol on runways they weren’t using at the time.

We had regular stoners rating as high as they ever got and still driving around in the RCMP airport.

We did the first and only survey of every RCMP officer, went through all of their chemical analysis records in detail. And three months later, we had the meeting with the RCMP officers.

They were very embarrassed because they were expected to have all this data on marijuana and crime.

Other than busting people for simple possession and small dealers, they had nothing, except some guys who got busted for marijuana and were already under suspicion for gang rape a few weeks earlier. There was one case of a young man who turned out to be schizophrenic. He had taken hash and assaulted his parents. But it wasn’t clear it was even in the same month.

They said they were sure the world literature would support them, which it didn’t.

So that blew away the marijuana-causing-crime issue.

The LSD crimes were a young man naked worshipping the golden boy statue in front of the capitol building in Manitoba; some guys naked running through Stanley Park; and three people caught inappropriately dressed worshipping the trees in the park.

One of the crimes was he pulled into a gas station while high on LSD and tried to get them to service six imaginary automobiles. How’s that for heavy crime?

The worst one of all? A woman was caught attempting to fornicate with a peanut-vending machine.

The RCMP officers writing this down must have had a hoot but the head commissioners didn’t think this was funny at all. They were highly embarrassed.

We surveyed every psychiatric hospital and every hospital and major clinic with a psychiatric ward or outpatient clinic.

Physicians were seeing these kids coming in seeming schizy and that they were smoking dope and assumed that the families will want to blame something outside. Because it’s either the parenting or the outside. Because genetics is very hidden and not clearly known at that time.

In Ottawa, study, No difference between number of schizophrenics to be expected (1-3 per cent of population in age groups) and number being reported as being caused by marijuana/LSD. Which means marijuana or LSD was not likely causing anything but was maybe concomitant in increasing the symptoms.

The psych hospitals were full of people with alcohol problems. Again, alcohol wiped everything else off the map.

Was the drug crisis exaggerated?

“A general but not well-defined fear fed into “drug crisis.”

Many believed marijuana was a gateway drug. But in those days, few people smoked marijuana who didn’t start with tobacco.

I just gave a talk on that in India.”

Where did the pot for your research come from?

“A field run by the U.S. government in Kentucky. They collected seeds from around the world and were growing them in different conditions there.

Kentucky pot was a dark, rich green.”

What happened?

“We ran out of money and all of the studies we did — the pharmacology studies — were left only in the not-finished, final statistical analysis.

They didn’t come up with the money for a follow-up until all of my staff members had jobs elsewhere.

That was in 1973/74.

All of our core research, even the data, is in the national archives. Most is still in microfiche. And most of it hasn’t been published other than in the reports. Except the stuff that we involved outside people who had their own research grants from universities in California and around Ontario that published on their own.

But I couldn’t do it free.

I had my two kids. No access to staff or computers.

I was living in a wonderful commune in Stanley Park, Vancouver. I worked at a rehab program.

When the commission was over, Trudeau put the word out to the prosecutors and the whole judicial system and police to not waste time on simple possession.

Trudeau couldn’t do much with it. There wasn’t the political will around the country. They were still very conservative about it.

And here we are, a half-century later just about, and now the issue is coming around again. It’s about time.

I’ve been disappointed that no one seems to be tracking down any of us about the political, socio-economic issues.

Even young Trudeau himself seems to be dealing with these issues and doesn’t mention his dad’s commission at all.

He’s fishing around for answers and his dad’s commission did the work. And people don’t even seem to recognize it.”

What was your final conclusion?

“The big plague of stoners bringing Canada to its knees is a farce.”

Source: Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd.
Link: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/04/08/governments_research_on_marijuanas_effects_done_long_ago.html
Author:Diana Zlomislic

The high rate of marijuana use among Canada’s youth is a by-product of strict drug control, pot activist and BC Green Party candidate Jodie Emery said.

Canada has the highest rate of cannabis use among young people in developed countries, according to a recent report by UNICEF. In Canada, 28 per cent of kids aged 11, 13 and 15 reported having used cannabis in the last 12 months. The data comes from a 2009-2010 World Health Organization (WHO) survey of 29 developed countries.

Canada also had the highest rates of youth marijuana use in a similar WHO survey conducted eight years prior, but the rate has gone down from 40 per cent to 28 per cent. While the situation may have improved, young people continue to use cannabis at a very high rate, despite laws against it.

In the Netherlands, a country known for its relaxed drug policy, only 17 per cent of youth said they used cannabis. Emery said that this actually makes sense.

“In countries with more liberal drug laws, the use of marijuana and other drugs is lower,” she said, a view that corresponds to the report’s findings.

Emery argued that the legalization and regulation of drugs help control the substance and keep it out of the hands of young people. When drugs are illegal, they’re controlled by criminal organizations, and gangs “give it to anyone who wants it,” she said. Further, these gangs make money off of prohibited drugs, so Emery asserts that politicians who support prohibition are in fact supporting gangs.

The health impacts of marijuana use are limited, and Emery says it’s no worse than alcohol, but a criminal record due to drug possession can have a life-long impact.

“The law causes more harm to young people than does the substance itself, Emery stated. “That needs to change.”

Emery makes it clear that she doesn’t condone marijuana use among children, and cited a report that suggested 16 could be an appropriate minimum age for marijuana use. The 2002 report, from a special committee to the Canadian Senate, recommended the legalization and regulation of marijuana. It said cannabis laws should only prohibit what causes demonstrable harm to others: illegal trafficking, impaired driving, and selling it to people under the age of sixteen.

Last November, a poll by Forum Research found that 65 per cent of Canadians support the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana. And yet, marijuana remains banned, with an exception for medical use.

Emery and many other proponents of legalization suggest that Canada follow the example of Washington state, which voted in November to legalize marijuana. The state will be regulating the sale of marijuana, while banning sales to young people, in the same way that alcohol is regulated.

Source: http://www.vancouverobserver.com/life/health/teen-marijuana-use-common-because-canadian-drug-policy-says-pot-activist

Author: Chris Lane

With three measures on the
May 21 ballot dealing with medical marijuana, backers of a City
Council-authored plan on Tuesday officially launched a campaign looking
to persuade voters why their compromise represents the best option.

"We are concerned," Councilman Paul Koretz said at a news conference
outside City Hall. "That’s why we are kicking off this campaign to make
people aware of Proposition D and what it would do."

Los Angeles has been grappling with the medical marijuana issue for
17 years and has been faced with an open system that has resulted in as
many as 1,000 unregulated dispensaries operating in the city.

Proposition D would limit the number of dispensaries to 135, while
restricting their locations near schools, parks and churches and placing
a 20 percent tax on gross receipts. It also requires background checks
of employees. It was developed by the city to counter two other measures
that qualified through the initiative process.

Proposition E also limits the number of dispensaries to 135, with
exemptions for collectives of five or fewer members. But it offers no
tax and fewer restrictions on locations. Prop. E backers have shifted
their support to Prop. D.

Proposition F offers no cap and was developed by other dispensary operators who would be shut out under the 135 cap.

Proposition F spokesman Garry South said it has stronger controls than Proposition D, by requiring clinics to follow
the same limitations on their locations, background checks of all
employees and volunteers, annual financial audits, parking requirements
and testing of the marijuana being dispensed.

"Prop. F does not limit the number of clinics and it does not grandfather in a select few dispensaries," South said.

Both Propositions D and F would impose a gross receipts tax of 20 percent for every $1,000 in revenue.

Rick Icaza, head of the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local
770, which has organized several of the clinics allowed under
Proposition D, said the measure is needed to have controls in place for
the allowed dispensaries.

"We need to make sure we have qualified people working at these
dispensaries, earning a good wage so they can support their families,"
Icaza said.

Don Duncan of the pro-medical marijuana group Americans for Safe Access said his organization also supports Measure D.

"We have been working to provide safe access since 2004," Duncan
said. "What Measure D is about is providing safe access. It makes it
permanent, safe and dignified."

As more states embrace legalized marijuana, the drug’s growing medicinal use has highlighted a disturbing fact for doctors: scant research exists to support marijuana’s health benefits.

Smoked, eaten or brewed as a tea, marijuana has been used as a medication for centuries, including in the U.S., where Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY) sold it until 1915. The drug was declared illegal in 1937, though its long history has provided ample anecdotal evidence of the plant’s potential medicinal use. Still, modern scientific studies are lacking.

What’s more, the federal government is scaling back its research funding. U.S. spending has dropped 31 percent since 2007 when it peaked at $131 million, according to a National Institutes of Health research database. Last year, 235 projects received $91 million of public funds, according to NIH data.

That’s left the medical community in a bind: current literature on the effects of medical cannabis is contradictory at best, providing little guidance for prescribing doctors.

“What’s happening in the states is not related to science at all,” said Beau Kilmer, co-director of RAND Corp.’s drug policy research center. Kilmer is also part of a group selected to advise the state of Washington on its legalization effort. “It’s difficult to get good information,” he said.

Two states, Washington and Colorado, have fully legalized the drug, 18 states allow its use for medical reasons and 17, including New York, have legislation pending to legalize it.

1999 Report

Donald Vereen, a former adviser to the last three directors of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, says that most doctors’ and policy makers’ knowledge on the subject stems from a 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine, an independent nonprofit that serves to provide information about health science for the government. The group summed up its findings saying cannabis appeared to have benefits, though the drug’s role was unclear.

The IOM report recommended clinical trials of cannabinoid drugs for anxiety reduction, appetite stimulation, nausea reduction and pain relief. It also found that the brain develops tolerance to marijuana though the withdrawal symptoms are “mild compared to opiates and benzodiazapines.”

“We don’t know that much more than what’s in that report,” said Vereen.

Vereen, for one, says marijuana’s effects on pain without the withdrawal symptoms associated with other medications are deserving of further study to develop better pain drugs.

Medical Benefits

Subsequent research suggests marijuana may help stimulate appetite in chemotherapy and AIDS patients, help improve muscle spasms in multiple sclerosis patients, mitigate nerve pain in those with HIV-related nerve damage and reduce depression and anxiety. It’s even been suggested that an active ingredient, THC, may prevent plaques in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s, according to a 2006 study by the Scripps Research Institute.

Still, fewer than 20 randomized controlled trials, the gold standard for clinical research, involving only about 300 patients have been conducted on smoked marijuana over the last 35 years, according to the American Medical Association, the U.S.’s largest doctor group.

A few small companies are trying to tap into an emerging market for marijuana therapies, which could exceed $1 billion in California alone, according to Mickey Martin, director of T-Comp Consulting in Oakland, California, which advises people who want to set up their own cannabis businesses.

$40 Weekly

His model of about 750,000 cannabis patients found that the estimated spending from California’s patient population is $1.1 billion, including $56 million in doctors’ fees and about $1 billion in medicine. That assumes roughly two-thirds of the patient population will pay $40 a week for medication, Martin said. Cannabis Science Inc., CannaVest Corp., and Medical Marijuana Inc. (MJNA) are among a handful of companies developing drugs based on cannabis research or medical marijuana itself.

Until more laws change, it will be difficult to study an illegal substance with the goal of turning it into a medication, researchers say. And since it’s illegal to grow, marijuana isn’t subjected to the rigorous quality control most medicines are, raising concerns patients may be at risk from contaminants, said Vereen.

Marijuana advocates point out inherent obstacles to conducting research: the National Institute on Drug Abuse controls all the cannabis used in approved trials, but the agency’s mandate is to study abuse of drugs, not health benefits.

FDA Dilemma

This creates dilemmas. The Food and Drug Administration, for instance, has approved a clinical trial studying whether marijuana can relieve symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The trial, however, which is in the second of three stages of clinical testing, is blocked. NIDA, which controls the legal testing supply of the drug grown at a University of Mississippi farm, has refused to supply the researchers with marijuana.

“NIDA is under a mandate from Congress to find problems with marijuana,” said Bob Melamede, CEO of Cannabis Science Inc. (CBIS), a Colorado Springs, Colorado-based company that develops medicines derived from marijuana. “If you want to run a study to show it cures cancer, they will not provide you with marijuana,” he said. “What you cannot do are the clinical studies that are necessary.”

Attempts to expand licensed facilities beyond the University of Mississippi farm, have been denied, including a petition from University of Massachusetts agronomist Lyle Craker. The Drug Enforcement Administration denied that request in 2011, reversing a 2007 recommendation from its own administrative law judge, Mary Ellen Bittner.

NIDA Projects

NIDA also administered the most projects from 2003 to 2012, overseeing $713 million split among 1,837 research efforts. The bulk of the funding in the past decade was devoted to evaluating marijuana’s risks, potential negative impacts on the brain and developing prevention and treatment strategies, according to NIDA.

“There’s been a significant amount of study, but not clinical research,” said Brad Burge, a spokesman for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a non- profit research and advocacy group. What’s lacking, says Burge, is “research intended to move marijuana, the plant, through the path to prescription approval by the FDA.”

Contradictory Findings

For now, the research that does exist is often contradictory. A survey of 4,400 people found that those who consumed marijuana daily or at least once a week reported less depressed mood than non-users, according to a 2005 report in the journal Addictive Behaviors. A 2010, however, study in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse of 14,000 found that anxiety and mood disorders were more common in those who smoked almost every day or daily.

Still, people continue to swear by medical marijuana. Cathy Jordan, 63, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at 36 and given 3 to 5 years to live. She smoked marijuana, a strain called Myakka Gold, on a Florida beach with friends, and from that day “the disease just stopped,” said her husband Bob, 65.

“All cannabis seems to work, and it’s slowed the progression,” he said in a telephone interview. They think marijuana may interfere with a neurotransmitter, glutamate, that can have harmful effects in the disease “but we’re just guessing here. All we know is when she doesn’t have it, she gets sick and when she does have it, she doesn’t get sick.”

On Feb. 25, they were raided for growing 23 plants for Cathy’s use. Bob was charged, though the prosecutors declined to press charges because of the medical records the couple supplied, he said. Currently, Cathy is the president of FL CAN, an advocacy group meant to generate support for changing marijuana policies.

Doctor Attitudes

Doctors’ attitudes are also shifting in favor of easing marijuana restrictions. The American Medical Association, the nation’s biggest doctor organization has called for a review of marijuana’s Schedule I status, a designation that declares it has no accepted medical use.

The American College of Physicians, the second-largest U.S. doctor organization with 133,000 members, also wants criminal penalties waived for doctors who prescribe marijuana and patients who smoke it. The drug could be useful to treat multiple sclerosis, nausea and pain, based on preliminary studies and pre-clinical lab work, the group said in a 2008 position paper calling for more research.

For the first time, a majority of Americans say they support legalization, according to a survey released April 4 by the Pew Research Center.

Restrictions Easing

As those views trickle up to law makers, there’s little doubt that the easing of marijuana restrictions on the state level will continue.

“We are in the middle of the river,” said Roger Roffman, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s school of social work who has studied marijuana use more than 20 years. “Change is happening so rapidly with both medical marijuana and non-medical marijuana, that it is too early to know what’s likely happening in terms of the effect.”

Source: Bloomberg.com (USA)
Author: Elizabeth Lopatto
Published: April 15, 2013
Copyright: 2013 Bloomberg L.P.
Contact: elopatto@bloomberg.net
Website: http://www.bloomberg.com/

The Board of Aldermen, the law-making body of St. Louis, Missouri, voted 22 to 3 in favor of reducing the penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana in the city to that of a traffic ticket.

Introduced earlier this year by Alderman Shane Cohn, the law gives police officers the option to redistribute some marijuana cases to the municipal court system, essentially making a criminal infraction a municipal offense.

Due to the absence of local marijuana laws in St. Louis, police charge offenders under the severe state laws.

“[Missouri] has some of the most draconian laws in the nation,” John Payne, executive director of Show-Me Cannabis Regulation, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Possession of 35 grams or less of marijuana is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. The ordinance reduces the penalty to a $100 to $500 fine and up to 90 days in jail.

The policy goes into effect June 1.

After a 40-year battle over the placement of marijuana in Schedule I,
the U.S. Court of Appeals, DC Circuit, ruled in January on the most
recent petition to reschedule marijuana in the case of AMERICANS FOR
SAFE ACCESS (ASA) v. DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION (DEA). The court ruled that the DEA had not
acted arbitrarily and capriciously when it denied ASA’s petition filed 9
years earlier to remove marijuana from Schedule I. Schedule I drugs
have "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United
States" and "a lack of accepted safety for use under medical
supervision" — a classification that holds marijuana more dangerous
than cocaine, morphine, or methamphetamine, all listed in Schedule II
with accepted medical uses. The court ruled that the research needed to
move marijuana out of Schedule I does not exist. We respectfully beg to
differ.

The DEA’s argument, stated in a 2006 report
from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is that
there are no "adequate and well-controlled studies" proving marijuana’s
efficacy. Though they noted a number of U.S.-based small-to-medium
sized randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of inhaled
marijuana for severe pain, spasticity, and wasting syndromes, all
showing valid medical benefits, they felt these were not big enough.
What DEA wants to see are akin to Phase III clinical trials — large
studies, involving hundreds of subjects, comparing marijuana to placebo
in a double-blind, randomized fashion for a specific indication —
exactly what the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants when
evaluating interstate drug marketing applications. Here’s the rub: those
kinds of studies have been done and are published
in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and yet neither the DEA, nor
the HHS, nor the Court took notice. Large, multicenter, randomized,
double-blind, placebo-controlled studies involving hundreds of patients
in America and abroad that are in some cases a year in duration have
been published in U.S. National Library of Medicine indexed journals
showing that marijuana, orally administered in extract form, can treat intractable pain in cancer and improve mobility and symptom control
in multiple sclerosis. What is arbitrary and capricious is federal
agencies have chosen to ignore these studies because they have been done
mainly in the private pharmaceutical drug development sector where
marijuana-infused products are produced, tested, and sometimes
strategically renamed. This hide and seek game has resulted in rigorous
research having little to no bearing on public scientific understanding
of the medical use of marijuana.

In the case of GW Pharma Ltd
(GWP) of Wiltshire, England, it is a mouth spray directly extracted
with liquid carbon dioxide from the flowers of two strains of marijuana
plants grown in UK-licensed company greenhouses from a worldwide marijuana seed collection that resided in the Netherlands until the late 1990s. In the case of the non-profit Institute of Clinical Research
(IKR) of Berlin, Germany, it is a capsulated alcohol extract made from
marijuana flowers grown in Switzerland and extracted in Germany.
Marijuana extracts have been produced for millennia for consumption, and
the public has an overriding interest and right to know that these
marijuana studies exist and that their results should logically have
bearing on how we as a society understand, utilize, value, and
ultimately classify marijuana.

So why do the feds not include marijuana resin extract studies when
weighing marijuana’s evidence base? Sometimes it is as simple as a name
game. Congress’s definition of marijuana — unchanged since 1937 — has
always included any compound, extract, or manufactured mixture containing a detectable amount of marijuana resin.
If marijuana resin has been extracted and dissolved into a solvent or
otherwise concentrated, that new substance is still called marijuana,
hash, or hash oil, and this form of marijuana often carries stricter
penalties, such as the life sentence penalty
recently adopted by Oklahoma in 2011 for first-offense hash production.
Millions have been punished under this full definition of marijuana
via their possession or distribution of marijuana-infused edibles such
as brownies or hash oil. Marijuana medicines made by GWP and IKR are
concentrated forms of the marijuana plant with marijuana resin as a
base. GWP’s lead product, imported for U.S. trials under DEA license,
was named "nabiximols"
(Sativex

It was no great feat, but as I predicted last October, Colorado and Washington have legalized pot, and Nevada is now in danger of losing our rightful place as the capital of forbidden fun.

On his tourism blog, Arthur Frommer wrote last year that we could “expect a torrent of new tourism to Seattle and Denver.”

The media is all over it, with a recent story filled with enough dumb pot puns and jokes to merit an editor’s termination, including references to “smoke signals,” grilled cheese sandwiches and food trucks, and fears that the feds could “harsh the mellow.”

Medical marijuana is already legal here, and Thursday a Nevada legislative committee approved the creation of medical marijuana dispensaries.

And last week, the Nevada Legislature took up a bill to legalize recreational marijuana.  It’s not going anywhere, but I applaud the Assembly Judiciary Committee for giving it a hearing.

Here’s why: There’s a better-than-even chance that recreational pot will be legal in Nevada after the 2016 election.

Wait, what’s that? you ask.

Let me explain.

For the first time, the Pew Research Center, the highly respected nonpartisan polling outfit, found that a majority of Americans favor marijuana legalization.

This wasn’t all that surprising, however, because a majority favored legalization for the first time in a Gallup poll last year.

More striking than the raw numbers is the trend, which points to rising support for legalization.

In fact, as an insightful recent piece in Talking Points Memo pointed out, the trend seems to parallel support for gay marriage.

The movement on gay marriage, recall, has been caused by a massive demographic shift whereby younger voters overwhelmingly favor marriage equality.  Same with marijuana.  Stay calm: Before you freak out, fearing the young are sitting around getting high all day, keep in mind that 6.9 percent of the population report using marijuana regularly, according to the most recent data.  Yes, that’s up from 5.8 percent in 2007, but way down from a high of 13.2 percent in 1979.

The real driver of the surge in popularity for both gay marriage and legalization of marijuana is a rapid increase in what I’d call the “Who Cares?” Caucus.  These younger voters – 1 in 5 of all voters in November were ages 18 to 29 – just don’t see the big deal with gay marriage or legal pot.

Conservatives have begun to throw in the towel on gay marriage, but on pot, some of them are actually leading the way, including National Review magazine, the organ of the establishment right.

So the trend is clear, and now, legalization advocates are looking for their next round of target states.  ( Just how the feds will react to this remains to be seen; marijuana is still illegal in the eyes of Washington.  )

Morgan Fox, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, told me that the big prize is California, home to 38 million people and a cultural bellwether for the rest of the nation.

But Nevada is also at the top of the list, he said.  It’s not hard to figure out why – we’re libertarian when it come to vices and have been able to integrate them into our culture and economy while maintaining a sense of normalcy.  ( OK, not entirely, but you get the point.  )

The voters rejected legal pot in the past, but that was seven years ago.

The target year is 2016, when lazy Democrats will get off the couch to elect the first woman president in American history.

Again, it’s happening.

Legalizers should temper their joy.  Yes, this is the right policy.  It could raise tax revenue and keep people out of the vortex that is the legal system.

And surely Nevada’s creative minds will figure out how to capitalize on legal pot.

But, as with end of the prohibition of gambling and alcohol, we need to put the right policies in place to deal with the relevant issues, including increased marijuana consumption, crime, underage use, driving while intoxicated, addiction, etc.

These are not simple issues, and while ending prohibition will relieve certain problems, it will create others.

If we don’t get the policy right, we could wind up with prohibition again.

So, in a way, it’s good that we aren’t taking action yet.  We can watch Colorado and Washington state, which are both pretty rational, decently governed states.  Then we can follow their lead, learning from their successes and failures.

But we need to start figuring this out, because it’s happening.  And 2016 will be here quick.

Source: Las Vegas Sun (NV)
Copyright: 2013 Las Vegas Sun, Inc
Contact: letters@lasvegassun.com
Website: http://www.lasvegassun.com/
Author: J. Patrick Coolican