Posts by Paul Armentano

Obama's Curious, Curt Response to a Torrent of Pot Legalization Questions
Posted by Paul Armentano, NORML on December 16, 2008 at 12:17 PM.

“The war on drugs has been an utter failure. (W)e need to rethink and decriminalize our (nation's) marijuana laws."

-Barack Obama, January 2004 (Watch the video here.)

"I inhaled frequently, that was the point."

-Barack Obama, November 2006 (Watch the video here.)

Q: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"

A: "President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana."

-Statement from Change.gov, the official website of President-Elect Obama, December 15, 2008

Okay, count me among those disappointed, but hardly surprised to see that Change.gov -- the official website of the incoming Obama administration -- answered the above question, which finished first out of over 7,000 public policy questions submitted to the website, in the most curt and dismissive way possible.

That said, as StoptheDrugWar.org's Scott Morgan writes, Obama's brevity is, in fact, quite telling.

As frustrating and insulting as it is to witness an important matter brushed casually to the side without explanation, Obama's answer actually says a lot. It says that he couldn't think of even one sentence to explain his position. Within the vast framework of totally paranoid anti-pot propaganda, Obama couldn't find a single argument he wanted to associate himself with. That's why he simply said "No. Next question."

All of this highlights the well-known fact that Obama agrees that our marijuana laws are deeply flawed. He's said so, and has back-pedaled recently for purely political reasons. If Obama's transition team tried to give an accurate description of his position on marijuana reform it would look like this:

Q: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?" S. Man, Denton

A: President-elect Obama will not use his political capital to advance the legalization of marijuana. While he agrees that arresting adults for marijuana possession is a poor use of law enforcement resources, he believes that the issue remains too controversial to do anything about it.

In fact, Obama essentially said as much earlier this year when asked about the legalization of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Pot Supporters Bang on Obama's Doors for Drug Reform
Posted by Paul Armentano, NORML on December 12, 2008 at 1:43 PM.

Change.gov, the Web site of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team, has now closed the Web page "Open for Questions."

After receiving nearly 100,000 total votes on more than 10,000 public policy issues, the most widely voted on question for Obama is:

"Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion-dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"

(Equally impressive, 16 of the top 50 overall questions posed to the new administration  pertained to drug-law reform. Now do we have your attention?)

According to the Change.gov site, "Over the next few days, some of the most popular questions selected by the Change.gov community will be answered by the Transition team, and their responses will be posted here on the site."

So does this mean that the Obama will post a response to the public's outcry for tangible marijuana-law reform? Or will the incoming administration choose to remain silent on the one progressive issue that the American public, but not their elected official, is "buzzing" about?

Meanwhile, over at the Web site Change.org (which is not affiliated with the Obama administration), your votes (nearly 2,500 of them as of this morning) have made the question, "Should we legalize the medicinal and recreational use of marijuana?" the top-rated idea on the Web site!

According to the site, there will be a second round of voting (this first round ends on Dec. 31) in January to determine which top 10 ideas are presented to the Obama administration on Inauguration Day.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Who's Getting Rich Off Prohibition? Just Look Who Opposes CA's Prop. 5
Posted by Paul Armentano, NORML on November 1, 2008 at 1:12 AM.

You can learn a lot about the merits of a proposal by taking a good, hard look at who's lobbying against it.

Take California's Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act, which would require the diversion of certain non-violent offenders to drug treatment and increase funding for state-sponsored rehabilitation programs. The measure seeks to expand upon the alternative sentencing programs initially enacted by Proposition 36, which is estimated to have saved taxpayers some $1.7 billion dollars and reduced the number of people incarcerated for simple drug possession by one-third. So who would oppose this proposal?

If you guessed: the folks who make their living arresting non-violent drug offenders, you'd be right! According to the 'No on 5' website, the California State Sheriff's Association, the California Narcotics Officers Association, the California Peace Officers Association, the Police Chiefs of California, and the California District Attorneys Association all oppose Prop. 5.

However, even more disturbing is who's bankrolling the 'No on 5'campaign. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, California's powerful prison guards union has spent close to $2 million dollars to lobby against the passage of Prop. 5.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Pot Can Ease Pain for Some HIV Patients
Posted by Paul Armentano, NORML on August 7, 2008 at 5:25 PM.

Oh, so this is why the Feds do everything they can to discourage any investigation into the safety and efficacy of inhaled cannabis.

Medicinal Marijuana Eases Neuropathic Pain in HIV

via The Washington Post

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 6 (HealthDay News) — Medicinal marijuana helps relieve neuropathic pain in people with HIV, says a University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine study.

It included 28 HIV patients with neuropathic pain that wasn’t adequately controlled by opiates or other pain relievers. The researchers found that 46 percent of patients who smoked medicinal marijuana reported clinically meaningful pain relief, compared with 18 percent of those who smoked a placebo.

The study, published online Aug. 6 in Neuropsychopharmacology, was sponsored by the University of California Center for Medical Cannabis Research (CMCR).

“Neuropathy is a chronic and significant problem in HIV patients as there are few existing treatments that offer adequate pain management to sufferers,” study leader Dr. Ronald J. Ellis, an associate professor of neurosciences, said in an UCSD news release. “We found that smoked cannabis was generally well-tolerated and effective when added to the patient’s existing pain medication, resulting in increased pain relief.”

The findings are consistent with and extend other recent CMCR-sponsored research supporting the short-term effectiveness of medicinal marijuana in treating neuropathic pain.

“This study adds to a growing body of evidence that indicates that cannabis is effective, in the short-term at least, in the management of neuropathic pain,” Dr. Igor Grant, a professor of psychiatry and director of the CMCR, said in the UCSD news release.   

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

UN's Drug Czar Lashes Out on Reformers: "You’re All On Drugs!"
Posted by Paul Armentano, NORML on March 13, 2008 at 6:36 AM.

UN Drug Czar Antonio Maria Costa made a rare appearance before the drug law reform community last November when he gave the keynote address at the Drug Policy Alliance’s bi-annual conference in New Orleans. It appears that we made quite an impression.

Speaking in Vienna this week, Costa commented on his brief appearance with this ad hominem attack:

“I attended the meeting of the Drug Alliance [DPA] in New Orleans last December, 1200 participants, 1000 lunatics, 200 good people to talk to. The other ones obviously on drugs.”

Of course, the idea of Mr. Costa — who just yesterday told the New York Times that pot use poses a greater danger to society than the use of cocaine or heroin — calling us crazy would be ironic if it wasn’t so insulting.

That said, unlike Mr. Costa, I’ve chosen not to articulate my thoughts with epithets. Rather, I’ve decided to simply post some of Mr. Costa’s previous statements and let the readers decide who is “obviously on drugs.”

“Today the harmful characteristics of cannabis are no longer that different from those of other plant-based drugs such as cocaine and heroin.”
Quoted in the London Telegraph, June 27, 2006

“Governments and societies must keep their nerve and avoid being swayed by misguided notions of tolerance. … Amid all the libertarian talk about the right of individuals to engage in dangerous practices provided no one else gets hurt, certain key facts are easily forgotten. First, cannabis is a dangerous drug — not just to the individuals who use it. … Evidence of the damage to mental health caused by cannabis use — from loss of concentration to paranoia, aggressiveness and outright psychosis — is mounting and cannot be ignored.”

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Study Says Marijuana Use Doesn’t Raise Cancer Risk: Will the Media Care?
Posted by Paul Armentano, NORML on March 6, 2008 at 8:28 AM.

Smoking pot, even long-term, is not associated with an increased risk of developing cancers of the head and neck, according to the results of a just-published case-control study from New Zealand.

"This population-based study did not find a statistically significant increase in the risk of head and neck cancer in adults [under age 55] from cannabis," authors concluded. "[Even] the risk associated with the highest tertile of cannabis use (defined as one joint per day for more than eight years) was not statistically significant after adjustment for cofounding variables including tobacco smoking, alcohol consumption, and level of income."

So for the second month in a row we have researchers from New Zealand telling us that pot smoking has little-to-no association with cancer. But perhaps you missed the first study. That would be understandable because the mainstream media deliberately obscured its findings with alarmist headlines like "Cannabis Bigger Cancer Risk Than Cigarettes" and "Experts Warn of Cannabis Cancer 'Epidemic'" -- headlines that, in fact, were nearly the opposite of what the study actually said.

So now we come to this latest report -- written by the same investigative team and involving almost the same number of subjects. Anyone think that the mainstream press will jump on the "pot isn't linked to cancer" bandwagon? I'm not holding my breath.

Anti-Pot Propaganda Reaches a Whole New Level of Lameness
Posted by Paul Armentano, NORML on March 5, 2008 at 2:07 PM.

According to a recent news item making international headlines, a journalist in a forthcoming BBC ‘documentary’ will “inject” herself with the “main ingredient” of so-called “skunk cannabis” in an effort to warn viewers of the “dramatic” and “unpleasant” effects of marijuana.

For readers on this side of the pond who have not followed this story, “skunk” is the slang term British prohibitionists have chosen in their attempt to rebrand cannabis as this millennium’s most dangerous drug. (US authorities executed a similar game plan in the early 1900s when they successfully outlawed hemp by rebranding it “marijuana”.) For years now, British police and news reporters have blamed everything from psychosis and suicide to criminal acts like rape and murder on the after-effects of smoking “skunk,” aka allegedly super-potent pot.

Never mind that a recent study reported that so-called “skunk” only comprises a minute fraction of the UK’s marijuana market.

Never mind that teen use of cannabis in Great Britain recently fell to a record low.

Never mind that a legal pill containing 100 percent THC is available by a doctor’s prescription and that its side-effects do not include psychosis, suicide, rape, or murder.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »