ABOVE: HIPPOCRITE BARACK OBAMA SMOKING GANJA
MAY 6, 2013
OBAMA AND MARIJUANA: THEN AND NOW
What was your favorite badaboom in President Obama’s routine at the White House Correspondents dinner? Here’s mine, from when he was talking about how “the media landscape is changing so rapidly”:
"You can’t keep up with it. I mean, I remember when BuzzFeed was just something I did in college around two A.M. (Laughter.) It’s true! (Laughter.)"
Obama’s joke shows how far we’ve come since the not-so-long-ago days when standard operating procedure for a politician outed on pot smoking was to plead “youthful experimentation,” express contrition, and boast modestly of having straightened up and flown right. This President, as far as I know, has never said any such thing; he has no apparent regrets in that department. His joke allowed the tuxedoed, evening-gowned, middle-aged audience at the Washington Hilton to feel, for a precious moment, hip. The subtext was that smoking pot, whether a lot or a little, is just a normal part of growing up—maybe even, for some, part of being grown up. Marijuana doesn’t seem to have ruined his life, which has been pretty successful so far. Nor has it done much to blight the lives of the other people in the Hilton ballroom, most of whom, like the rest of the media, political, and Hollywood élites, have smoked pot, too.
We are now on our third straight (so to speak) President who, the evidence more than suggests, have personally flouted the laws against having possession of marijuana. But the incumbent is the first who has an irrefutable history as an “enthusiastic” (his characterization, not mine) stoner. If you read “Dreams from My Father,” then you know that Obama liked not only the drug’s psychoactive effects but also what might be called its democratizing qualities:
"I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference if you smoked reefer in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room with some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school…. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism".
David Maraniss, in “Barack Obama: The Story,” provides some pungent detail, helpfully summarized by none other than BuzzFeed. Young Barry, leader of a Punahou School clique styling itself the Choom Gang, pioneered “T.A.” - short for Total Absorption, the polar opposite of “I didn’t inhale.” Among other recreations, the future President was into “roof hits,” a non-wasteful method of smoking pot in a car (usually that white classmate’s V.W. bus, dubbed the Choomwagon) with the windows rolled up. Once the joint was reduced to a roach but some smoke was still trapped overhead, he and his friends would crane their necks upward to whoosh in the last wisps. He was also adept at “interceptions,” i.e., sneaking an extra toke when it wasn’t his turn - a risky stratagem, punishable, if noticed, by being skipped over on the next pass-around.
The problem with the joke, as with all those knowing chuckles at the Hilton, is that a great many people are suffering on account of marijuana—just not from the weed itself. Like young Obama, people who smoke marijuana do so because they find that it alleviates suffering (psychological, spiritual, physical), or simply because it helps them relax and enjoy themselves. Marijuana-associated suffering enters the picture only when prohibition does:
Police prosecuted 858,408 persons for marijuana violations in 2009, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report.… Of those charged with marijuana violations, approximately 88 percent (758,593 Americans) were charged with possession only. The remaining 99,815 individuals were charged with “sale/manufacture,” a category that includes virtually all cultivation offenses.
There are still states where simple possession can theoretically put you in prison for life if it’s your third strike, but outrages like the one John Lennon immortalized thirty years ago are rare. Even so, tens of thousands of people still languish in federal and state prisons for marijuana offenses in a typical year, and just about everybody who gets busted for pot spends time locked up. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, estimates that from fifty to a hundred thousand Americans are behind bars for pot, and only pot, on any given night. The longer-term consequences can be a lot worse than a few hours of humiliating inconvenience. If you’re employed, you can lose your job. If you’re in college, you can lose your financial aid and you will lose your eligibility for student loans, as have some two hundred thousand of your peers. If you’re undocumented, you’ll probably get deported. If you’re a parolee, you’re apt to find yourself back in jail for the remainder of your sentence. All of which, of course, is but a small part of the suffering caused by the gargantuan, perpetual “war on drugs.”
So the joke was perhaps a little tasteless, if you’re the sensitive type. Not as callous as the video Bush junior made for the 2004 dinner, in which he pretended to look under the Oval Office furniture, mumbling, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.” But still a trifle discomfiting.
I like to think that if Obama had a Johnsonian majority on Capitol Hill, marijuana would no longer come under the federal criminal code. It would be the I.R.S.’s concern, not the D.E.A.’s. But then, if Obama had a Johnsonian majority we’d have single-payer universal health care, a hefty carbon tax, and semi-meaningful gun control. And Guantánamo would be just another naval base. So there’s no mystery about why Obama hasn’t tried to do anything legislatively to humanize the marijuana status quo. But there’s quite a lot he could have done—could still do—administratively and through executive orders.
For a start, he could arrange for the Justice Department to end the absurd classification of marijuana as a supremely dangerous Schedule I drug, like heroin. And he shouldn’t just knock it down to Schedule II, cheek by jowl with cocaine. Better to demote it to Schedule IV, where it would have Xanax and Ambien for company, or clear down to Schedule V, reserved for cough medicine. Better still, take it off the “schedule” altogether. If alcohol isn’t on there, marijuana shouldn’t be, either.
Second, he could make it clear—to the public, to the Justice Department, to the D.E.A.—that his policy is to avoid making life unnecessarily difficult for the eighteen states (plus D.C.) that allow marijuana use for medical purposes, for the two states that have made its recreational use permissible under state law (including Colorado; see Ryan Lizza's piece on John Hickenlooper, the governor, in this week’s issue), for the dozen or so states and hundreds of localities that have decriminalized possession of small amounts, and, overall, for peaceful, otherwise inoffending marijuana smokers. To date, the Obama Administration’s signals in these areas have been confusing and its actions only slightly better (some would say slightly worse) than its predecessors’.
Third, but by no means last, he could change the name of the Office of National Drug Control Policy—a.k.a. the White House “drug czar”—to the Office of National Harm Reduction Drug Policy, and tell it to come up with something halfway as reasonable as the report of the Nixon-appointed Shafer commission, which, in 1972, when Obama was in sixth grade, recommended making marijuana legal.
Back here in the present, though, the drug czar’s latest ukase, ninety-five stupefying pages long, was issued last week. It makes some feeble gestures toward reform but mainly recycles the same old obsolete blather. In his introduction, President Obama mentions pot in only one sentence, and a curiously ambiguous sentence it is:
Despite positive trends in other areas, we continue to see elevated rates of marijuana use among young people, likely driven by declines in perceptions of risk.
Since he is suggesting that “elevated rates of marijuana use among young people” is not a positive trend (which it no doubt isn’t), is he implying that elevated rates of marijuana use amongold people is a positive trend? (Which it certainly is, given the comfort cannabis provides for geriatric patients.) Also, is he purposely leaving open the possibility that “young people” arecorrect in perceiving marijuana use to be less risky (less risky healthwise, presumably) than—well, than the government has spent the last eighty years telling them it is?
Probably not, alas. I’m probably just grasping at straws. Obama is a busy man. He doesn’t have time to read, let alone encode, everything that appears over his robo-signature. But he really ought to feel a smidgen of shame that the government he heads treats people who do exactly what he used to do, and now casually jokes about, as criminals.
You can find good reporting on marijuana in general and medical marijuana in particular in O’Shaughnessy’s, a journal named after the physician who introduced cannabis to Western medicine in 1839. The annual print edition is distributed by doctors to patients, and articles are now being posted on its Web site, along with a blog by the managing editor, Fred Gardner. Gardner’s unusual résumé includes stints as an editor at Scientific American, an anti-war organizer, a private investigator, and press spokesman for the district attorney of San Francisco—all relevant experience, given that O’Shaughnessy’s covers pot-related science, medicine, politics, law, and history. O’Shaughnessy’s was co-founded in 2003 by the late Tod Mikuriya, M.D., the California doctor who was famously accused by Bill Clinton’s drug czar Barry McCaffrey of practicing “Cheech and Chong medicine.”
OBAMA AND MARIJUANA: THEN AND NOW
What was your favorite badaboom in President Obama’s routine at the White House Correspondents dinner? Here’s mine, from when he was talking about how “the media landscape is changing so rapidly”:
"You can’t keep up with it. I mean, I remember when BuzzFeed was just something I did in college around two A.M. (Laughter.) It’s true! (Laughter.)"
Obama’s joke shows how far we’ve come since the not-so-long-ago days when standard operating procedure for a politician outed on pot smoking was to plead “youthful experimentation,” express contrition, and boast modestly of having straightened up and flown right. This President, as far as I know, has never said any such thing; he has no apparent regrets in that department. His joke allowed the tuxedoed, evening-gowned, middle-aged audience at the Washington Hilton to feel, for a precious moment, hip. The subtext was that smoking pot, whether a lot or a little, is just a normal part of growing up—maybe even, for some, part of being grown up. Marijuana doesn’t seem to have ruined his life, which has been pretty successful so far. Nor has it done much to blight the lives of the other people in the Hilton ballroom, most of whom, like the rest of the media, political, and Hollywood élites, have smoked pot, too.
We are now on our third straight (so to speak) President who, the evidence more than suggests, have personally flouted the laws against having possession of marijuana. But the incumbent is the first who has an irrefutable history as an “enthusiastic” (his characterization, not mine) stoner. If you read “Dreams from My Father,” then you know that Obama liked not only the drug’s psychoactive effects but also what might be called its democratizing qualities:
"I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference if you smoked reefer in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room with some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school…. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism".
David Maraniss, in “Barack Obama: The Story,” provides some pungent detail, helpfully summarized by none other than BuzzFeed. Young Barry, leader of a Punahou School clique styling itself the Choom Gang, pioneered “T.A.” - short for Total Absorption, the polar opposite of “I didn’t inhale.” Among other recreations, the future President was into “roof hits,” a non-wasteful method of smoking pot in a car (usually that white classmate’s V.W. bus, dubbed the Choomwagon) with the windows rolled up. Once the joint was reduced to a roach but some smoke was still trapped overhead, he and his friends would crane their necks upward to whoosh in the last wisps. He was also adept at “interceptions,” i.e., sneaking an extra toke when it wasn’t his turn - a risky stratagem, punishable, if noticed, by being skipped over on the next pass-around.
The problem with the joke, as with all those knowing chuckles at the Hilton, is that a great many people are suffering on account of marijuana—just not from the weed itself. Like young Obama, people who smoke marijuana do so because they find that it alleviates suffering (psychological, spiritual, physical), or simply because it helps them relax and enjoy themselves. Marijuana-associated suffering enters the picture only when prohibition does:
Police prosecuted 858,408 persons for marijuana violations in 2009, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report.… Of those charged with marijuana violations, approximately 88 percent (758,593 Americans) were charged with possession only. The remaining 99,815 individuals were charged with “sale/manufacture,” a category that includes virtually all cultivation offenses.
There are still states where simple possession can theoretically put you in prison for life if it’s your third strike, but outrages like the one John Lennon immortalized thirty years ago are rare. Even so, tens of thousands of people still languish in federal and state prisons for marijuana offenses in a typical year, and just about everybody who gets busted for pot spends time locked up. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, estimates that from fifty to a hundred thousand Americans are behind bars for pot, and only pot, on any given night. The longer-term consequences can be a lot worse than a few hours of humiliating inconvenience. If you’re employed, you can lose your job. If you’re in college, you can lose your financial aid and you will lose your eligibility for student loans, as have some two hundred thousand of your peers. If you’re undocumented, you’ll probably get deported. If you’re a parolee, you’re apt to find yourself back in jail for the remainder of your sentence. All of which, of course, is but a small part of the suffering caused by the gargantuan, perpetual “war on drugs.”
So the joke was perhaps a little tasteless, if you’re the sensitive type. Not as callous as the video Bush junior made for the 2004 dinner, in which he pretended to look under the Oval Office furniture, mumbling, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.” But still a trifle discomfiting.
I like to think that if Obama had a Johnsonian majority on Capitol Hill, marijuana would no longer come under the federal criminal code. It would be the I.R.S.’s concern, not the D.E.A.’s. But then, if Obama had a Johnsonian majority we’d have single-payer universal health care, a hefty carbon tax, and semi-meaningful gun control. And Guantánamo would be just another naval base. So there’s no mystery about why Obama hasn’t tried to do anything legislatively to humanize the marijuana status quo. But there’s quite a lot he could have done—could still do—administratively and through executive orders.
For a start, he could arrange for the Justice Department to end the absurd classification of marijuana as a supremely dangerous Schedule I drug, like heroin. And he shouldn’t just knock it down to Schedule II, cheek by jowl with cocaine. Better to demote it to Schedule IV, where it would have Xanax and Ambien for company, or clear down to Schedule V, reserved for cough medicine. Better still, take it off the “schedule” altogether. If alcohol isn’t on there, marijuana shouldn’t be, either.
Second, he could make it clear—to the public, to the Justice Department, to the D.E.A.—that his policy is to avoid making life unnecessarily difficult for the eighteen states (plus D.C.) that allow marijuana use for medical purposes, for the two states that have made its recreational use permissible under state law (including Colorado; see Ryan Lizza's piece on John Hickenlooper, the governor, in this week’s issue), for the dozen or so states and hundreds of localities that have decriminalized possession of small amounts, and, overall, for peaceful, otherwise inoffending marijuana smokers. To date, the Obama Administration’s signals in these areas have been confusing and its actions only slightly better (some would say slightly worse) than its predecessors’.
Third, but by no means last, he could change the name of the Office of National Drug Control Policy—a.k.a. the White House “drug czar”—to the Office of National Harm Reduction Drug Policy, and tell it to come up with something halfway as reasonable as the report of the Nixon-appointed Shafer commission, which, in 1972, when Obama was in sixth grade, recommended making marijuana legal.
Back here in the present, though, the drug czar’s latest ukase, ninety-five stupefying pages long, was issued last week. It makes some feeble gestures toward reform but mainly recycles the same old obsolete blather. In his introduction, President Obama mentions pot in only one sentence, and a curiously ambiguous sentence it is:
Despite positive trends in other areas, we continue to see elevated rates of marijuana use among young people, likely driven by declines in perceptions of risk.
Since he is suggesting that “elevated rates of marijuana use among young people” is not a positive trend (which it no doubt isn’t), is he implying that elevated rates of marijuana use amongold people is a positive trend? (Which it certainly is, given the comfort cannabis provides for geriatric patients.) Also, is he purposely leaving open the possibility that “young people” arecorrect in perceiving marijuana use to be less risky (less risky healthwise, presumably) than—well, than the government has spent the last eighty years telling them it is?
Probably not, alas. I’m probably just grasping at straws. Obama is a busy man. He doesn’t have time to read, let alone encode, everything that appears over his robo-signature. But he really ought to feel a smidgen of shame that the government he heads treats people who do exactly what he used to do, and now casually jokes about, as criminals.
You can find good reporting on marijuana in general and medical marijuana in particular in O’Shaughnessy’s, a journal named after the physician who introduced cannabis to Western medicine in 1839. The annual print edition is distributed by doctors to patients, and articles are now being posted on its Web site, along with a blog by the managing editor, Fred Gardner. Gardner’s unusual résumé includes stints as an editor at Scientific American, an anti-war organizer, a private investigator, and press spokesman for the district attorney of San Francisco—all relevant experience, given that O’Shaughnessy’s covers pot-related science, medicine, politics, law, and history. O’Shaughnessy’s was co-founded in 2003 by the late Tod Mikuriya, M.D., the California doctor who was famously accused by Bill Clinton’s drug czar Barry McCaffrey of practicing “Cheech and Chong medicine.”
Obama's Pot Problem: Now that states have started legalizing recreational marijuana, will the president continue the government’s war on weed?
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
By TIM DICKINSON
December 7, 2012 8:00 AM ET
When voters in Colorado and Washington state legalized recreational marijuana in November, they thought they were declaring a cease-fire in the War on Drugs. Thanks to ballot initiatives that passed by wide margins on Election Day, adults 21 or older in both states can now legally possess up to an ounce of marijuana. The new laws also compel Colorado and Washington to license private businesses to cultivate and sell pot, and to levy taxes on the proceeds. Together, the two states expect to reap some $600 million annually in marijuana revenues for schools, roads and other projects. The only losers, in fact, will be the Mexican drug lords, who currently supply as much as two-thirds of America's pot.
Drug reformers can scarcely believe their landslide victories at the polls. "People expected this day would come, but most didn't expect it to come this soon," says Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief who campaigned for legalization. "This is the beginning of the end of prohibition."
But the war over pot may be far from over. Legalization has set Colorado and Washington on a collision course with the Obama administration, which has shown no sign of backing down on its full-scale assault on pot growers and distributors. Although the president pledged to go easy on medical marijuana – now legal in 18 states – he has actually launched more raids on state-sanctioned pot dispensaries than George W. Bush, and has threatened to prosecute state officials who oversee medical marijuana as if they were drug lords. And while the administration has yet to issue a definitive response to the two new laws, the Justice Department was quick to signal that it has no plans to heed the will of voters. "Enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act," the department announced in November, "remains unchanged."
The 10 Best Politicians on Pot
A big reason for the get-tough stance, say White House insiders, is that federal agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration are staffed with hard-liners who have built their careers on going after pot. Michele Leonhart, a holdover from the Bush administration whom Obama has appointed to head the DEA, continues to maintain that pot is as dangerous as heroin – a position unsupported by either science or experience. When pressed on the point at a congressional hearing, Leonhart refused to concede any distinction between the two substances, lamely insisting that "all illegal drugs are bad."
"There are not many friends to legalization in this administration," says Kevin Sabet, director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida who served the White House as a top adviser on marijuana policy. In fact, the politician who coined the term "drug czar" – Joe Biden – continues to guide the administration's hard-line drug policy. "The vice president has a special interest in this issue," Sabet says. "As long as he is vice president, we're very far off from legalization being a reality."
There's no question that the votes in Colorado and Washington represent a historic shift in the War on Drugs. "This is a watershed moment," says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. "People are standing up and saying that the drug war has gone too far." And drug reformers achieved the landmark victory with a creative new marketing blitz – one that sold legalization not to stoners, but to soccer moms.
The man behind Colorado's legalization campaign was Mason Tvert, a Denver activist who was radicalized against the drug war by two experiences as a teenager. First, in high school, a bout of binge drinking landed him in the hospital. Then, as a college freshman, he made what he believed was a healthier choice to smoke pot – only to get subpoenaed by a grand jury and grilled by campus police about his drug use. "It was ridiculous," Tvert recalls, "to be spending these law-enforcement resources worrying about whether a college student might or might not be using pot in his dorm room on the weekend."
In 2005, at age 22, Tvert founded Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER) to prompt a public conversation about the relative dangers of pot and booze. "We're punishing adults for making the rational, safer decision to use marijuana rather than alcohol, if that's what they prefer," says Tvert. "We're driving people to drink." That same year, fueled by support on college campuses, SAFER launched a ballot initiative to make Denver the world's first city to remove all criminal penalties for possession of marijuana by adults. Tvert cheekily branded then-mayor and now Colorado governor John Hickenlooper a "drug dealer" for owning a brew pub. The shoestring campaign, Tvert says, was only intended to raise awareness. "We just happened to win."
This year, Tvert and other drug reformers drew an even more explicit link between the two recreational drugs, naming their ballot initiative the "Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act of 2012." Instead of simply urging people to vote against prohibition, the measure gave Coloradans a concrete reason to vote for legalization: Taxing pot would provide more money for schools, while freeing up cops from senseless pot busts would enable them to go after real criminals. "The public does not like marijuana," explains Brian Vicente, a Denver attorney who co-wrote the law. "What they like is community safety, tax revenue and better use of law enforcement."
Equally important to winning over mainstream voters was the plan to treat pot like alcohol. While the feds continue to view marijuana as contraband to be ferreted out by drug dogs and SWAT teams, Colorado and Washington will now entrust pot to the same regulators who keep tabs on Jameson and Jägermeister. The new laws charge the Washington State Liquor Control Board and the Colorado Department of Revenue – which already oversees medical marijuana – with issuing licenses for recreational marijuana to be sold in private, stand-alone stores. The Colorado law also gives local communities the right to prohibit commercial pot sales, much like a few "dry" counties across the country still ban liquor sales. "These will be specifically licensed marijuana retail stores," says Tvert. "It's not going to be popping up at Walmart. This is not going to force a marijuana store into a community that does not want it."
10 Marijuana Myths and Facts
The legalization campaign in Colorado was a grassroots, low-budget affair that triumphed in the face of strong opposition from Gov. Hickenlooper and the Denver Chamber of Commerce. The reform effort in Washington, by contrast, received more than half its $6.2 million in funding from billionaire drug reformers Peter Lewis and George Soros – and enjoyed mainstream support. The public face for legalization was Rick Steves, the avuncular PBS travel journalist – and dedicated pothead – who chipped in $450,000 to the cause. In Seattle, the mayor, city attorney and every member of the city council supported the measure. Unlike past efforts to turn back pot prohibition at the ballot box, which saw public support crater at the 11th hour, support for the measures in Colorado and Washington actually increased through Election Day: Both laws passed by at least 10 points. In Colorado, marijuana proved more popular than the president, trumping Obama's winning tally by more than 50,000 votes.
Regardless of how the federal government responds to the initiatives, many of their greatest benefits have already taken hold. In November, more than 200 Washington residents who had been charged with pot possession saw their cases dropped even before the new law went into effect. "There is no point in continuing to seek criminal penalties for conduct that will be legal next month," said Seattle prosecutor Dan Satterberg. Local police are now free to focus their resources on crimes of violence, and cops can no longer use the pretext of smelling dope as a license for unwarranted searches. "That gets us into so many cars and pockets and homes – illegally, inappropriately," says Neill Franklin, a retired narcotics officer who now directs Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "That ends in Colorado and Washington – it ends."
A hilarious FAQ called "Marijwhatnow?" – issued by the Seattle police department – underscores the official shift in tactics:
Q: What happens if I get pulled over and I'm sober, but an officer or his K-9 buddy smells the ounce of Super Skunk I've got in my trunk?
A: Each case stands on its own, but the smell of pot alone will not be reason to search a vehicle.
Despite the immediate benefits of the new laws, the question remains: What will the federal government do in response? Advocates of legalization are hoping the Obama administration will recognize that it's on the wrong side of history. "Everybody's predicting there's going to be a backlash, and that's a good bet," concedes Nadelmann. "But there's some reason to be optimistic that the feds won't jump – at least not right away."
The administration, he points out, has yet to make its intentions clear – and that, by itself, is a sign of progress. In 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder strongly denounced California's bid to regulate and tax marijuana before voters even had a chance to weigh in at the polls. This year, by contrast, the administration said nothing about the legalization bids in Colorado and Washington – even after nine former heads of the DEA issued a public letter decrying the administration's silence as "a tacit acceptance of these dangerous initiatives."
In addition, the provisions that directly flout the federal government's authority to regulate marijuana don't take effect right away – leaving time for state and federal authorities to negotiate a truce. In Colorado, the state isn't required to begin regulating and taxing pot until next July, while officials in Washington have until next December to unveil a regulatory plan. "There's no inherent need for a knee-jerk federal response," says Nadelmann.
Most important, the governors of both Colorado and Washington have vowed to respect the will of the voters – even though they personally opposed the new laws. Gov. Hickenlooper pledged that "we intend to follow through" with regulating and taxing marijuana. But he also sounded a note of caution to potheads. "Federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug," he warned, "so don't break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly."
If Obama were committed to drug reform – or simply to states' rights – he could immediately end DEA raids on those who grow and sell pot according to state law, and immediately order the Justice Department to make enforcement of federal marijuana laws the lowest priority of U.S. attorneys in states that choose to tax and regulate pot. He could also champion a bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado, that would give state marijuana regulation precedence over federal law – an approach that even anti-marijuana hard-liners have endorsed. As George W. Bush's former U.S. attorney for Colorado wrote in a post-election op-ed in the Denver Post: "Letting states 'opt out' of the Controlled Substances Act's prohibition against marijuana ought to be seriously considered."
When it comes to pot, the federal government is both impotent and omnipotent. What the feds cannot do is force either Colorado or Washington to impose criminal sanctions on pot possession. "They cannot say to states: You must keep arresting or throwing people in jail for simple use," says Sabet, the former White House adviser. "And they cannot compel the states to impose penalties on use." Individual pot smokers in Colorado and Washington will technically be in violation of federal law, but as a practical matter the DEA only has the resources to pursue high-level traffickers.
Where the federal government has great power to act is in shutting down state taxation and regulation of marijuana. Privately, both drug reformers and drug warriors believe the Obama administration is likely to take Colorado and Washington to court to keep them out of the pot business. "I would put money on it," says Sabet.
Unfortunately for drug reformers, the administration appears to have an open-and-shut case: Federal law trumps state law when the two contradict. What's more, the Supreme Court has spoken on marijuana law: In the 2005 case Gonzales v. Raich contesting medical marijuana in California, the court ruled that the federal government can regulate even tiny quantities of pot – including those grown and sold purely within state borders – because the drug is ultimately connected to interstate commerce. If the courts side with the administration, a judge could issue an immediate injunction blocking Washington and Colorado from regulating or taxing the growing and selling of pot – actions that would be considered trafficking under the Controlled Substances Act. The feds could also threaten to prosecute state employees tasked with implementing the new regulations – a hardball tactic the administration deployed last year to shut down state regulation of medical marijuana in Washington and Rhode Island.
Pot Legalization Is Coming
Such draconian measures would do nothing to curb marijuana use – particularly in Colorado, where the new law empowers citizens to grow up to six plants and share up to an ounce of their weed with other adults. "Thanks to homegrow," says Vicente, who coauthored the law, "we will still have legal adult access" – no matter how hard the feds crack down on commercial growers and retailers. But denying states the ability to regulate marijuana would eliminate the tax revenues that reformers promised voters. "If they want to act cynically," says Nadelmann, "the federal gambit would be to block regulation to make this as messy as possible" – in the hopes that the public would sour on pervasive, unregulated weed.
Ironically, if Obama succeeds in gutting the new state laws, he will essentially be serving the interests of foreign drug cartels. A study by the nonpartisan think tank Instituto Mexicano Para la Competitividad found that legalization in Colorado and Washington would deal a major blow to the cartels, depriving them of nearly a quarter of their annual drug revenues – unless the federal government decides to launch a "vigorous intervention." If that happens, pot profits would continue to flow to the cartels instead of to hard-hit state budgets. "Something's wrong," says Stamper, the former Seattle police chief, "when the lawbreakers and the law enforcers are on the same side."
In the end, the best defense against federal intervention may be other states standing up against prohibition. While pro-pot sentiment is strongest in the West, recent polls show that legalization is now beginning to enjoy majority support nationwide. "We're beyond the tipping point," says Stamper. Spurred by the victories in Colorado and Washington, legislators are already moving to legalize pot in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and Iowa. "It's time for the Justice Department to recognize the sovereignty of the states," Gov. Jerry Brown of California declared. "We don't need some federal gendarme to come and tell us what to do."
Obama, the former constitutional-law professor, has relied on the expansive powers of the chief executive when it serves him politically – providing amnesty to a generation of Dream Act immigrants, or refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court. A one-time pothead who gave a shout-out to his dealer in his high school yearbook, Obama could single-handedly end the insanity of marijuana being treated like heroin under the Controlled Substances Act with nothing more than an executive order.
What the president needs to act boldly, reform advocates believe, is for the rising tide of public opinion to swamp the outdated bureaucracy of the War on Drugs. "The citizens have become more savvy about the drug war," says Franklin, the former narcotics cop. "They know this is not just a failed policy – they understand it's also a very destructive policy." With an eye on his legacy, Franklin says, Obama should treat pot prohibition like the costly misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan: "This is another war for the president to end."
This story is from the December 20th, 2012 - January 3rd, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.
By TIM DICKINSON
December 7, 2012 8:00 AM ET
When voters in Colorado and Washington state legalized recreational marijuana in November, they thought they were declaring a cease-fire in the War on Drugs. Thanks to ballot initiatives that passed by wide margins on Election Day, adults 21 or older in both states can now legally possess up to an ounce of marijuana. The new laws also compel Colorado and Washington to license private businesses to cultivate and sell pot, and to levy taxes on the proceeds. Together, the two states expect to reap some $600 million annually in marijuana revenues for schools, roads and other projects. The only losers, in fact, will be the Mexican drug lords, who currently supply as much as two-thirds of America's pot.
Drug reformers can scarcely believe their landslide victories at the polls. "People expected this day would come, but most didn't expect it to come this soon," says Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief who campaigned for legalization. "This is the beginning of the end of prohibition."
But the war over pot may be far from over. Legalization has set Colorado and Washington on a collision course with the Obama administration, which has shown no sign of backing down on its full-scale assault on pot growers and distributors. Although the president pledged to go easy on medical marijuana – now legal in 18 states – he has actually launched more raids on state-sanctioned pot dispensaries than George W. Bush, and has threatened to prosecute state officials who oversee medical marijuana as if they were drug lords. And while the administration has yet to issue a definitive response to the two new laws, the Justice Department was quick to signal that it has no plans to heed the will of voters. "Enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act," the department announced in November, "remains unchanged."
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A big reason for the get-tough stance, say White House insiders, is that federal agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration are staffed with hard-liners who have built their careers on going after pot. Michele Leonhart, a holdover from the Bush administration whom Obama has appointed to head the DEA, continues to maintain that pot is as dangerous as heroin – a position unsupported by either science or experience. When pressed on the point at a congressional hearing, Leonhart refused to concede any distinction between the two substances, lamely insisting that "all illegal drugs are bad."
"There are not many friends to legalization in this administration," says Kevin Sabet, director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida who served the White House as a top adviser on marijuana policy. In fact, the politician who coined the term "drug czar" – Joe Biden – continues to guide the administration's hard-line drug policy. "The vice president has a special interest in this issue," Sabet says. "As long as he is vice president, we're very far off from legalization being a reality."
There's no question that the votes in Colorado and Washington represent a historic shift in the War on Drugs. "This is a watershed moment," says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. "People are standing up and saying that the drug war has gone too far." And drug reformers achieved the landmark victory with a creative new marketing blitz – one that sold legalization not to stoners, but to soccer moms.
The man behind Colorado's legalization campaign was Mason Tvert, a Denver activist who was radicalized against the drug war by two experiences as a teenager. First, in high school, a bout of binge drinking landed him in the hospital. Then, as a college freshman, he made what he believed was a healthier choice to smoke pot – only to get subpoenaed by a grand jury and grilled by campus police about his drug use. "It was ridiculous," Tvert recalls, "to be spending these law-enforcement resources worrying about whether a college student might or might not be using pot in his dorm room on the weekend."
In 2005, at age 22, Tvert founded Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER) to prompt a public conversation about the relative dangers of pot and booze. "We're punishing adults for making the rational, safer decision to use marijuana rather than alcohol, if that's what they prefer," says Tvert. "We're driving people to drink." That same year, fueled by support on college campuses, SAFER launched a ballot initiative to make Denver the world's first city to remove all criminal penalties for possession of marijuana by adults. Tvert cheekily branded then-mayor and now Colorado governor John Hickenlooper a "drug dealer" for owning a brew pub. The shoestring campaign, Tvert says, was only intended to raise awareness. "We just happened to win."
This year, Tvert and other drug reformers drew an even more explicit link between the two recreational drugs, naming their ballot initiative the "Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act of 2012." Instead of simply urging people to vote against prohibition, the measure gave Coloradans a concrete reason to vote for legalization: Taxing pot would provide more money for schools, while freeing up cops from senseless pot busts would enable them to go after real criminals. "The public does not like marijuana," explains Brian Vicente, a Denver attorney who co-wrote the law. "What they like is community safety, tax revenue and better use of law enforcement."
Equally important to winning over mainstream voters was the plan to treat pot like alcohol. While the feds continue to view marijuana as contraband to be ferreted out by drug dogs and SWAT teams, Colorado and Washington will now entrust pot to the same regulators who keep tabs on Jameson and Jägermeister. The new laws charge the Washington State Liquor Control Board and the Colorado Department of Revenue – which already oversees medical marijuana – with issuing licenses for recreational marijuana to be sold in private, stand-alone stores. The Colorado law also gives local communities the right to prohibit commercial pot sales, much like a few "dry" counties across the country still ban liquor sales. "These will be specifically licensed marijuana retail stores," says Tvert. "It's not going to be popping up at Walmart. This is not going to force a marijuana store into a community that does not want it."
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The legalization campaign in Colorado was a grassroots, low-budget affair that triumphed in the face of strong opposition from Gov. Hickenlooper and the Denver Chamber of Commerce. The reform effort in Washington, by contrast, received more than half its $6.2 million in funding from billionaire drug reformers Peter Lewis and George Soros – and enjoyed mainstream support. The public face for legalization was Rick Steves, the avuncular PBS travel journalist – and dedicated pothead – who chipped in $450,000 to the cause. In Seattle, the mayor, city attorney and every member of the city council supported the measure. Unlike past efforts to turn back pot prohibition at the ballot box, which saw public support crater at the 11th hour, support for the measures in Colorado and Washington actually increased through Election Day: Both laws passed by at least 10 points. In Colorado, marijuana proved more popular than the president, trumping Obama's winning tally by more than 50,000 votes.
Regardless of how the federal government responds to the initiatives, many of their greatest benefits have already taken hold. In November, more than 200 Washington residents who had been charged with pot possession saw their cases dropped even before the new law went into effect. "There is no point in continuing to seek criminal penalties for conduct that will be legal next month," said Seattle prosecutor Dan Satterberg. Local police are now free to focus their resources on crimes of violence, and cops can no longer use the pretext of smelling dope as a license for unwarranted searches. "That gets us into so many cars and pockets and homes – illegally, inappropriately," says Neill Franklin, a retired narcotics officer who now directs Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "That ends in Colorado and Washington – it ends."
A hilarious FAQ called "Marijwhatnow?" – issued by the Seattle police department – underscores the official shift in tactics:
Q: What happens if I get pulled over and I'm sober, but an officer or his K-9 buddy smells the ounce of Super Skunk I've got in my trunk?
A: Each case stands on its own, but the smell of pot alone will not be reason to search a vehicle.
Despite the immediate benefits of the new laws, the question remains: What will the federal government do in response? Advocates of legalization are hoping the Obama administration will recognize that it's on the wrong side of history. "Everybody's predicting there's going to be a backlash, and that's a good bet," concedes Nadelmann. "But there's some reason to be optimistic that the feds won't jump – at least not right away."
The administration, he points out, has yet to make its intentions clear – and that, by itself, is a sign of progress. In 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder strongly denounced California's bid to regulate and tax marijuana before voters even had a chance to weigh in at the polls. This year, by contrast, the administration said nothing about the legalization bids in Colorado and Washington – even after nine former heads of the DEA issued a public letter decrying the administration's silence as "a tacit acceptance of these dangerous initiatives."
In addition, the provisions that directly flout the federal government's authority to regulate marijuana don't take effect right away – leaving time for state and federal authorities to negotiate a truce. In Colorado, the state isn't required to begin regulating and taxing pot until next July, while officials in Washington have until next December to unveil a regulatory plan. "There's no inherent need for a knee-jerk federal response," says Nadelmann.
Most important, the governors of both Colorado and Washington have vowed to respect the will of the voters – even though they personally opposed the new laws. Gov. Hickenlooper pledged that "we intend to follow through" with regulating and taxing marijuana. But he also sounded a note of caution to potheads. "Federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug," he warned, "so don't break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly."
If Obama were committed to drug reform – or simply to states' rights – he could immediately end DEA raids on those who grow and sell pot according to state law, and immediately order the Justice Department to make enforcement of federal marijuana laws the lowest priority of U.S. attorneys in states that choose to tax and regulate pot. He could also champion a bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado, that would give state marijuana regulation precedence over federal law – an approach that even anti-marijuana hard-liners have endorsed. As George W. Bush's former U.S. attorney for Colorado wrote in a post-election op-ed in the Denver Post: "Letting states 'opt out' of the Controlled Substances Act's prohibition against marijuana ought to be seriously considered."
When it comes to pot, the federal government is both impotent and omnipotent. What the feds cannot do is force either Colorado or Washington to impose criminal sanctions on pot possession. "They cannot say to states: You must keep arresting or throwing people in jail for simple use," says Sabet, the former White House adviser. "And they cannot compel the states to impose penalties on use." Individual pot smokers in Colorado and Washington will technically be in violation of federal law, but as a practical matter the DEA only has the resources to pursue high-level traffickers.
Where the federal government has great power to act is in shutting down state taxation and regulation of marijuana. Privately, both drug reformers and drug warriors believe the Obama administration is likely to take Colorado and Washington to court to keep them out of the pot business. "I would put money on it," says Sabet.
Unfortunately for drug reformers, the administration appears to have an open-and-shut case: Federal law trumps state law when the two contradict. What's more, the Supreme Court has spoken on marijuana law: In the 2005 case Gonzales v. Raich contesting medical marijuana in California, the court ruled that the federal government can regulate even tiny quantities of pot – including those grown and sold purely within state borders – because the drug is ultimately connected to interstate commerce. If the courts side with the administration, a judge could issue an immediate injunction blocking Washington and Colorado from regulating or taxing the growing and selling of pot – actions that would be considered trafficking under the Controlled Substances Act. The feds could also threaten to prosecute state employees tasked with implementing the new regulations – a hardball tactic the administration deployed last year to shut down state regulation of medical marijuana in Washington and Rhode Island.
Pot Legalization Is Coming
Such draconian measures would do nothing to curb marijuana use – particularly in Colorado, where the new law empowers citizens to grow up to six plants and share up to an ounce of their weed with other adults. "Thanks to homegrow," says Vicente, who coauthored the law, "we will still have legal adult access" – no matter how hard the feds crack down on commercial growers and retailers. But denying states the ability to regulate marijuana would eliminate the tax revenues that reformers promised voters. "If they want to act cynically," says Nadelmann, "the federal gambit would be to block regulation to make this as messy as possible" – in the hopes that the public would sour on pervasive, unregulated weed.
Ironically, if Obama succeeds in gutting the new state laws, he will essentially be serving the interests of foreign drug cartels. A study by the nonpartisan think tank Instituto Mexicano Para la Competitividad found that legalization in Colorado and Washington would deal a major blow to the cartels, depriving them of nearly a quarter of their annual drug revenues – unless the federal government decides to launch a "vigorous intervention." If that happens, pot profits would continue to flow to the cartels instead of to hard-hit state budgets. "Something's wrong," says Stamper, the former Seattle police chief, "when the lawbreakers and the law enforcers are on the same side."
In the end, the best defense against federal intervention may be other states standing up against prohibition. While pro-pot sentiment is strongest in the West, recent polls show that legalization is now beginning to enjoy majority support nationwide. "We're beyond the tipping point," says Stamper. Spurred by the victories in Colorado and Washington, legislators are already moving to legalize pot in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and Iowa. "It's time for the Justice Department to recognize the sovereignty of the states," Gov. Jerry Brown of California declared. "We don't need some federal gendarme to come and tell us what to do."
Obama, the former constitutional-law professor, has relied on the expansive powers of the chief executive when it serves him politically – providing amnesty to a generation of Dream Act immigrants, or refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court. A one-time pothead who gave a shout-out to his dealer in his high school yearbook, Obama could single-handedly end the insanity of marijuana being treated like heroin under the Controlled Substances Act with nothing more than an executive order.
What the president needs to act boldly, reform advocates believe, is for the rising tide of public opinion to swamp the outdated bureaucracy of the War on Drugs. "The citizens have become more savvy about the drug war," says Franklin, the former narcotics cop. "They know this is not just a failed policy – they understand it's also a very destructive policy." With an eye on his legacy, Franklin says, Obama should treat pot prohibition like the costly misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan: "This is another war for the president to end."
This story is from the December 20th, 2012 - January 3rd, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.
The Latest Cannabis Discoveries That the US Government Doesn’t Want You to Know
Despite issuing a highly publicized memorandum in 2009 stating, "Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration," it remains clear that federal lawmakers and the White House continue to willfully ignore science in regards to the cannabis plant and the federal policies which condemn it to the same prohibitive legal status as heroin. In fact, in 2011 the Obama administration went so far as to reject an administrative petition that called for hearings to reevaluate pot’s safety and efficacy, pronouncing in the Federal Register, “Marijuana does not have a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States or a currently accepted medical use with severe restrictions. At this time, the known risks of marijuana use have not been shown to be outweighed by specific benefits in well-controlled clinical trials that scientifically evaluate safety and efficacy.” (The Administration’s flat-Earth position was upheld in January by a three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.)
Nevertheless, scientific evaluations of cannabis and the health of its consumers have never been more prevalent. Studies are now published almost daily rebuking the federal government’s allegations that the marijuana plant is a highly dangerous substance lacking any therapeutic utility. Yet, virtually all of these studies – and, more importantly, their implications for public policy – continue to be ignored by lawmakers. Here are just a few examples of the latest cannabis science that your federal government doesn’t want you to know about.
Frequent cannabis smokers possess no greater lung cancer risk than do either occasional pot smokers or non-smokers
Subjects who regularly inhale cannabis smoke do not possess an increased risk of lung cancer compared to those who either consume it occasionally or not at all, according to data presented in April at the annual meeting of the American Academy for Cancer Research.
Investigators from the University of California, Los Angeles analyzed data from six case-control studies, conducted between 1999 and 2012, involving over 5,000 subjects (2,159 cases and 2,985 controls) from around the world.
They reported, “Our pooled results showed no significant association between the intensity, duration, or cumulative consumption of cannabis smoke and the risk of lung cancer overall or in never smokers.”
Previous case-control studies have also failed to find an association between cannabis smoking and head and neck cancers or cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract.
Nevertheless, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration continues to maintain, “Marijuana smokers increase their risk of cancer of the head, neck, lungs and respiratory track.”
Consistent use of cannabis associated is associated with reduced risk factors for Type 2 diabetes
Will the pot plant one day play a role in staving the ongoing epidemic of Type 2 diabetes? Emerging science indicates that it just might.
According to trial data published this month in the American Journal of Medicine, subjects who regularly consume cannabis possess favorable indices related to diabetic control compared to occasional consumers or non-consumers.
Investigators at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, assessed self-report data from some 5,000 adult onset diabetics patients regarding whether they smoked or had ever smoked marijuana. Researchers reported that those who were current, regular marijuana smokers possessed 16 percent lower fasting insulin levels and reduced insulin resistance compared to those who had never used pot. By contrast, non-users possessed larger waistlines and lower levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL or ‘good’) cholesterol – both of which are risk factors for type 2 diabetes.
Similar benefits were reported in occasional cannabis consumers, though these changes were less pronounced, “suggesting that the impact of marijuana use on insulin and insulin resistance exists during periods of recent use,” researchers reported.
The recent findings are supportive of the findings of 2012 study by a team of UCLA researchers, published in the British Medical Journal, which reported that adults with a history of marijuana use had a lower prevalence of type 2 diabetes and possess a lower risk of contracting the disease than did those with no history of cannabis consumption, even after researchers adjusted for social variables (ethnicity, level of physical activity, etc.) Concluded the study, “[This] analysis of adults aged 20-59 years … showed that participants who used marijuana had a lower prevalence of DM (Diabetes Mellitus) and lower odds of DM relative to non-marijuana users.”
Diabetes is the third leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer.
Inhaling cannabis dramatically mitigates symptoms of Crohn’sdisease
Smoking cannabis twice daily significantly reduces symptoms of Crohn’s disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disorder that is estimated to impact about half a million Americans. So say the results of the first-ever placebo-controlled trial assessing the use of cannabis for Crohn’s – published online this month in the scientific journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
Researchers at the Meir Medical Center, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in Israel assessed the safety and efficacy of inhaled cannabis versus placebo in 21 subjects with Crohn’s disease who were nonresponsive to conventional treatment regimens. Eleven participants smoked standardized cannabis cigarettes containing 23 percent THC and 0.5 percent cannabidiol – a nonpsychotropic cannabinoid known to possess anti-inflammatory properties -- twice daily over a period of eight weeks. The other ten subjects smoked placebo cigarettes containing no active cannabinoids.
Investigators reported, “Our data show that 8-weeks treatment with THC-rich cannabis, but not placebo, was associated with a significant decrease of 100 points in CDAI (Crohn’s Disease and activity index) scores.” Five of the eleven patients in the study group reported achieving disease remission (defined as a reduction in patient’s CDAI score by more than 150 points). Participants who smoked marijuana reported decreased pain, improved appetite, and better sleep compared to control subjects. Researchers reported that “no significant side effects” were associated with cannabis inhalation.
The clinical results substantiate decades of anecdotal reports from Crohn’s patients, some one-half of which acknowledge having used cannabis to mitigate symptoms of the disease.
Marijuana-like substances halt HIV infection in white blood cells
The administration of THC has been associated with decreased mortality and ameliorated disease progression in monkeys with simian immunodeficiency virus, a primate model of HIV disease. So could cannabinoids produce similar outcomes in humans? The findings of a newly published preclinical trial indicate that the answer may be ‘yes’ and they reveal the substance’s likely mechanism of action in combating the disease.
Writing in the May edition of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, investigators at the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia reported that the administration of cannabinoid agonists limits HIV infection in macrophages (white blood cells that aid in the body's immune response). Researchers assessed the impact of three commercially available synthetic cannabis agonists (non-organic compounds that act on the same endogenous receptor sites as do plant cannabinoids) on HIV-infected macrophage cells. Following administration, researchers sampled the cells periodically to measure the activity of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, which is essential for HIV replication. By day 7, investigators reported that the administration of all three compounds was associated with a significant decrease in HIV replication.
“The results suggest that selective CB2 (cannabinoid 2 receptor) agonists could potentially be used in tandem with existing antiretroviral drugs, opening the door to the generation of new drug therapies for HIV/AIDS,” researchers summarized in a Temple University news release. “The data also support the idea that the human immune system could be leveraged to fight HIV infection."
Cannabinoids offer a likely treatment therapy for PTSD
Post-traumatic stress syndrome is estimated to impact some eight millions American annually and effective treatments for the condition are few and far between. Yet just published research in the May issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry indicates that cannabinoids hold the potential to successfully treat the condition.
Researchers at the New York School of Medicine reported that subjects diagnosed with PTSD possess elevated quantities of endogenous cannabinoid receptors in regions of the brain associated with fear and anxiety. In addition, authors also reported that these subjects suffer from the decreased production of anandamide, an endogenous cannabinoid neurotransmitter, resulting in an imbalanced endocannibinoid system. (The endogenous cannabinoid receptor system is a regulatory system that is present in living organisms for the purpose of promoting homeostasis).
Authors speculated that increasing the body’s production of cannabinoids would likely restore the body’s natural brain chemistry and psychological balance. They affirmed, “[Our] findings substantiate, at least in part, emerging evidence that … plant-derived cannabinoids such as marijuana may possess some benefits in individuals with PTSD by helping relieve haunting nightmares and other symptoms of PTSD.”
The researchers concluded: “The data reported herein are the first of which we are aware of to demonstrate the critical role of CB1 (cannabinoid) receptors and endocannabinoids in the etiology of PTSD in humans. As such, they provide a foundation upon which to develop and validate informative biomarkers of PTSD vulnerability, as well as to guide the rational development of the next generation of evidence-based treatments for PTSD.”
But don’t expect federal officials to help move this process forward. In 2011 federal administrators blocked investigators at the University of Arizona at Phoenix from conducting an FDA-approved, placebo-controlled clinical trial to evaluate the use of cannabis in 50 patients with PTSD.
Scientific integrity? Not when it comes to marijuana, not by a long shot.