Marijuana law reform legislation is pending is several states. Below is a summary of this week’s legislative activity and tips to help you become involved in changing the laws in your state.

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For the third consecutive year, pot arrests are up in the city of Denver. Why is this news? It’s news because Denver voters have twice since 2005 passed municipal initiatives ordering the cops to stop making minor pot busts. Yet, as the New York Times reports, local cops have chosen to do just the opposite — with the city’s assistant attorney bragging, “There has not been a policy change.”

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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.

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Michigan voters will be deciding on more than just the next President this November; they will also be voting on whether to make Michigan the thirteenth state to authorize the use of medical cannabis.

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Here at NORML we are used to seeing some hysterical, unfounded claims made about the ills of cannabis. However, even we were shocked when a supporter from Iowa sent us Senator Tom Harkin’s (D, IA) raging, reefer madness-esque reply to his note asking him to justify why medicinal cannabis is still illegal after the second largest medical association in the country, the American College of Physicians, publicly backed rescheduling of cannabis and the protection of patients who use it for medicinal purposes. Here’s the highlights of the reply he received (full text here):

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Illinois’ Senate Public Health Committee will hold a hearing this Wednesday, March 5, on Senate Bill 2865 — which seeks to legalize medical cannabis.  If you live in Illinois, please take a moment to support this effort.

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