It is becoming increasingly more difficult for America’s Office Of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) to continue to claim that cannabis is not a valuable and acceptable medicine. Late Wednesday night Austria’s parliament placed the country in line with a number of other countries (i.e., Canada) and 12 American states that allow seriously-ill, dying or sense-threatened medical patients who possess a physician’s recommendation to legally possess and use cannabis medicinally.

VIENNA (AFP) - Austria’s parliament has adopted a new bill allowing the cultivation of cannabis for medical and scientific purposes, under the Health Ministry’s control.The bill, approved by parliament during a late-night session Wednesday, will give the health and food safety agency AGES the exclusive right in Austria to grow the plant, which is otherwise categorised as a drug.

Michael Bach, president of the Austrian pain studies association OeSG, welcomed the new legislation, saying: “Any initiative that makes it possible to develop and provide new drugs for pain therapy is welcome.”

“Substances drawn from cannabis have been used for medical purposes more and more in the last few years,” he added.
Possession of or dealing in cannabis incurs a 6-month prison sentence in Austria.

Below is this week’s summary of pending state legislation and tips to help you become involved in changing the laws in your state.

Missouri: Joplin NORML and Sensible Joplin turned in over 6,000 signatures this week in favor of a municipal ballot initiative to reduce minor marijuana possession penalties to a fine-only offense. (Under Missouri law, marijuana possession is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.) The bill’s proponents were required to collect approximately 4,600 signatures from registered voters to qualify for the November 2008 ballot. The city has 20 days to verify the signatures. To learn more about the initiative, click here.

Rhode Island: Legislators are contemplating whether to override Gov. Don Carcieri’s (R) recent veto of legislation that sought to study whether the state should establish state-licensed ‘Compassion Clubs’ to provide medicinal cannabis to authorized patients. In 2005 and 2007, Gov. Carcieri vetoed legislation to legalize the medical use of cannabis by state-authorized patients. Both vetoes were eventually overridden by the legislature. For more information, please visit the Rhode Island Patient Advocacy Coalition here here. To hear comments from RIPAC Executive Director Jesse Stout on NORML’s Daily Audio Stash, please click here.

Hawaii: Republican Governor Linda Lingle vetoed legislation (House Bill 2675) this week that sought to establish a legislative commission to study ways to better provide medical cannabis to state-qualified patients. In her veto message, Gov. Lingle said she opposed the bill because “the use of marijuana, even medical marijuana, is illegal under federal law,” and because she believes that there are alternative prescription drugs available besides cannabis. Although the Senate voted to override the Governor’s veto, the House chose not to. To hear comments from Drug Policy Forum of Hawaii Executive Director Pam Lichty on NORML’s Daily Audio Stash, please click here.

Oregon: Oregon NORML held a press conference this week to announce the launch of the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act (OCTA), which seeks to regulate the sale of cannabis in state liquor stores. Proponents of the measure must collect 83,000 signatures from registered voters to qualify the initiative for the November 2010 ballot. To view the press conference, click here. To read media coverage of the campaign launch, please visit here.

California: Via CBS News — “The Berkeley City Council has placed on the Nov. 4 ballot [a measure that] would eliminate limits on the amount of medical marijuana that could be legally processed by patients or caregivers, establish peer review for medical marijuana collectives to police themselves and allow medical marijuana dispensaries to locate where permitted without a public hearing. The initiative failed by only 191 votes in 2004 but a judge nullified the results, ruling that Alameda County election officials mishandled a recount and ordering that the measure be placed back on the ballot in November.”

REMINDER: NORML podcaster Russ Belville and I will be discussing this essay, as well as my previous blog post “US Government Patents Medical Pot,” later today on the NORML Daily Audio Stash. An abbreviated version of my essay appears on Alternet.org here.

The US government’s longstanding denial of medical marijuana research and use is an irrational and morally bankrupt public policy. On this point, few Americans disagree. As for the question of “why” federal officials maintain this inflexible and inhumane policy, well that’s another story.

One of the more popular theories seeking to explain the Feds’ seemingly inexplicable ban on medical pot — and the use of cannabis by adults in general — goes like this: Neither the US government nor the pharmaceutical industry will allow for the use of medical marijuana because they can’t patent it or profit from it. A related, yet equally common hypothesis argues: Big Pharma lobbies the federal government to keep pot illegal because it won’t be able to compete with patients growing their own medicine.

They’re appealing theories, yet I’ve found neither to be accurate nor persuasive. Here’s why.

Full Story

A few months ago it was Iowa’s Democratic Senator Tom Harkin that was replying to his constituents claiming cannabis “use often has fatal consequences” and that cannabis users may actually sell their children for ‘drug’ money.

Now, Senator Charles Grassley (R) in a letter to constituents, oddly equates cannabis use to genocide, murder and child rape.

After several thousand years, civilized societies have failed to eliminate murder, rape, or child abuse. Nor have they eliminated organized crime, the manufacture of counterfeit money, or genocide. But no one seriously sees these failures as justification for surrender. Illegal drug use costs society at least as much as any of these social ills. Yet we do not hear any calls to legalize these abuses. Why then should we give up? Should we surrender to the criminals, and legalize marijuana? No. Instead, we should do whatever we can to prevent criminals from gaining the upper hand, do what needs to be done to give our families, our friends, and our neighbors a safe and secure place to live.

However, his major problem with this premise, and presumably his underlying rationale for supporting cannabis prohibition, is that few in the United States (even in Iowa) agree with such absurd assertions as most citizens perceive cannabis use closer to alcohol consumption—and since the mid-1990s, as a valuable, non-toxic, affordable and effective medicine.

Also, similar to the Harkin letter, Senator Grassley equates cannabis law reform with “surrender”, which helps one understand how hard it is to lobby these gents when they cast the debate as ‘winning’ or ‘surrendering’ (but, what else is new in DC?).

There are many reasons why America’s 70-year old cannabis prohibition, a failed public policy many times worse in scope and cost than alcohol’s short-lived prohibition, still prevails. Regrettably, because of the way the US Senate works regarding seniority, committee assignments and a senator’s individual ability to place a hold on legislation, cannabis reform is always against the eight ball in the Senate in a way not possible in the House of Representatives.

Senator Grassley is too smart and sophisticated a man to really believe that cannabis use equates to murder, child rape and genocide. Please join NORML in contacting Senator Grassley and asking him to stop replying to his constituents in Iowa with non-sense, and to support the decriminalization of cannabis and to allow sick, dying and sense-threatened Iowans (and citizens nationwide) to legally access and use medicinal cannabis.

Thanks to Ames Progressive’s Gavin Aronsen for the tip and Grassley’s letter to constituents who contact him about cannabis law reform is read here.

The extent of the federal government’s hypocrisy on the issue of medicinal cannabis truly knows no bounds. Don’t believe me? Just click here.

(Thanks to Huffington Post blogger Brinna for the link.)

US Patent 6630507 - Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants

Application: filed on 2/02/2001

US Patent Issued on October 7, 2003

Assignee: The United States of America, as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services  

And there you have it. The same federal government that steadfastly denies pot has any medicinal value also holds the medical patents on the plant’s various therapeutic cannabinoids. And they aren’t the only ones who do.

NORML podcaster Russ Belville and I will be discussing this issue in depth — as well as the related issue of whether or not Big Pharma is behind the prohibition of pot — on the Daily Audio Stash next week.

Stay tuned.

Below is this week’s summary of pending state legislation and tips to help you become involved in changing the laws in your state.

California: The California Senate this week approved SJR 20, which seeks to halt federal law enforcement from prosecuting state-sanctioned medical cannabis patients and dispensaries. The measure passed by a vote of 24 to 15, and now goes to the state Assembly — where a similar proposal, AB 2743, was recently withdrawn from consideration.

Michigan: A statewide ballot measure seeking to legalize the possession and use of medical cannabis has been authorized to appear on the November ballot. According to a spring 2008 poll, two-thirds of Michigan voters back the measure. If passed, Michigan would become the thirteenth state since 1996 to enact legislation protecting medical cannabis patients from arrest and state criminal prosecution, and the ninth to do so via ballot initiative. For more information on the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act, please visit here.

Massachusetts: Election officials on Wednesday certified for the November ballot a statewide initiative seeking to decriminalize the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana. Since 2002, more than 480,000 voters in 127 Massachusetts communities have endorsed non-binding resolutions to liberalize local pot policies. More information on the initiative is available from the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy.

Rhode Island: Governor Don Carcieri — a longtime opponent of medical marijuana — vetoed legislation this week that sought to establish a legislative commission to study ways to better provide medical cannabis to state-qualified patients. Since the measure received strong support from both the House and Senate, it is possible that legislators may elect to override the Governor’s veto. For more information, please visit the Rhode Island Patient Advocacy Coalition here.

So I went to the Drug Czar’s blog today, but strangely enough, I couldn’t find any mention of this story.

US leads the world in illegal drug use
via CBS News

Despite tough anti-drug laws, a new survey shows the U.S. has the highest level of illegal drug use in the world.

The World Health Organization’s survey of legal and illegal drug use in 17 countries, including the Netherlands and other countries with less stringent drug laws, shows Americans report the highest level of cocaine and marijuana use.

For example, Americans were four times more likely to report using cocaine in their lifetime than the next closest country, New Zealand (16% vs. 4%). Marijuana use was more widely reported worldwide, and the U.S. also had the highest rate of use at 42.4% compared with 41.9% of New Zealanders.

In contrast, in the Netherlands, which has more liberal drug policies than the U.S., only 1.9% of people reported cocaine use and 19.8% reported marijuana use.

“Globally, drug use is not distributed evenly and is not simply related to drug policy, since countries with stringent user-level illegal drug policies did not have lower levels of use than countries with liberal ones,” researcher Louisa Degenhardt of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and colleagues write in PLoS Medicine.

One wonders if Drug Czar John Walters can even show his face in public today. Seriously, is there anything this man has ever said that this new WHO report doesn’t expose to be a blatant and deliberate lie?

America is ‘winning’ the war on drugs? Wrong! The US actually leads the world in illicit drug use, despite increasing the number of drug offenders behind bars 1100 percent since 1980.

Liberalizing marijuana laws will escalate marijuana use? False! Marijuana use is twice as prevalent in the United States as it is in Spain and Italy (where marijuana possession is quasi-legal) and the Netherlands — where marijuana is openly used and sold in public.

Experimenting with marijuana is a ‘gateway’ to the use of cocaine? Lie! Rates of cocaine use in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands — three nations with some of the most liberal pot policies in the world — is actually eight times less than it is in the United States.

Talking about pot in public makes my nose grow longer? True! Whoops, I made that one up.

Anyway, you can check out the full study, along with this very telling table, here.