Madison NORML's Ben Masel with me at the 2009 Great Midwest Harvest Fest in Madison.

It is with great sadness I report on the death of one of the most outstanding activists in the NORML family – Ben Masel has passed away at age 56 following his battle with lung cancer.

Friends are leaving tribute on Ben’s Facebook page.

I met Ben at the 2009 Great Midwest Harvest Fest. He and Gary Storck flew me out to speak to the crowd of thousands on the campus of University of Wisconsin and the statehouse steps. I quickly found him to be exceptionally brilliant (he was just shy of “grand master” in chess) and loaded with fabulous stories of his past activism with the Yippies.

Ben had hoped to make it out to the NORML Conference last week, but obviously his health had taken a turn for the worse. The NORML Board presented to him a special award for his lifetime of work. My own tribute to Ben appears in the August 2011 issue of HIGH TIMES Magazine where we named him “Freedom Fighter of the Month”… unfortunately too late for him to read it. It will be one of my bigger disappointments that Ben never received the recognition he deserved while he was alive to enjoy it.

Following is the article for HIGH TIMES with my sincere condolences to family and friends who had the privilege of knowing and loving him more than I.

If you watched the TV news coverage of the Wisconsin labor protests in Madison last February, you may have seen this month’s Freedom Fighter Ben Masel. A longtime activist with Madison NORML, Ben was instrumental in creating the vibrant cannabis community in the state, including organizing Weedstock and the Great Midwest Harvest Fest that celebrates its fortieth anniversary this October 1-3 (see madisonhempfest.com). He’s currently been fighting over the past few legislative sessions to get Wisconsin to pass the Jacki Rickert Medical Marijuana Act.

While Ben fights for the end of marijuana prohibition, his activism also extends into mainstream politics as well. He’s a passionate civil libertarian, advocating equally for free speech and gun rights, personal privacy and a return to stronger congressional control of war powers. Ben has run many times for elective office, from a challenge to Governor Tommy Thompson in 1990 to his current candidacy for the US Senate seat held by Herb Kohl. He first caught attention for his radicalism when at age 17 he became the youngest person placed on President Nixon’s infamous “enemies list” and “the man” has kept his eye on Ben ever since.

This March at the age of 56, Ben received the horrible news that he’d been stricken by lung cancer. Speaking to the Wisconsin State Journal, Ben said, “I’m feeling pretty upbeat about stuff. Not about having (cancer), but overall. I’m definitely not in the ‘Oh, no, poor me, I’ve got cancer’ mode.” In reviewing our records, we’re stunned and embarrassed that Ben had not been listed among the 206 activists who’ve won the award since 1990. Everyone at NORML and HIGH TIMES extends our highest hopes for Ben’s good health.

UPDATED: NORMLtv is now streaming the presentation of Ben’s award from this year’s conference in his honor:

According to Google News, more than 750 media outlets — that’s 7-5-0, folks — have now weighed in on this week’s pot scare story du jour: “Smoking marijuana causes testicular cancer.”

So is there any truth behind the provocative headline? Some, but hardly enough to justify the media’s feeding frenzy.

Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research in Seattle matched 369 men with of testicular germ cell tumors (TGCTs) with 979 healthy controls. Here’s what they found.

Men who self-reported having “ever used” marijuana had no statistically significant risk of testicular cancer compared to healthy controls who never used pot.

Men who reported currently using marijuana at least once per week, and who had started smoking pot prior to age 18, had an elevated risk compared to controls of contracting a type of testicular cancer known as nonseminoma.

Sounds scary, huh?  Well here’s the catch.

According to the federal government, millions of people smoke marijuana regularly. By contrast, diagnoses of nonseminoma, which typically affects males between the ages of 15 and 34, are extremely rare.

How rare?

Nonseminomas account for fewer than one half of one percent of all cancers among American men.

Further undermining the study’s hypothesis is this: Since the 1970s, the percentage of American males smoking pot has climbed dramatically. By contrast, incidences of nonseminoma have risen only nominally during this same time period.

Of course, this is hardly the first time the mainstream media has jumped ugly on cannabis. Around this same time last year, news outlets from Reuters to Fox News declared that marijuana posed a greater cancer risk than cigarettes. Only problem was that the study they were reporting on actually demonstrated the opposite.

So why does the mainstream media continue to get the story wrong when it comes to pot? Good question. You can read my abbreviated answer here. And while you’re on NORML’s site, get the skinny on what the scientific literature really has to say about any potential links between marijuana and cancer here, here, and here.

Today, the good folks at HuffingtonPost.com published my latest essay on the subject, “What Your Government Knows About Cannabis And Cancer — And Isn’t Telling You.”

Since the Huffington Post is an online medium, I made it a point to include nearly a dozen links to pertinent research and clinical/pre-clinical trials demonstrating that cannabinoids possess anti-cancer properties.

Fortunately, in the past 10 years scientists overseas have generously picked up where U.S. researchers so abruptly left off, reporting that cannabinoids can halt the spread of numerous cancer cells — including prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and brain cancer. (An excellent paper summarizing much of this research, “Cannabinoids for Cancer Treatment: Progress and Promise,” appears in the January 2008 edition of the journal Cancer Research.) A 2006 patient trial published in the British Journal of Cancer even reported that the intracranial administration of THC was associated with reduced tumor cell proliferation in humans with advanced glioblastoma.

For most visitors to the Huffington Post, my essay will be their first exposure to this information, but ideally, not their last. Hopefully, readers of the site — which is one of the most visited on the Internet — will join us in our calls to end the US government’s multi-decade long denial of this potentially groundbreaking research.

You can read the full text of my essay here.

Please feel free to leave a comment and/or circulate this article widely (Digg it, reddit, buzz up, etc.) My last Huff Post essay, “Don’t Buy The ‘Potent Pot’ Hype,” received nearly 100 comments, a personal response from the Drug Czar’s office, and earned me a guest spot on Dr. Drew Pinsky’s live nationally syndicated radio show. That said, in my opinion, the government’s cover-up of pot’s anti-cancer abilities is a far more important topic; hopefully we can get a similar buzz started.

PS: Those interested in learning more about this topic can download an audio file of my recent guest appearance on the radio show, “Sex, Drugs, and Civil Liberties,” (KOPN: Columbia, Missouri) here.

Outrageous Anti-Pot Lies: Media Uses Disgraceful Cancer Scare Tactics

via Alternet.org

[T]he media chose to selectively highlight data implicating cannabis’s dangers while ignoring data implicating its relative safety. In this case, the study’s authors (and, by default, the worldwide press) chose only to emphasize one small subgroup of marijuana smokers (those who reported smoking at least one joint per day for more than ten years). These subjects did in fact, experience an elevated risk of lung cancer compared to non-using controls. (Although contrary to what the press reported, even the study’s heaviest pot smokers never experienced an elevated comparable to those subjects who reported having “ever used” tobacco.) By contrast, cannabis consumers in the study who reported light or moderate pot use actually experienced a decreased cancer risk compared to non-using controls.

Read the full article here.

“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.

Had anyone in the mainstream media even bothered to read the study, which appears in the European Respiratory Journal, they would have stumbled across this nugget, “While cannabis smoking … was not associated with a significantly increased risk of lung cancer, those with the highest tertile of use had a significantly increased risk.”

So just how many subjects in the study (which, overall, assessed the risk in a measly 79 cases and 324 controls) qualified for the “highest tertile?” All of 14 cases and four controls! And, oh yeah, 70 of the 79 lung cancer cases also smoked tobacco.

Needless to say, prior population case control studies that have failed to find any relationship between cannabis use and cancer, such as this, this and this, do not receive nearly the same type of media attention. Go figure?