Congress allows DC to implement 1998 medical marijuana law

House and Senate negotiations for the 2010 Appropriations bill have been completed. This is the huge federal budget bill and it just so happens that Washington DC is a federal district and its spending is controlled by Congress.

In 1998, DC passed a medical marijuana bill overwhelmingly, but Congressional drug warriors led by Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia prevented DC from spending any federal money to count the votes (that’s right, in our democracy’s capital, our leaders conspired to prevent citizens from counting votes in a legal election). When that was deemed unconstitutional, they spent the money to count the votes, showing that 69% of DC supported medical marijuana. So Rep. Barr created the “Barr Amendment” that prevented DC from spending any money to implement the medical marijuana program they had voted in.

Well, today’s 2010 Appropriations bill changes all that. In addition to removing bans on abortion, domestic partnerships, and needle exchange, Congress has given the go-ahead to begin implementing DC medical marijuana!

(US Senate) Removing Special Restrictions on the District of Columbia: Eliminates a prohibition on the use of local tax funds for abortion, thereby putting the District in the same position as the 50 states. Also allows the District to implement a referendum on use of marijuana for medical purposes as has been done in other states, allows use of Federal funds for needle exchange programs except in locations considered inappropriate by District authorities, and discontinues a ban on the use of funds in the bill for domestic partnership registration and benefits.

DC’s medical marijuana bill was written with the same sort of open language as was passed in California… will we be seeing marijuana dispensaries on K Street anytime soon?

Study: Marijuana Imagery In Anti-Pot Ads Encourages Teen Use

[Editor's note: This post is excerpted from this week's forthcoming NORML weekly media advisory. To have NORML's media advisories delivered straight to your in-box, sign up for NORML's free e-zine here.]

Anti-drug public service announcements that feature teens using marijuana are less likely to dissuade viewers from experimenting with pot than are advertisements absent such images, according to survey data to be published in the journal Health Communication.

Investigators at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania assessed the attitudes of over 600 adolescents, aged 12 to 18, after viewing 60 government funded anti-marijuana service announcements. Specifically, researchers evaluated whether the presence of marijuana-related imagery in the ads (e.g., the handling of marijuana cigarettes or the depiction of marijuana smoking behavior) were more likely or less likely to discourage viewers’ use of cannabis.

Messages that depict teens associating with cannabis are “significantly less effective than others,” the researchers found.

“This negative impact of marijuana scenes is not reversed in the presence of strong anti-marijuana arguments in the ads and is mainly present for the group of adolescents who are often targets of such anti-marijuana ads (i.e., high-risk adolescents),” authors determined. “For this segment of adolescents, including marijuana scenes in anti-marijuana (public service announcements) may not be a good strategy.”

Since 1998, Congress has appropriated over $2 billion to fund anti-drug advertisements as part of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. Independent reviews of the campaign have determined that the ads fail to discourage viewers from trying marijuana or other drugs.

In 2006, a study published in the journal Addictive Behaviors reported that teenagers who were most often exposed to the ad campaign were also most likely to hold positive attitudes about marijuana and were most likely to express their intent to use it.