First, do no harm...

Bruce Mirken, former communications director for MPP, has a great review of the potential of cannabinoids in cancer treatment at AlterNet.

In his 1971 State of the Union speech, President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, prompting passage of the National Cancer Act, aimed at making the “conquest of cancer a national crusade.” Just four years later, scientists from the National Cancer Institute published a study demonstrating that a group of compounds taken from a common, widely cultivated plant shrank lung tumors that had been implanted in mice, extending their survival.

In a world that made sense, this plant and the anticancer drugs it produced would have been rushed into further testing, and we’d have known in a few years whether they had potential as treatments for human cancers. Instead, research proceeded at a glacial pace, with almost no further progress till the 1990s. Since then, vast quantities of lab and animal data have confirmed those early findings, but studies of these plant compounds in actual human beings with cancer remain nearly nonexistent.

What got in the way was Nixon’s other war, the “war on drugs.” The plant in question was cannabis sativa — marijuana — public enemy number one in that other war, and discovering that marijuana had beneficial properties was the last thing the U.S. government wanted to do.

He also covers the claims of Rick Simpson and his claims of curing cancer with hemp oil.

When I worked at the Marijuana Policy Project, we received several impassioned emails imploring us to tell Sen. Kennedy that cannabis could cure his brain tumor. Others touted Canadian Rick Simpson’s “Healing Hemp Oil” Web site, Phoenix Tears.

The site includes video and written instructions for making the preparation. The procedure involves using a solvent such as naphtha or isopropyl alcohol to extract the THC from marijuana, then boiling off the solvent using a rice cooker to leave a thick oil with a high THC concentration.

Simpson warns readers away from conventional cancer treatments: “Hemp oil has a very high success rate in the treatment of cancer, unfortunately many people who come to me have been badly damaged by the medical system with their chemo and radiation etc. The damage such treatments cause have a lasting effect and people who have suffered the effects of such treatments are the hardest to cure.”

He offers numerous stories and testimonials describing seemingly hopeless cancers cured by hemp oil, but no controlled, scientific experiments.

And critics find plenty to worry about. First, they note, despite warnings and disclaimers on the site, the procedure for making the medicine is risky. Mitch Earleywine, author of Understanding Marijuana and a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany, calls the do-it-yourself procedure “outrageously dangerous. Even if you don’t light yourself on fire, you may end up with leftover solvent that would slowly poison the healthiest of us.”

While cautious about reports that are “solely anecdotal,” Paul Armentano, deputy director and resident science wonk at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, lays blame for the lack of proper data at the foot of prohibition. “It is a shame that lone individuals must try and engage in the work that the medical establishment should be undertaking, yet have turned a blind eye to,” he says. “Unfortunately, what we have is speculation rather than hard science, and we only have the politicization of cannabis to blame.”

I know many people swear by Rick Simpson’s treatment.  Given the amazing things cannabis can do, I don’t doubt that hemp oil does have some wonderful healing properties.  I would use hemp oil if I were in a battle with cancer… but in addition to, not instead of the medical treatments that have been proven in clinical studies and through decades of trial with millions of patients. That’s my issue with Simpson; not that cannabis might help (it probably does and it can’t really hurt), but that he’s counseling people to reject what is known to help.

I also know it won’t be me combining flame with naphtha or isopropyl alcohol any time soon.

SF Weekly

Oaksterdam takes its name from a bastardization of Oakland, where the university began, and pot-friendly Amsterdam. Here, new growers and dispensary operators are being trained like whole legions of Johnny Appleseeds, soon to spread pot’s blessings from one coastline to the other. Not that anywhere is truly virgin ground, but consider: The pro-marijuana movement has never had an army so large, politically sophisticated, and well-funded, even if supporters downplay the millions that roll in. Nor has it enjoyed such a frenzied period of media exposure, a startling amount of it positive.

Never has there been such a concerted thrust to legalize the drug nationwide — for medical purposes, for the plain old joy of getting stoned, and for a gold mine in profits to be reaped by those who control the multipronged industry. Together with a rapidly shifting public attitude toward pot and a White House willing to accept state medical-marijuana laws, legalization seems as inevitable today as it was unthinkable a generation ago. “We’re almost at a zeitgeist,” says one of the high-profile lobbyists who is making it happen, Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) in Washington, D.C.

Zeitgeist has become one of the buzzwords of the campaign — meaning, in context, a sort of coming together of favorable forces. St. Pierre, who can call on advisory-board input from the likes of Willie Nelson and Woody Harrelson, is a glib former altar boy and preppy from Massachusetts who likes to wear a marijuana-leaf lapel pin. He says that in the past year, NORML has seen an unprecedented escalation of Web-page hits, podcast downloads, new memberships, and media calls. “We monitor [newspaper] columns, and editors have swung in favor of reform,” he says. “I will go give a lecture in Des Moines, Iowa. The questions people are asking come right out of watching Weeds on Showtime. It’s quite remarkable.”

Badgering newspapers and television programs to pay attention to the subject used to be one of the critical challenges for people like St. Pierre. Getting a meaningful dialogue started was half the battle. Now the buzz is self-sustaining, indicating a willingness of America, as a whole, to engage the subject.

“The first time, nearly eight years ago, I attempted to pitch a marijuana-related story to CNN, they literally laughed at me,” remembers Bruce Mirken, a San Francisco–based spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project. “The person who answered the phone burst out laughing. Now they’re calling us. We’ve been on various broadcasts and cable network shows 21 times [in 2009] — at least a couple on CNN. We’ve also been on the Today show, ABC World News, really all over.”

A fantastic article from columnist Dave Ferrell which I highly recommend readers check out. It is our time: don’t let up the pressure on elected officials, news organizations, and (possibly most important) everyday people you speak to. I had the opportunity to speak with some of my work colleagues including several conservatives over the holidays about marijuana legalization. What brought them to our side of the argument was a simple question: is what we’re doing now vis-à-vis the War on Drugs working? The answer is very clear: no.

The Washington Post

The compromise legislation, which must go before the full House and Senate and could be voted on by week’s end, would end decades of prohibitions that city officials and activists say increased the number of impoverished children, expanded the number of people infected by HIV and AIDS, and blocked a District referendum 10 years ago that allowed the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

“This is a great triumph for the District,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said Wednesday. Although two votes remain, Norton said, “we think it’s over.” The financial services legislation that governs District spending is contained in a large package of bills, “and it will be hard to take this one out,” she said. “We’re almost home free.”

In 1998, D.C. voters overwhelmingly approved a measure to legalize the possession, use, cultivation and distribution of marijuana if recommended by a physician for serious illnesses. Initiative 59 passed with 69 percent of the vote, but before the law could go into effect, the Republican-controlled Congress enacted an amendment that blocked the city from setting its own drug policies.

It has taken a decade to persuade Congress to remove the impediment, said Bruce Mirken, communications director of the Marijuana Policy Project.

“It’s 11 years overdue,” Mirken said. “It’s about time the citizens of the District of Columbia had their own health policies respected.”

If the compromise bill is passed and signed into law by President Obama, the District would join 13 states in legalizing marijuana for medical use.

This is about about allowing DC residents to have the same rights as other US citizens to determine their own future. For too long, Congress has used the District’s budget as a club to enforce their own antiquated and morality-based views. The voting residents of the District have spoken (in the case of medical marijuana, they’ve spoken since 1998); it is time for Congress to step back and let the democratic process work.

I can’t do any better than MPP’s Bruce Mirken on this one:

(LA Times) Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, ridiculed the effort. “Let me guess, they set a record number of plant seizures and marijuana has now been eradicated from California?” he quipped.

Mirken said the campaign has caused growers to move from private lands into wilderness areas. “This is an annual exercise in futility. Not only does it not do anything meaningful, it actually makes the problem worse,” he said.

It’s all part of California’s CAMP – Campaign Against Marijuana Planting – which over 27 years has been funding law enforcement to take helicopters into the hills so police can get paid triple time to pull weeds and then fly them all over the wilderness blowing their seeds across the land so the cops can go weeding again next year.  According to the report:

Los Angeles County, which has seen a whirlwind expansion in medical marijuana dispensaries this year, has notched another marijuana milestone. The county has moved to No. 5 for the amount seized in the state’s annual eradication campaign, with 340,187 pot plants uprooted — more than a fourfold increase.

Statewide, the 27-year-old effort, known as the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, found and destroyed almost 4.5 million plants in 41 counties, up from 2.9 million seized in each of the two prior years’ growing season. The amount has climbed steadily since 1996, when California voters approved the nation’s first medical marijuana law.

State officials put the wholesale value of this year’s eradicated marijuana at $17.8 billion.

Let’s see, the standard California sales tax, minus any county or local taxes, is 8.25%, so that eradication represents about $1.46 billion dollars in tax revenues.  Obviously marijuana has not been completely eradicated by CAMP and I think even the cops will tell you they’re only scratching the surface.  Let’s be generous and suppose they’re pulling up 10% of California’s outdoor crop.  That would be $14.6 billion in taxes going uncollected.  It’s even more money if we include indoor grows and figure they’re catching much less than 10% of the crops.

ABC covers the proposal to legalize marijuana from an Assemblymember “naturally” from San Francisco.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’d just ask that dispensary employee if he thinks the black market $15/gram pricing would drop under legalization and whether that would be better for “the people who really need it”.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/rvdradio/2009/07/15/RVD-Radio-with-Rob-Van-Dam

That was a lot of fun. I never quite get used to doing live talk radio without putting on my FCC filter.

Now really, Rob Van Dam, Paul and Me on the air with “Officer X”, is that even fair? That’s out of a wrestling script – three against one. And I relished every second of it. How many times do you see one of ours on the TV against two of theirs and a skeptical host?

Rob Van Dam will be speaking at the NORML CON in San Francisco, Sept. 24-26 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. See http://norml.org/conference for details

(Huffington Post) Three television stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles have rejected an ad promoting the legalization and taxation of marijuana, set to run on consenting stations and cable networks in the state beginning Wednesday.

Two ABC affiliates joined one NBC station in the decision to reject the spots. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, has called for a debate on legalizing marijuana.

“I think it’s time for a debate,” he said in May. “And I think that we ought to study very carefully what other countries are doing that have legalized marijuana and other drugs, what affect it had on those countries, and are they happy with that decision.”

KABC in Los Angeles and KGO and KNTV in San Francisco apparently aren’t interested in such a debate. “How can you debate it if they won’t air both sides?” wondered Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, which is behind the ad buy that he called “modest but not trivial.”

NEW YORK (Huffington Post via AP) — The savage drug war in Mexico. Crumbling state budgets. Weariness with current drug policy. The election of a president who said, “Yes _ I inhaled.”

These developments and others are kindling unprecedented optimism among the many Americans who want to see marijuana legalized.

Doing so, they contend to an ever-more-receptive audience, could weaken the Mexican cartels now profiting from U.S. pot sales, save billions in law enforcement costs, and generate billions more in tax revenue from one of the nation’s biggest cash crops.

Said a veteran of the movement, Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance: “This is the first time I feel like the wind is at my back and not in my face.”

“For the most part, what we’ve seen over the past 20 years has been incremental,” said Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief now active with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “What we’ve seen in the past six months is an explosion of activity, fresh thinking, bold statements and penetrating questions.”

“The notion that we have to keep something completely banned for adults to keep it away from kids doesn’t hold up,” said Bruce Mirken, communications director of the Marijuana Policy Project.

As for Obama, the activists don’t expect him to embrace the cause at this point.

“Obama’s got two wars, an economic disaster. We have to realize they’re not going to put this on the front burner right now,” said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, or the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “But every measurable metric out there is swinging our way.”

Somebody cue Roger Waters… the tide is turning.

Click here to view the embedded video.