So, yesterday the big news was that the White House sent a memo out to the attorneys general in all the states where it’s legal to use medical marijuana. You might be thinking that if you’re not sick it doesn’t affect you, but you’d be wrong. It’s a step in the right direction, and every baby-step counts, people!

Besides the estimated 28 million people in this country that smoke pot (legally and otherwise), there’s a growing number of Americans who are waking up to the fact that marijuana isn’t the dangerous drug that they’ve been brainwashed into believing. In fact, a slim majority of Americans now believe that alcohol is a more dangerous drug than weed. Think about that.

Ultimately, public opinion is what will eventually make marijuana legal. If more and more people (whether they’re users or not) are realizing that pot isn’t a dangerous drug, then it follows that eventually more and more people are going to get fed up with seeing their tax dollars spent on fighting a losing battle. Even the White House gets this, based on this passage from yesterday’s memo:

“…prosecution of individuals with cancer or other serious illnesses who use marijuana as part of a recommended treatment regimen consistent with applicable state law, or those caregivers in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state law who provide such individuals with marijuana, is unlikely to be an efficient use of limited federal resources.”

In other words, the Obama administration thinks it’s a waste of federal dollars to fight medical marijuana – and it knows that most Americans think so too.

We should all let our government know that we support its decision regarding medical marijuana. Maybe it isn’t much, but it’s also one more way to let them know that the tide of public opinion in general is changing regarding marijuana laws.

Want to say “thank you” to President Obama? NORML has set up a page on their website that makes it easy to do just that. All you have to do is fill in your name & contact info (I suppose so that they can see what district you’re from).

To send an email to the White House, go here: http://capwiz.com/norml2/issues/alert/?alertid=14205391

And while we’re at it, we should give NORML a big shout out too. It’s organizations like theirs that keep the fight moving forward.

Annual Causes of Death in the United States:

• Tobacco: 435,000
• Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity: 365,000
• Alcohol: 85,000
• Microbial Agents: 75,000
• Toxic Agents: 55,000
• Motor Vehicle Crashes: 26,374
• Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs: 32,000
• Suicide: 30,622
• Incidents Involving Firearms: 29,000
• Homicide: 20,308
• Sexual Behaviors: 20,000
• All Illicit Drug Use, Direct and Indirect: 17,000
• Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs such as Aspirin: 7,600
• MARIJUANA: 0

This information could be used to make a case for outlawing couch potatoes who sit around watching porn, smoking cigarettes and eating Big Macs under the influence of aspirin. But, um, as a deterrent against smoking pot it didn’t exactly scare the pants off me. They’ll have to try harder.

You can read the entire article here, but basically what it says is that a new study was done in the UK to try to prove the earlier study’s results (common practice among researchers). The conclusion the second study came to was completely different from the first one, and the results were recently published in the journal Schizophrenia Research.

The authors of this study were professional and polite in their wording, and they didn’t exactly come right out and say those other guys are idiots. But they didn’t need to, because based on the following excerpt from the news article it’s pretty damn obvious that weed can’t be linked to schizophrenia:

According to the study, cannabis use in the UK between 1972 and 2002 has increased four-fold in the general population, and 18-fold among under-18s.

Based on the literature supporting the link, the authors argue that this should be followed by an increase in schizophrenia incidence of 29% between 1990 and 2010.

But the researchers found no increase in the rates of schizophrenia and psychosis diagnosis during that period. In fact some of the data suggested the incidence of these conditions had decreased.

So in other words, in the UK there are four times as many people smoking marijuana today as there were in 1972. But not only has the incidence of schizophrenia not increased, it’s actually slightly decreased since 1972.

If the researchers that did the first study had any common sense, then they would see that it stands to reason that if smoking pot was linked to schizophrenia then there would have to be about four times as many schizophrenics today as there were in 1972. But it just ain’t so. Which has to make ya wonder – what were THEY smokin’ ?

Read the full article here.

Read the full article here.

read the full article

read the full article

read the full article

read the full article