• Cannabis & Hemp

    UMass Professor Drops Bid To Grow Medical Pot

    WASHINGTON (AP) — A University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor says he’s dropping his nearly decade-long fight to persuade the government to let him grow marijuana in bulk for medical research.

    Horticulturist Lyle Craker wanted to cultivate marijuana to boost research into the plant’s potential medicinal benefits. But he’s been rebuffed — even as more than a dozen states have legalized medical marijuana.

    Craker, 70, said he saw no end in sight to the legal wrangling, given the likelihood of an appeals process that could run several years, or even decades. He was frustrated, too, that he never got a hoped-for boost from the Obama administration.

    “I’m disappointed in our system,” he said. “But I’m not disappointed at what we did. I think our efforts have brought the problem to the public eye more. … This is just the first battle in a war.”

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    Harper’s Faith-Based Drug War

    We should not pretend that Bill S-10 has anything to do with evidence – or with making our country a safer place in which to live.

    by Neil Boyd Associate Director, Criminology, Simon Fraser University.

    The Harper Conservatives are under fire for their extraordinarily expensive legislative initiative, Bill S-10. Among other things, the bill seeks to spend at least hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on prison building, in order to impose a mandatory minimum term of six months in jail for anyone who grows more than six marijuana plants. Most Canadians, experts and non-experts alike, have criticized the proposal as costly and counter-productive, noting that it will imprison individuals who are mostly non-violent and who sell to willing adult consumers.

  • Hot Off The 'Net

    Why This Cop Asked the President About Legalizing Drugs

    The president’s YouTube comments are a tremendous first step for a more open national dialogue on drug reform.

    You might not think a 65-year-old retired cop would take to the Internet to ask the president of the United States to consider legalizing drugs, but that’s just what I did recently. The answer I got from President Obama in YouTube’s “Your Interview with the President” contest pleasantly surprised me.

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    Anti-Stigma Week: Time to Reflect and Act

    It has been incredible to see a diverse group of people and organizations pool their skills and resources to mount Anti-Stigma Week, with activities that all have one goal – enhancing individual and community health and well-being by transforming stigma around drug use.

    This year’s Anti-Stigma Week theme is Drug Use, Dignity and Human Rights. Drug use, and especially illicit drug use, is associated with high degrees of stigma that hurt individuals’ health and access to health care and reduce community cohesion.

    Stigma is a societal process that marks people as outsiders. Those who are different -because of their behaviours or identities -are subject to disapproval and marginalization.

    They aren’t seen as people, as someone’s daughter or father, neighbours with their own stories and failings and hopes. This prejudice makes it easier for active discrimination to take hold, or to leave individuals fearing that others think them less worthy. The way systems are organized and accepted societal attitudes reinforce these tendencies.

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    Drug War Anniversary a Time for Reflection and Action

    By Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director, Drug Policy Alliance

    Some anniversaries provide an occasion for celebration, others a time for reflection, still others a time for action. This June will mark forty years since President Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” identifying drug abuse as “public enemy No. 1.” As far as I know, no celebrations are planned. What’s needed, indeed essential, are reflection — and action.

  • Cannabis & Hemp - Hot Off The 'Net

    YouGov/Economist Poll Finds Most Americans Support Marijuana Legalization

    By Jacob Sullum

    A new YouGov poll commissioned by The Economist finds most Americans support marijuana legalization. Here is the question:

    Some people say marijuana should be treated like alcohol and tobacco. They say it should be regulated and taxed and made illegal for minors. Do you agree?

    Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they agreed, while only 23 percent disagreed. The remaining 19 percent had no opinion. This is the strongest support for legalization that I can recall seeing in a nationally representative poll. A Gallup poll in late October found that 46 percent of Americans favored legalization, a record for that organization’s surveys. (By comparison, support was under 30 percent in Gallup polls taken during the late 1970s, a time that today is remembered as relatively pot-tolerant.) As far as I know, the only other survey to find majority support for legalizing pot was a May 2009 Zogby poll in which 52 percent of respondents favored that position. The question in that survey was pretty slanted in favor of legalization, however.