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The Alter Net news today reported that America was ready for legalized marijuana.Sounded pretty good to me until I opened my daily paper and saw an article by one Alan Ferguson saying that in spite of

No one other than the Drug Czar publishes more misleading headlines about marijuana than Reuters news service. Heck, the Drug Czar even gets his blogging ideas from them.

Via NORML, just look at these two recent Reuters headlines regarding recent marijuana research:

Heavy marijuana use shrinks brain parts

Marijuana may up heart attack, stroke risk

All of this sounds very disturbing, of course, but as is always the case with scary marijuana headlines, there turns out to be far more to the story and far less for marijuana users to worry about. In this case, both studies relied on small samples of obscenely heavy marijuana users (up to 350 joints per week!).

Let me be the first to concede that if someone smokes marijuana all day every day, there is something wrong with them. They may be treating a medical and/or psychological condition and their use may even be understandable under some unusual circumstance. But these are not the people we should study if we want to know the effects of marijuana. The lessons we learn from observing them won't apply to anyone but them.

Beyond all of that, neither of these studies even shows what the headline said. They just didn't. Sarah Baldauf at U.S. News & World Report helpfully points out that the "shrinking brain" study researchers didn't know what size the participants' brains were before initiating marijuana use. It's possible that people with a smaller hippocampus and amygdala are more likely to become compulsive marijuana users, and that the drug doesn’t change brain size at all. Brain size is also a deeply flawed measure of intelligence anyway. In sum, the story isn't news, it's nonsense.

As for the marijuana-heart disease link, the study didn’t address whether the subjects actually had heart disease. Its conclusions were based on heightened levels of a protein that's associated with heart disease. It means nothing, even if you leave aside the fact that the subjects of the study smoked an unbelievable 78-350 joints per week.

In fairness to Reuters, both stories included a strong counterpoint from MPP's Bruce Mirkin, arguing that the absurdly high marijuana consumption of the study participants rendered any conclusions meaningless. Nonetheless, we should not be grateful simply because a reformer got a quote in a story that should never have been published.

We could go on all day about bad things that marijuana "might cause," "could lead to," or "may be associated with," but none of that means a thing unless it's actually true. What is true, and will always be true, is that the war on marijuana users harms far more people than marijuana ever could.

It seems Mexican President Felipe Calderon's aggressive drug war tactics are impressing American politicians more than his own people:

A majority of Mexicans believe violent drug gangs are winning a war with President Felipe Calderon's government after one of the worst months on record for killings, Reforma newspaper reported on Sunday.

According to a poll by the newspaper, 53 percent of Mexicans think that drug traffickers hold the upper hand against government forces which are trying to clamp down on cartels that ship drugs to the United States.

Only 24 percent said they believed the government was winning the battle. The remaining 23 percent gave no opinion. [Reuters]

Since Calderon took office and promised a crackdown on drug trafficking, there have been over 4,000 drug war killings in Mexico. Mexicans must live amidst horrific and growing violence, with no end in sight, just so Calderon can stand proudly atop the drug war podium. Of course, he can only do so figuratively, for fear of being gunned down like his highest-ranking police officials.

Really, the question of who's winning the drug war shouldn't even have to be asked. Of course the cartels are winning, because there wouldn’t be cartels without the drug war. Every dollar they make, every bride they pay, every assassin's bullet is a product of drug prohibition's bloodstained legacy. The problem with the drug war isn’t that we aren’t trying hard enough, it's that trying hard is actually where all the worst violence and disorder comes from.

Drug Dealers Ensuring Against Legalization (DDEAL.us) (Please REPOST! The threat of legalization is REAL!) DDEAL Newsletter #1

Nowhere is the failure of drug prohibition more obvious than in Mexico, where President Calderon's crackdown has already produced over 4,000 deaths, without making a dent in the drug trade.

Yet Obama now joins John McCain in praising Mexico's brutal and ineffective anti-drug efforts:

Mexican drug cartels are terrorizing cities and towns. President Calderon was right to say that enough is enough. We must support Mexico’s effort to crack down. [suntimes.com]

I don't know how anyone can look at the dismal state of the Mexican drug war and find anything to be proud of. Still, I agree with Pete Guither who responded to Obama's comments by pointing out that we just can't expect a realistic drug policy platform from the major party candidates. They're not there yet.

Obama's good positions on needle exchange, medical marijuana, and sentencing have drawn interest from reformers, but there's simply no way to paint his praise of Mexico's bloody drug war crusade as anything other than typical prohibitionist "troop surge" rhetoric. It's the opposite of what's needed and it should give us pause before endorsing the popular perception among reformers that Obama "gets" the drug war issue.

When describing his plans to fund drug war activity in Central and South America, Obama says "we'll tie our support to clear benchmarks for drug seizures, corruption prosecutions, crime reduction, and kingpins busted," demonstrating a fundamental failure to grasp how those activities complement one another. Crime and violence will simply increase if enforcement increases, so any set of benchmarks will ultimately have to ignore one category or the other.

In regards to both Obama and McCain, however, we've got to recognize that ending violence in the international drug trade is the final stage of drug policy reform. It's the very last issue we'll have to confront and the last one about which we're likely to hear interesting or forward-thinking proposals from prominent politicians. There's no middle ground here. When we're ready to end violence and corruption in the drug trade, we'll stop waging the drug war.

(This blog post was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)

The Drug Czar's blog was very excited on Friday. Why? Because a school in Florida drug tested 120 students and all of them passed!

"It worked out very positively," [the principal] said this afternoon. "We did not have a single student test positive, out of 120 students we tested."

Random meant random, she said. Tests were done unannounced at different times during different days of the week. Some students were tested more than once, just because of the randomness of it all, she said. [Tampa Bay Online]

Admittedly, a random sample of 120 students testing negative for drugs is a surprising result. So surprising, in fact, that one begins to wonder how the hell it happened. Well the answer is simple: according to Tampa Bay Online, they used saliva tests, which are practically useless.

Via wikipedia, here are the estimated detection times for saliva drug testing:

• Marijuana and hashish (THC): An hour after ingestion, and up to 24 hours depending on use.
• Cocaine (including crack): From time of ingestion up to 2 to 3 days.
• Opiates: From time of ingestion up to 2 to 3 days
• Methamphetamine and ecstasy (MDMA, "crank," "ice"): From time of ingestion up to 2 to 3 days.
• Benzodiazepines: From time of ingestion up to 2 to 3 days

So, basically, all 120 of these students could have been smoking hash and crack all night on Friday and still passed their drug tests on Monday when they got to school. I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm just saying that testing students' saliva doesn't prove whether or not they use drugs. That's not how it works, and any newspaper article purporting to celebrate the effectiveness of such a program ought to disclose that fact, lest it should become yet another arm in the Drug Czar's nationwide campaign to randomly collect bodily fluids from our children.

Drug gangs Winning Drug War And what do the jack-booted thugs (erm...government authorities) say?