Reuters - Marijuana may up heart attack, stroke risk: study:

"The marijuana users in the study averaged smoking 78 to 350 marijuana cigarettes per week, based on self-reported drug history, the researchers said."

It's been quite the weekend in Metro Vancouver.There was a killing and a wounding on Thursday outside a strip club in the downtown core .Police say it was a gang shooting.On Friday a man driving in Bu

NORML reports on the death of Rachel Hoffman, another disgusting and preventable death caused by the war on drugs and the reckless police tactics it has inspired.

Hoffman was caught selling marijuana and ecstasy in Florida. After threatening her with prison time, the police then gave Hoffman the option of becoming an informant–without first consulting with her lawyer. They set up a deal with her connection. What happened in between isn’t yet clear. But they found her body late last week.

Proving once again that the most dangerous thing about illicit drugs like ecstasy and marijuana isn’t the drugs themselves. It’s what the government does to you after you’re caught with them. [The Agitator]

Watch this video, in which Tallahassee Police Chief Jones blames Rachel for her own death and then says, "we are aggressively seeking justice for Rachael and her family."

If Chief Jones wants justice he should start by fixing the protocols he claims his officers adhered to. They sent Rachel in to purchase an uncharacteristic amount of drugs, along with a gun, just to ramp up the charges even higher. Their insatiable lust for big busts and big headlines gave them away and got their informant killed. There's nothing complicated about this. No nuances to debate. It's horrible policing brought on by a horrible war, which produced another horrible outcome.

Note: If you get arrested, speak with a lawyer immediately and do not fall for the common tricks police use to recruit snitches. They may tell you that this is your only chance to make a deal. They may exaggerate how much trouble you're already in, so as to leverage your cooperation. Frequently, people arrested for drugs endanger their own lives by becoming informants, when a lawyer could have gotten them off altogether. The drug war feeds on these coercive tactics, creating crimes that would never have occurred, and ruining one life after the next. Don't fall for it.

Karen Brooks at the Dallas Morning News blog badly misses the point in regards to Barack Obama's support for medical marijuana:

Just got a notice from the happy folks over at the Marijuana Policy Project that Sen. Barack Obama "stands with us" on access to medical marijuana.

I'm not sure this helps his campaign, although the growing number of states (a dozen, at least) that have approved the use and prescription of medical marijuana may mean that he'll get support on the issue. Here in Texas, the decriminalization legislation - way stronger stuff than what the Medical Pot People are pushing - comes from both sides of the aisle.

So I guess what I'm saying here is, uhm, who knows if this will help or hurt him.

Well, allow me to relieve you of your uncertainty. Polling consistently shows overwhelming public support for medical marijuana. Do you know what medical marijuana's record is with voters? It's 10-1 at the state level, losing only in South Dakota, which ain't really Obama territory anyway. Supporting medical marijuana is among the safest policy positions one can take in 2008, and there's not a shred of evidence to the contrary. I look forward to a point when it's no longer necessary to illustrate this.

Secondly, Brooks buy into the myth that federal interference somehow makes medical marijuana laws ineffective:

Anyway, these laws and ordinances quickly go up in smoke when the feds - who just can't stand the idea of anyone smoking pot and getting away with it - decide to bust down doors and haul away the cancer patients and their docs anyway.

While I appreciate the implied sympathy for patients and doctors, this hyperbolic assessment of the force of federal law vastly overstates the impact of the DEA's campaign against medical marijuana. Despite federal interference, medical marijuana is more available to patients than ever before. The number of dispensaries that have been raided is dwarfed by the number that are open right now, at this exact moment. The idea that medical marijuana laws have been crippled by federal law enforcement is just as fictitious as can be.

My point here is not to excuse the ongoing raids and other atrocities that do still occur. Rather, it must be understood that the Drug Czar badly wants the public to believe that these laws don’t work because he knows we're going to keep passing them in new states and we're 10-1 so far. The only reason DEA even bothers to keep conducting these ugly and unpopular medical marijuana raids is so that the media will falsely report that these laws just "go up in smoke" as Brooks now suggests. That argument is then used against new medical marijuana initiatives to imply that there's no point in passing them, even though existing laws protecting patients have generally been very effective at preventing sick people from getting arrested.

Both of the above points are common misconceptions, and I don’t fault Brooks for indulging them. Still, it is vital that the discussion of medical marijuana continue on a sound factual basis as we proceed towards a showdown between Obama and McCain on this issue.

So, to recap, I submit the following two propositions:

1. Medical marijuana is overwhelmingly supported by the American public.

2. Federal efforts to shut down medical marijuana distribution in states were it is legal have failed utterly.

(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.)

A number of our readers wrote in this weekend to point out that drug czar John Walters was stumping the "marijuana causes mental illness" bandwagon. It was probably inevitable. After all, a year ago we reported, "Reefer Madness Strikes a Leading British Newspaper," and this and other spurious claims have continued to emanate from various outlets and agencies ever since. Still, propaganda is no less irritating for having anticipated it. So I could only sigh when I received a copy of a New York Times story that a member had forwarded, with his note "Walters is at it again." The article did quote people on the other side, which is good. But there's no way around the headline, which is what most people will ever read and which did not reflect any controversy or disagreement over the drug czar's claims. Master stats and criminology expert Matthew Robinson (author of the famed "Lies, Damn Lies, and Drug War Statistics" picked a similar title for his detailed critique of Walters, "Here We Go Again: White House Makes Scary Claims About Marijuana." I'll leave it to readers to follow the link for the bulk of Robinson's analysis, but the major thing to keep in mind is that Walters has not met the three-level burden of proof to back up his claims. Those levels are the following:

1. One must show a correlation. Marijuana use and mental illness have to show up in many of the same people. That might not be so hard to demonstrate, but the reason for the correlation may be as simple as the fact that lots of people use marijuana, so most physicial or psychological issues may be represented among its users. Which leads to the second needed level:
2. One must show a temporal order. That is, it is necessary to prove that marijuana use preceded the onset of mental illness. If marijuana use began later, there obviously is no causation. Even if they start at about the same time, there may be no causation.
3. And then there is a third, very crucial intellectual requirement for drawing the conclusion that marijuana use causes mental illness. That is the need to demonstrate a "lack of spuriousness" -- which means eliminating the possibility that other factors could have led to both the marijuana use and the mental illness. For example, physical or other life issues may have led an individual to become depressed, and that person may have then begun using marijuana because of being depressed. Or there could be biological or personality factors that make both depression and drug use more likely. Or there could be other things going on.

And now you know more about statistics than the drug czar does. :)