It is the gifting season!  If you are considering making a charitable contribution to a non-profit before year’s end, please consider making it to one of the outstanding organizations working to end marijuana prohibition, conduct marijuana research, and provide marijuana education.  These organizations do excellent work and will use your donation wisely.

Americans for Safe Access is the largest national member-based organization of patients, medical professionals, scientists and concerned citizens promoting safe and legal access to cannabis for therapeutic use and research.  You can support ASA at on their donation page.  If you donate by the end of the year, MedBox Inc will match donations up to $10,000.

Marijuana Policy Project works to change national and state laws to reduce or eliminate penalties for the medical and non-medical use of marijuana.  They rally supporters for these causes and increase public awareness.  MPP was a major driver behind the success in Colorado and Washington.  You can donate directly on their website at http://www.mpp.org/donating.  You can also support them when you are shopping on-line by starting at http://www.mpp.org/donating/shop-online.html.

NORML’s mission is to move public opinion sufficiently to achieve the repeal of marijuana prohibition so that the responsible use of cannabis by adults is no longer subject to penalty. You can support NORML with your membership or through donation by clicking http://norml.org/support.

Project CBD is a non-profit educational service dedicated to promoting and publicizing research into the medical utility of cannabidiol (CBD) and other components of the Cannabis plant.  It was conceived by two journalists who have been covering the medical marijuana movement / industry in the pages of O’Shaughnessy’s.  They think (and we agree) the reintroduction of CBD-rich Cannabis into the grassroots supply warrants special focus.  Project CBD supports the Society of Cannabis Clinicians’ effort to collect, aggregate and publish data from patients to determine patterns of efficacy—or lack of efficacy.  Donate to Project CBD at http://projectcbd.org. Your donation helps their practical research efforts and public education about cannabis.

We would also like to make mention that Patients Out of Time is also worthy of your donations.  However, their website is currently offline.  Please consider them in the future.

Rasmussen Poll Shows Huge Majority Thinks U.S. Losing the Drug War

A new poll released on Tuesday concluded that the vast majority of Americans are not impressed with the results of the nation’s anti-drug efforts. A full 82% of respondents answered “no” to the question: “Is the United States winning the war on drugs?” This is a significant increase from a poll released in June of this year, in which 66% of respondents characterized the drug war as a failure. Only 7% answered “yes” to the most recent poll question, while 12% were undecided.

As the Huffington Post reports, several other marijuana-related questions were asked in the same poll. One of these found that 45% supported legalizing marijuana, with 45% opposed and the remaining 10% undecided. This is consistent with two earlier polls released this year on the same question. Asked which was more dangerous, alcohol or marijuana, 51% of the latest poll’s respondents answered “alcohol,” while only 24% said “marijuana,” and 24% were undecided. Contrary to the traditional image of marijuana’s legalization being an issue of interest only to its users, 88 % said that they had not smoked marijuana even once in the past year, which is similar to the national average.

Thirty-four percent of respondents agreed that the government spends too much money on the war on drugs, and only 23% of all respondents claimed that the government should be spending even more. According to the New York Times, the enforcement costs alone have been $20 to $25 billion per year over the past decade.

In the wake of the recent successful ballot initiatives in Colorado and Washington to legalize the marijuana industry, as well as Massachusetts becoming the 18^th state with an effective medical marijuana law, one more question from the poll is worth noting. A full 60% said that marijuana laws should be left to the states, while only 27% said that the federal government should determine the marijuana laws in any particular state. As MPP’s Steve Fox noted yesterday in the Chicago Sun-Times, the federal government’s authority to prohibit marijuana has always been highly questionable on constitutional grounds.

The survey of 1,000 adults nationwide was conducted on November 9-10, 2012 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

The original article can be found here.

Science Friday October 12, 2012

Donald Abrams, Chief of Oncology at San Francisco General Hospital and Professor of Medicine at University of California and Bertha Madras, Professor of Psychobiology at Harvard Medical School debate the government ban on therapeutic use of medical marijuana. They discuss the benefits of marijuana including stimulating appetite, reduce pain, improve sleep, suppress nausea, and possibly fight cancer cells.  Americans for Safe Access will present the scientific case for marijuana’s therapeutic effects to a federal appeals court, in hopes of relaxing federal restrictions.

Click here to listen to the debate.

Thanks 420 Magazine for posting the entire Huffington Post article by Steph Sheer,If NBC Can See the Need for Medical Marijuana, Why Can’t Obama?

What a beautifully written article!  It is wonderful to see the arts expanding from portraying “pot culture” to helping educate people about what is medical marijuana (cannabis) and its efficacy as a medicine.  I am so grateful that the tide is turning and that science is becoming more of a part of the conversation about cannabis.  The portrayal of the cannabis experience in Parenthood is not unlike my family’s experience when my mom utilized cannabis to help her die more comfortably with lung cancer.

Here is a snippet from the article:

In the episode “One More Weekend with You,” aired November 20, Kristina Braverman’s character, played by Monica Potter, tries to stay strong for her family, but becomes violently ill after receiving chemotherapy. Her husband Adam, played by Peter Krause, finds her on the bathroom floor and panics. He cleans her up and then packs all the kids into the car to visit his musician-producer brother, the first person he could think of who might have marijuana. His brother produces some from his sock drawer and warns that it was not the same pot from when they were kids, it was “genetically engineered” (a common misunderstanding of the decades of modern breeding of the plant for human consumption).

In the next scene Kristina Braverman’s character is laying in bed smoking a joint. She is visibly better. She says it is strong and puts it out, saying “Save that f

or later.” Her husband asked if it helped, and he is visibly relieved to see her smile. She acknowledges the relief she’s found from marijuana, and says her husband will need to get “a lot more.” She settles back into her pillow and finally sleeps.

This episode reflects a situation that thousands of cancer patients and their caregivers are experiencing, but not always with the same ending. As a medical cannabis advocate I see this story play out in many ways. Many caregivers don’t have a pot-smoking brother and instead find themselves asking for marijuana from friends, family members or even their children. Over the past decades I have heard heartbreaking stories of people having no idea where to look and who to ask for this medicine.

But even for those patients who can find a supply of marijuana for their needs, many questions still arise. What if their source runs out? What if their source gets into a legal entanglement? What if there is mold or mildew on the medicine? What should they do if they live in public housing?

These experiences and these questions are what voters and legislators are trying to answer by passing laws in 18 states and the District of Columbia. These laws don’t make marijuana medicine — cannabis is a plant that has been used medicinally for thousands of years. The laws are an attempt

to reconcile the legal system with the reality of sick patients seeking effective medicine. For patients and government officials in medical cannabis states, it is now federal law that is creating the most significant hurdle.

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