Hey, today's a special day! On this day, seventy years ago, FDR signed into law the first marijuana law in our nation's history. The Marijuana Policy Project has a wonderfully snarky press release pointing out the absurdity of the situation:

"It's hard to think of a more spectacularly bad, long-term policy failure than our government's 70-year war on marijuana users," said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C. "Since the federal government banned marijuana in 1937, it's gone from being an obscure plant that few Americans had even heard of to the number-one cash crop in the United States."

The law, known as the Marijuana Tax Act, theoretically established a tax on producers, sellers, buyers, and prescribers of marijuana, but in fact its requirements were so onerous and the penalties for noncompliance so draconian that it effectively functioned as a ban, leading to the removal of cannabis (as marijuana was known to physicians) from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia in 1942. The law was superseded by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which placed marijuana -- along with heroin and LSD -- in the most restrictive category of drugs, Schedule I, reserved for substances deemed to have literally no medical use.

I don't normally like to just run nearly an entire press release verbatim, but c'mon, let's be clear - the MPP clearly has it together on this topic. So here's the rest of this (sadly) illuminating text:

Federal government estimates indicate that marijuana use has increased approximately 4,000 percent since the Marijuana Tax Act took effect. A study by researcher Jon Gettman, Ph.D., published in December 2006 and based on government data, found marijuana to be the country's number-one cash crop, exceeding the value of corn and wheat combined. The federally funded Monitoring the Future survey reports that approximately 85 percent of high school seniors describe marijuana as "easy to get" -- a figure that has remained virtually unchanged since the survey began in 1975. In 2005 (the most recent figures available), U.S. law enforcement made an all-time record 786,545 marijuana arrests -- 89 percent for possession, not sale or trafficking.

"Marijuana prohibition is easily the government’s biggest long-term failure since its disastrous experiment with alcohol Prohibition from 1919 to 1933, but the marijuana prohibition disaster just lives on," Kampia said. "It's time to steer a new course and regulate marijuana like we do alcohol."

Word!

And now, a brief look at the whimsical proclivities of that most elusive of childhood myths - The Drug Fairy. From the drug comedy DVD Tales From The Tripside.

I can't help it - every time some slight mention of this comes past my feedreader, I begin salivating helplessly, and I don't even like ketamine all that much. But still... you may remember a while back when we reported that Javelin Pharm was headed toward clinical trials in humans of an intranasal ketamine treatment. Well... the only new thing to report is that they finally got around to dosing their first patient in this study:

Javelin Pharmaceuticals announced dosing of the first patient in a Phase III clinical study of intranasal ketamine for the treatment of breakthrough cancer pain.

Javelin said it has begun to prepare its new drug application (NDA) for an initial indication as an emergency analgesic, and plans to submit it to the FDA in 2008. A later, supplemental NDA is planned for the indication of breakthrough cancer pain, the company added....

The primary measure of efficacy is the sum of the differences from initial pain intensity as measured on a zero-10 scale during the first 60 minutes after dosing, the company added.

It's so incredibly difficult to just be objective about the fact that this substance, delivered in this fashion, could produce real relief for cancer patients in pain, when it could also produce incredibly warm fuzzies for strung out ravers coming down from massive doses of street E. And yet, I will soldier on...

Internationally known e-mail spammer Christopher William Smith was sentenced to 30 years in prison today for running an illegal Canadian pharmacy that sold millions of dollars of addictive painkillers without prescriptions.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael J. Davis called Smith, 27, a "drug kingpin" as he handed down the 30-year sentence requested by federal prosecutors.

This totally changes the 21st century model of what a "drug kingpin" should look like. However, if you think 30-years is a stiff penalty, take this tasty little nugget into account:

Just days after a federal judge shut down the Burnsville pharmacy in May 2005 and ordered Smith to refrain from selling drugs, Smith traveled to the Dominican Republic under a false passport and opened a new online pharmacy, authorities said.

He was convicted last November of nine charges of conspiracy, illegal distribution of drugs and money laundering.

Busted! However, you have to give this guy credit for pushing the envelope on a totally new organized crime business model.

From the "Big Brother is Here" files:

White House drug czar John Walters on Wednesday announced grants totaling $1.67 million for random student drug testing at six Texas school districts.

...

The money will help them develop or expand random drug testing programs.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy says that about 1,000 school districts across the nation have a program, with about half of those programs getting federal resources.

Federally funded random drug testing in schools? Are they testing the teachers and principals too? How about random drug tests for all government employees? How do the students feel about submitting to these tests? Does it give them that warm feeling of freedom inside?

Update on the harm-reduction front, New Jersey finally gives in to health and safety issues surrounding intravenous drug use:

New Jersey has been the only state without a legal way for drug addicts to get clean syringes, but the Legislature and Gov. Jon S. Corzine approved a pilot program last year that allows up to six cities to establish needle exchanges for three years.

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Each city will be required to report the number of individuals participating, exchanged syringes, and participants referred into social services and drug treatment programs. The cities will also have to report status of participants' treatment, and whether the program has helped cut the spread of HIV, hepatitis C and other blood-borne diseases.

It's interesting that there is also a statistical end tied this program, allowing state sponsors to check efficacy of the program down the line. But what made New Jersey cave in to this basic act of junkie compassion?

New Jersey had 66,886 HIV and AIDS cases as of June 2006, the latest state health department figures show. Of those, 43 percent were attributed to needle drug use, about twice the national average and the second highest rate in the nation behind Connecticut.

Wow! No wonder they got their act together.

For cognitive science geeks studying visual processing (I know you are out there), the problem of how neurons process visual information has been somewhat of a mystery. For instance, does the visual cortex "chunk" areas of data into visual memory, updating them periodically; or does it trickle-fill areas that need updating in a sequential fashion? Well it turns out the answer is neither. Instead, the visual cortex processes incoming data in rolling waves (a mix of chunking and sequential filling). From the report at Eurekalert:

“What we found is that signals pass through brain areas like progressive waves, back and forth, a little bit like what fans do at baseball games,” said the study’s corresponding author, Jian-young Wu, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown. Just as the stadium wave is coordinated and travels through the crowd, a collective pattern emerges from the activities of millions of neurons in the visual areas, he said, explaining, “It simply makes sense that brain function is the result of large numbers of neurons working together.”

Aside from the neat visual image (pun intended) why is this information important? It shows that there is a larger organizational pattern to information processing, and that "reactive firing" and "chunking data" in response to stimulus is not a chaotic process, but one that follows periodic oscillating waves sweeping across the cortical network. Given that cognitive scientists are leaning towards slow-wave coherence as the solution to the all-important "binding problem" (how the brain associates specific data with specific stimuli), it only makes sense that periodic wave-functions might be responsible for maintaining order at all levels of sensory processing.

For no apparent reason, please to enjoy this rendition of "Listen To The Band," one of the only late period Monkees tracks that was worth a damn, as performed on the band's 1969 NBC variety show, 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. The show is widely regarded as the Star Wars Christmas Special of the Monkees' oeuvre, but the group nevertheless managed to put on one hell of a psychedelic freak out when they ended the show with this insane version of "Listen To The Band," which features Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll, a host of turned on dancers and musicians, and all manner of video mayhem. It's kind of hard to believe they aired this over-the-top weirdness on national television, although the network did schedule this special opposite the Academy Awards that year to ensure as few people as possible would see it. Be patient; the mayhem takes its time simmering before it starts to kick in.

Every now and then, a good old-fashioned anti-WOD rant in a major media outlet is just what the doctor ordered. There's just something so delightful seeing the media dare to articulate what zillions of activists and drug users have known for a long time - that the war on drugs is irrational, unnecessarily destructive, and also, not working. This particular piece in the New Statesman takes a look at the UK's 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, which created a scheduling system similar to our own - and with similar problems:

Cannabis is an example of the nonsenses created by the 1971 act's simplistic classification system. Stronger types of cannabis are now on sale, we are told, and research shows a link with schizophrenia. [Ed. note: no, it doesn't!]

This is like saying Chablis should be banned because cognac is much stronger and because some people become alcoholics, with dire effects on themselves, their families and society. All drugs, legal and illegal (including gambling and pornography), vary in their effects according to how strong or pure they are, who takes them, and where, when and how they take them. The classification system cannot allow for this and is, in any case, full of anomalies. Coca leaves are in class A, alongside crack cocaine, even though the drug in its raw state is largely harmless. Ecstasy is also in class A, though it causes 25 deaths a year against 652 for heroin, which is taken far less widely.

Magic mushrooms, another class A drug, do nothing more than make eccentrics more eccentric. If we are trying to send "messages" to young people about the dangers of drugs, as press and politicians claim, we do it in a pretty confusing way. Many who try one class A drug without ill effects may well conclude they can all be taken freely.

But this isn't an eyes-wide-open screed that ends with a call for complete legalization. As this author notes, legalization is rather tangential to addressing root causes that lead to drug addiction and drug-related crime:

Nobody should pretend that legalisation would solve "the drugs problem", however it is conceived. Many - perhaps most - users handle drugs without significant harm to themselves or others. Where drugs lead to crime, addiction and family breakdown, they are nearly always associated with wider social problems. The best way to wage war on drugs is to step up the war against poverty.

Amen. Of course, I have a strict policy about, uh, not holding my breath...

You may have gotten the impression that meth use and dangerous sexual behavior are primarily a problem for the gay community, given the publicity campaigns targeted to try to address those behaviors in that population. However, guess what - straight people have unsafe sex on meth, too!

The California Department of Pubic Health, acknowledged that researchers have not paid enough attention to the risky sexual practices of straight meth users. Their study found that straight meth users were 50 percent more likely to have had sex with a random stranger. Furthermore, straight meth users were almost three times as likely (29.6 percent) to have had anal sex with a female in comparison to their sober counterparts (11.9 perecent). This is particularly alarming because straight meth users only wore a condom 25 percent of the time when having anal sex.

Yipe!