And this might have something to do with it, too.

http://focus.hms.harvard.edu/1997/Nov14_1997/bulletin.html

"A MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) award from the National Institute of Drug Abuse has been granted to Harrison Pope Jr., associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital. The award extends until 2004 a four-year, $1 million award originally granted to Pope in 1996 to study the cognitive consequences of long-term marijuana use. Pope will now receive an additional $1 million from NIDA without having to submit another grant application under the normal competitive renewal process."

A PDF that I can't figure out how to copy and paste from http://www.drugabuse.gov/PDF/MJProgressRep04.pdf has Volkow, NIDA, ONDCP, Drug Free America and Harrison Pope all together and names their grant and studies and report under the title, "A Progress Report on Marijuana Research and Dissemination Efforts from the National Institute on Drug Abuse".

Yes....this Doctor Harrison Pope is very intangled in the money side of NIDA and the ONDCP and Drug Free America.

Who would of thought?

I got 83 results by Googling "Harrison-Pope grant NIDA".

Hmmmm. Very interesting, indeed.

Funny that the article itself says nothing about all this being funded by NIDA, the ONDCP, or Drug Free America. Wonder why they didn't mention that Pope was a researcher working with government grants and "guidance".

Sounds like a deal to me...make that a Deal. "Pope will now receive an additional $1 million from NIDA without having to submit another grant application under the normal competitive renewal process."

What is true, is that people get killed, terrorized, have their lives, their careers, their future, and their families destroyed and torn apart, because of prohibition.

They are killers whining about someone who wants to use cannabis.

Cannabis is a plant. It and it's use are not "evil".

Being a killer or supporting killers because you don't like people consuming cannabis...or anything...other than other people...is definitely EVIL.

If they legalized and regulated marijuana today, I would probably not partake as much. Since the government thinks it can abridge my right to do what I want with my own body, I will consume and promote cannabis until the law changes. I'm sure the roughly 20 million regular marijuana consumers in America feel the same.

" Most users of more addictive drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, started with marijuana, scientists say, and the earlier they started, the greater their risk of becoming addicted."

Scientists say this? Really? STARTED with marijuana? Didn't most of those folks start with either alcohol or cigarettes? I know of no one who smokes marijuana that didn't drink alcohol first.

I don't take much faith from the study. The article does, however, make a reasonable point: if you have to buy pot from criminals, it will give the criminals the opportunity to sell their other wares.

***

By Richelle Putnam - All Headline News Staff Writer

February 6, 2007

Blacksburg, VA (AHN) - Recent studies have concluded that when users quit smoking pot, they do experience withdrawal systems. In addition, those who abuse harder drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, admitted to using marijuana first. Risk of addiction relates to how early in life the user starts.

Marijuana, a mixture of flowers, stems, seeds, and leaves from the hemp plant, Cannabis sativa, can be smoked as a cigarette or in a pipe. THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) is its main active chemical.

Bob Stephens, a Virginia Tech psychologist and editor of the book "Cannabis Dependence," conducted treatment studies of marijuana addiction, and was quoted in a USA Today article as saying, "There's never any shortage of people who meet this definition."

A study called "Monitoring the Future," performed by the University of Michigan, revealed that adolescent use of marijuana in the U.S. decreased from 2005 to 2006. However, in the past 15 years, marijuana use has become more common. This is according to the same "Monitoring the Future" study, which followed a group of eighth graders into adulthood. USA Today stated that a survey among eighth-graders revealed an increase from 6.2% in 1991 to 11.7% in 2006 regarding marijuana use. 31.5% of the surveyed 12th graders admitted to marijuana use in the past year compared to 23.9% in 1991.

Harrison Pope, director of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at Boston's McLean Hospital, who studied heavy marijuana users for fourteen years, found that those who smoked pot once a day scored lower on their verbal IQ testing.

Research on chronic marijuana smokers and alcoholics performed in 2006 by psychiatry professor, Ronald Kadden, who has run the Health Center's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment Center for over ten years, showed that marijuana was more addictive that originally thought.

However, past studies claimed that marijuana is still the lesser evil of the very much legal drug, alcohol. In a 1999 Summit Daily article, the U. S. Department of Transportation 1990-91 study revealed that the adverse effect on drivers is "relatively small" to the adverse effects of those under the influence of alcohol and some prescribed drugs.

A 2004 study performed by Alyssa J. Myers and Marion O. Petty of the Department of Psychology at Missouri Western State University, researched the connection of alcohol use to marijuana use. The study revealed that, "the more alcohol someone drinks, the more likely they will be to want to smoke marijuana. We also found that 100% of the people who reported marijuana use were also drinkers. The first drug used by the majority of people who smoke marijuana was alcohol, 67%."

The report also stated that marijuana, a "gateway" drug, is considered worse than alcohol, because it supposedly prods users to try harder drugs. However, the study stresses the use of marijuana typically comes after alcohol and tobacco use and most people don't realize that alcohol is the "gateway" drug to the "gateway" marijuana drug.

Copyright: All Headline News

Do you think the esteemed Harvard high muckety-muck Harrison Pope might be a tad biased when he suggests that the only way to 'scientifically' settle the question of whether cannabis is a gateway substance would be to randomly assign people to either smoke pot or abstain. And that this would be not just unethical, but "grossly" unethical.

Meanwhile, as you read this, tens of thousands of folks in our fair country are participating in "controlled studies" - funded by Big Pharma - where they are randomly assigned to administer or abstain from (aka 'placebo') any number of substances with verifiably more dangerous/poisonous side-effects than cannabis. This process is basically how pharmaceutical research on humans is conducted.

This is just another propaganda piece put out by the White House and paid for with our Tax dollars.

I thought this was illegal?

But then again most of what King George is doing is illegal and that does not stop him either.

It's going to be harder then I thought to just hang on until this jack off is out of office.

Together we can make it and beat them with the TRUTH and good science. Remember Bush & Chaney say Global warming is not real but a "Chicken Little theory" and science once again proves them wrong and now they are listening.

----------------------------------

I hope you'll pardon me posting here, but since there was no where else to comment on the USA Today article, "Caution: Marijuana may not be lesser evil," (Feb 6) this seemed like the best place.

The article was devoted to promoting the gateway and addiction myths about marijuana. The gateway myth has been disproven by every reputable study - including all U.S. government studies, the last one being the 1999 Institute of Medicine Report, commissioned by the Drug Czar's office themselves.

The addiction myth also trotted out, made a big deal of some dubious efforts to establish withdrawal symptoms with marijuana. Scientists have discovered some minute effects that are so ephemeral, most people don't even notice them. Obviously, a withdrawal symptom that is so slight, it's not noticed is not a factor creating addiction.

Throughout this whole piece of propaganda, the "problem" cases were ALL people who were multiple drug users, which is NOT the common experience for marijuana consumers. Clearly, these people's problems came from the problematic drugs they were using and NOT marijuana.

One such case was actually laughable. USA relates:

"Rachel Kinsey says drug addiction runs in her mother's family, although not in her immediate family. Kinsey, 24, started drinking alcohol at 14 and smoking marijuana at 15 — "definitely a predecessor for everything else I used.""

She started drinking at 14 and smoking pot at 15, but it was the marijuana that was the "predecessor?" This confused thinking wouldn't pass an 8th grade English class.

In attempts to bolster the propping up of these myths, other ludicrous tidbits are thrown in such as this one:

"Research shows marijuana users are significantly less satisfied with the quality of their lives than non-users, a revelation "as telling as any very fancy story of molecules," Volkow says."

Less satisfied with their lives? Not quite bedrock research there. And, of course, they make no allowances for the fact these consumers live in a society that demonizes them for making the choice to consume marijuana - and, if they are unlucky enough to be one of the 800,000 people arrested EVERY YEAR for marijuana, they are saddled with a "criminal" record for life, which marginalizes them from employment, and other vital areas of life. No wonder they feel less satisfied!

The truth is, marijuana is far safer and less destructive (zero marijuana deaths in all of history) than alcohol, which clearly IS addictive. It is not just the height of hypocrisy to promulgate this prohibitionist propaganda, but is an intellectual slap in the face to readers of USA Today who see alcohol celebrated in the same pages - as in this blog on wine and in other places.

It is this dishonesty about marijuana that is the real "gateway." When youth discover all the lies they've been told about marijuana, they think all the warnings about the hard drugs must be lies too. The costs of marijuana prohibition and it's propaganda devastate millions of young lives each year.

A sea change is coming. Call it 'global warming.'

He liked what it felt like, and by age 15, he was drinking coffee every week. He supported his habit with the money his parents gave him for getting straight A's on his report card. They didn't have a clue.

"By 16, when I got my license, it turned into a fairly everyday thing," says OverwhelmSam, now 48. "I believe it is very addictive, especially for people with addictive personalities."

Millions of baby boomers might disagree. After all, they drank coffee — the country's most popular licit drug — in their youth and quit with little effort.

But studies have shown that when regular coffee drinkers quit, they do experience withdrawal symptoms, a characteristic used to predict addictiveness. Most users of more addictive drugs, such as nicotine or alcohol, started with coffee, scientists say, and the earlier they started, the greater their risk of becoming addicted.

Many studies have documented a link between drinking coffee and the later use of "harder" drugs such as alcohol and nicotine, but that doesn't necessarily mean coffee causes addiction to harder drugs.

To the Editor,

As a retired police officer from Bath Township (NE of Lansing), I would urge the citizens of Flint to vote for the medical marijuana initiative on Feb. 27. (Feb. 5: Pot Vote Mostly Symbolic)

Mr. Buchanan should know that in 11 states that have legalized medicinal use of marijuana, use amongst teens has NOT increased. The Flint police have enough to do without wasting time on sick people. We are a Thin Blue Line.

PS. Unless Mr. Buchanan is working toward the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco, he is condoning the use of two deadliest drugs in America.

Bath Township Officer Howard J. Wooldridge, retired Frederick, MD