Huge Google Grant to Michigan Marijuana Group Could Usher in New Era for Cannabis Industry

The medical cannabis movement is getting some major help from one of the most well-known corporate names in the world: Google.

Michigan Compassion, a nonprofit organization that seeks to increase awareness of the health benefits of marijuana, has received a massive in-kind grant from the Internet search giant’s donation program, Google Grants.

The cannabis organization will receive $250,000 in annual credits for AdWords – Google’s main advertising offering for businesses – and other related services. The continue for the life of Michigan Compassion, meaning its value could easily soar into the tens of millions of dollars over time.

Aside from the dollar amount, the grant is very significant in other ways. For one, it signals the entrance of a major company into the medical marijuana debate, giving cannabis some additional legitimacy and clout. It also moves marijuana into the mainstream business world, opening the door for other major companies to dabble in cannabis – from a philanthropic, investment or product sense.

Perhaps most importantly, it shows that corporate attitudes towards cannabis are shifting: Google has traditionally blocked many marijuana-related businesses and organizations from using its AdWords service. The grant, therefore, signals that Google is becoming more accepting of cannabis.

“This is huge, this is really huge,” said Heidi Parikh, executive director of Michigan Compassion. “For a corporation that has prohibited ads with marijuana or cannabis in them to utilize this service and accept our organization opens a bridge for everybody. At one point Google even had a lock on us because of the keywords we used on our website.”

The award letter even states that this is the first medical marijuana nonprofit to receive an AdWords grant from Google, Parikh said.

Michigan Compassion will use the grant to boost its presence on the Internet – ideally by moving its website and projects up high in search results – and further its overall outreach efforts.

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I Went From Selling Drugs to Studying Them -- And Found That Most of What We Assume About Drugs Is Wrong

A scientist with a rough past explains how he used his life experiences to blow the lid off modern drug research.

June 19, 2013 |  

This is the prologue to Columbia University researcher Dr. Carl Hart's explosive new book, " High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journal of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Psychology."  Read a Q&A with the author here.

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

—James Baldwin

The straight glass pipe filled with ethereal white smoke. It was thick enough to see that it could be a good hit, but it still had the wispy quality that distinguishes crack cocaine smoke from cigarette or marijuana smoke. The smoker was thirty-nine, a black man, who worked as a street bookseller. He closed his eyes and lay back in the battered leather office chair, holding his breath to keep the drug in his lungs as long as possible. Eventually, he exhaled, a serene smile on his face, his eyes closed to savor the bliss.

About fifteen minutes later, the computer signaled that another hit was available.

“No, thanks, doc,” he said, raising his left hand slightly. He hit the space bar on the Mac in the way that he’d been trained to press to signal his choice.

Although I couldn’t know for sure whether he was getting cocaine or placebo, I knew the experiment was going well. Here was a middle-aged brother, someone most people would label a “crackhead,” a guy who smoked rock at least four to five times a week, just saying no to a legal hit of what had a good chance of being 100 percent pure pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. In the movie version, he would have been demanding more within seconds of his first hit, bug-eyed and threatening—or pleading and desperate.

Nonetheless, he’d just calmly turned it down because he preferred to receive five dollars in cash instead. He’d sampled the dose of cocaine earlier in the session: he knew what he would get for his money. At five dollars for what I later learned was a low dose of real crack cocaine, he preferred the cash.

Meanwhile, there I was, another black man, raised in one of the roughest neighborhoods of Miami, who might just as easily have wound up selling cocaine on the street. Instead, I was wearing a white lab coat and being funded by grants from the federal government to provide cocaine as part of my research into understanding the real effects of drugs on behavior and physiology. The year was 1999.

In this particular experiment, I was trying to understand how crack cocaine users would respond when presented with a choice between the drug and an “alternative reinforcer”—or another type of reward, in this case, cash money. Would anything else seem valuable to them? In a calm, laboratory setting, where the participants lived in a locked ward and had a chance to earn more than they usually could on the street, would they take every dose of crack, even small ones, or would they be selective about getting high? Would merchandise vouchers be as effective as cash in altering their behavior? What would affect their choices?

Before I’d become a researcher, these weren’t even questions that I would think to ask. These were drug addicts, I would have said. No matter what, they’d do anything to get to take as much drugs as often as possible. I thought of them in the disparaging ways I’d seen them depicted in films like New Jack City and Jungle Fever and in songs like Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads.” I’d seen some of my cousins become shells of their former selves and had blamed crack cocaine. Back then I believed that drug users could never make rational choices, especially about their drug use, because their brains had been altered or damaged by drugs.

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Federal nullification efforts mounting in states

By DAVID A. LIEB — Associated Press

 

 

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Imagine the scenario: A federal agent attempts to arrest someone for illegally selling a machine gun. Instead, the federal agent is arrested - charged in a state court with the crime of enforcing federal gun laws.

Farfetched? Not as much as you might think.

The scenario would become conceivable if legislation passed by Missouri's Republican-led Legislature is signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon.

The Missouri legislation is perhaps the most extreme example of a states' rights movement that has been spreading across the nation. States are increasingly adopting laws that purport to nullify federal laws - setting up intentional legal conflicts, directing local police not to enforce federal laws and, in rare cases, even threatening criminal charges for federal agents who dare to do their jobs.

An Associated Press analysis found that about four-fifths of the states now have enacted local laws that directly reject or ignore federal laws on marijuana use, gun control, health insurance requirements and identification standards for driver's licenses. The recent trend began in Democratic leaning California with a 1996 medical marijuana law and has proliferated lately in Republican strongholds like Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback this spring became the first to sign a measure threatening felony charges against federal agents who enforce certain firearms laws in his state.

Some states, such as Montana and Arizona, have said "no" to the feds again and again - passing states' rights measures on all four subjects examined by the AP - despite questions about whether their "no" carries any legal significance.

"It seems that there has been an uptick in nullification efforts from both the left and the right," said Adam Winkler, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who specializes in constitutional law.

Yet "the law is clear - the supremacy clause (of the U.S. Constitution) says specifically that the federal laws are supreme over contrary state laws, even if the state doesn't like those laws," Winkler added.

The fact that U.S. courts have repeatedly upheld federal laws over conflicting state ones hasn't stopped some states from flouting those federal laws - sometimes successfully.

About 20 states now have medical marijuana laws allowing people to use pot to treat chronic pain and other ailments - despite a federal law that still criminalizes marijuana distribution and possession. Ceding ground to the states, President Barack Obama's administration has made it known to federal prosecutors that it wasn't worth their time to target those people.

Federal authorities have repeatedly delayed implementation of the 2005 Real ID Act, an anti-terrorism law that set stringent requirements for photo identification cards to be used to board commercial flights or enter federal buildings. The law has been stymied, in part, because about half the state legislatures have opposed its implementation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

About 20 states have enacted measures challenging Obama's 2010 health care laws, many of which specifically reject the provision mandating that most people have health insurance or face tax penalties beginning in 2014.

After Montana passed a 2009 law declaring that federal firearms regulations don't apply to guns made and kept in that state, eight other states have enacted similar laws. Gun activist Gary Marbut said he crafted the Montana measure as a foundation for a legal challenge to the federal power to regulate interstate commerce under the U.S. Constitution. His lawsuit was dismissed by a trial judge but is now pending before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"The states created this federal monster, and so it's time for the states to get their monster on a leash," said Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that local police could not be compelled to carry out provisions of a federal gun control law. But some states are now attempting to take that a step further by asserting that certain federal laws can't even be enforced by federal authorities.

A new Kansas law makes it a felony for a federal agent to attempt to enforce laws on guns made and owned in Kansas. A similar Wyoming law, passed in 2010, made it a misdemeanor. The Missouri bill also would declare it a misdemeanor crime but would apply more broadly to all federal gun laws and regulations - past, present, or future - that "infringe on the people's right to keep and bear arms."

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter in late April to the Kansas governor warning that the federal government is willing to go to court over the new law.

"Kansas may not prevent federal employees and officials from carrying out their official responsibilities," Holder wrote.

Federal authorities in the western district of Missouri led the nation in prosecutions for federal weapons offenses through the first seven months of the 2013 fiscal year, with Kansas close behind, according to a data clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Felons illegally possessing firearms is the most common charge nationally. But the Missouri measure sets it sights on nullifying federal firearms registrations and, among other things, a 1934 law that imposes a tax on transferring machine guns or silencers. Last year, the federal government prosecuted 83 people nationally for unlawful possession of machine guns.

So what would happen if a local prosecutor actually charges a federal agent for doing his or her job?

"They're going to have problems if they do it - there's no doubt about it," said Michael Boldin, executive director of the Tenth Amendment Center, a Los Angeles-based entity that promotes states' rights. "There's no federal court in the country that's going to say that a state can pull this off."

Yet states may never need to prosecute federal agents in order to make their point.

If enough states resist, "it's going to be very difficult for the federal government to force their laws down our throats," Boldin said.

Missouri's governor has not said whether he will sign or veto the bill nullifying federal gun laws. Meanwhile, thousands of people have sent online messages to the governor's office about the legislation.

Signing the measure "will show other states how to resist the tyranny of federal bureaucrats who want to rob you of your right to self-defense," said one message, signed by Jim and Arlena Sowash, who own a gun shop in rural Stover, Mo.

Others urged a veto.

"Outlandish bills like this - completely flouting our federal system - make Missouri the laughingstock of the nation," said a message written by Ann Havelka, of the Kansas City suburb of Gladstone.

Follow David A. Lieb at: http://www.twitter.com/DavidALieb

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2013/06/21/2686935/federal-nullification-efforts.html#storylink=cpy

Talking Marijuana with Dr. Jeffrey Miron

June 17, 2013 by Brett Wilkins in Civil Liberties, Crime & Punishment, Drugs, Featured, The Best of Moral Low Ground, U.S. Government

 

Moral Low Ground editor-in-chief Brett Wilkins recently interviewed Dr. Jeffrey Miron about marijuana prohibition, medical marijuana and the market implications of legalization. This article was originally published in the Medical Marijuana Review.

(Photo: Dr. Jeffrey Miron)

Why is a Harvard University economics professor proclaiming “marijuana should be legalized for just about everything”? Does he see prices for medical marijuana sliding down due to increased competition from private companies? We decided to find out by interviewing Dr. Jeffrey Miron, senior lecturer and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Economics at Harvard University, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, the nation’s leading libertarian think-tank.

As an unabashed and outspoken champion of individual liberty, Dr. Miron has stirred the pot by publicly advocating for the legalization of all drugs, a move he says would save tens of billions of dollars annually for federal, state and local governments. We recently spoke with Dr. Miron about the future of medical marijuana, the economics of newly minted canna-businesses and the Obama’s administration approach to the war on drugs.

MediRevew: You have written that “just as the harms of alcohol prohibition were worse than the harms of alcohol itself, the adverse effects of marijuana prohibition are worse than the unwanted consequences of marijuana use,” and that legalization is the better policy. What’s the biggest obstacle to legalization?

Miron: I think the big obstacle to legalization is the entrenched interests of people whose job it is to continue prohibiting marijuana, whether that’s local vice squads, federal agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Drug Czar’s office or the White House. And there are some entrenched interests that people don’t always think about.

One example is the treatment sector. A lot of people are coerced into getting drug abuse treatment because they’re, say, caught in a routine traffic stop with marijuana in their car, and they’re able to get that arrest to go away if they go through some court-ordered treatment. But they’re not people who need drug abuse treatment, so there’s a lot of extra demand created for the treatment sector. So this sector also has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.”

MediReview: Given President Obama’s campaign promise of a hands-off approach to medical marijuana and the Justice Department’s Ogden Memo (directing federal resources only against medical marijuana providers who violate state law), what do you make of the Obama administration’s crackdown on medical marijuana?

Miron: I think that the administration, first of all, focuses on the electoral consequences. I don’t think they’ve seen it so far as in their interest to be soft on medical marijuana, or on any drugs. It seemed that way at the beginning, but that changed rather quickly. [The administration] knows that it would give the Republicans an issue if it came down strongly in favor of medical marijuana, or supported the recreational legalizations in Colorado and Washington. And so I think they just don’t want to go there. They want to let public opinion shift so much on its own. They’re sort of going along with public opinion, not trying to make public opinion.

MediReview: Public opinion is generally very much in favor of medical marijuana, and according to polls, a majority of Americans now even support recreational legalization. Do you feel that full legalization is inevitable?

Miron: Well, I hope that’s right, but I’m not positive that’s right. Pendulums can swing one way, and then sometimes the other way. There are certainly examples where public opinion has gone in one direction and then the other on lots of public policy issues, including drugs. So I don’t think we should assume it’s inevitable.

I think it’s plausible that marijuana will continue to move in the direction of medicalization and legalization. But if you’re sitting in Washington and you have the White House drug czar’s office right down the hall from you, and you have the DEA right there, and you have some Congressmen who are still screaming for prohibition, I think it’s pretty hard. And the federal government can interfere quite a bit with the decisions by states to try to medicalize and legalize.

The other reason why I don’t think we should assume [legalization] is inevitable is that very few major party politicians, on both sides of the aisle, are totally comfortable with the idea of letting states do what they want. The existing major parties don’t want to let states deviate from federal policy. Any federal politician who endorses letting states deviate is in trouble.

MediReview: If legalization does occur, do you foresee Big Pharma cornering the market on medical marijuana in the same way Big Agriculture dominates farming?

Miron: I’m not sure I would use the word ‘cornered.’ I think that in a fully legal market, we would likely see a substantial share of [marijuana] that was produced and sold by a relatively small number of companies, as we do with cars or beer or tobacco. But as long as the regulation of that industry is moderate at most, there will still be ample room for smaller firms to succeed. We see competition in the beer industry from overseas. We see lots of microbreweries.

[But] if you have a lot of regulation, then you’re going to limit the ability of the small producer to survive in the marketplace. An excellent example of that is the tobacco industry. It’s so costly, and there are all sorts of lawsuits and so many restrictions on advertising that it’s very hard for any newcomer to get into the tobacco industry in a profitable way, and so the big companies do rule that industry. But I don’t think we should be that concerned if a lot of the medical marijuana market is taken over by a relatively small number of companies… That’s just the way markets seem to work. And as long as there’s not too much regulation there will still be plenty of competition.

MediReview: Is this good for consumers? Do you see market forces and increased competition driving prices down?

Miron: I personally don’t think that prices are going to change dramatically. I wouldn’t be shocked if they went down by noticeable amounts, maybe 25 percent, perhaps even 50 percent, but I suspect that they won’t go down much at all. There are two reasons why.

One, I don’t think that current marijuana prohibition in the US is actually all that strong. I think that the amount of money that’s being spent trying to raise the price of marijuana relative to the size of the market is pretty miniscule. Therefore, they’re not having much effect in raising the cost.

Second, if you look at data and compare [marijuana] prices in the US to places where it’s almost entirely legal… they’re not that different. If you look at places like California where it’s very close to being legalized, prices aren’t that different from other places in the country. So I think that prices may go down, but they’re not going to go down a ton.

MediReview: Three years ago, you said that we can’t be sure if marijuana is effective medicine because DEA rules make it virtually impossible to carry out proper scientific trials. Consistent with its Schedule I classification, the federal government continues to emphatically insist marijuana has no accepted medical use. Do you think this is an accurate assessment?

Miron: The federal government continues to insist that smoked marijuana has no non-medical benefits, and in particular has no superior benefits compared to synthetic products or derivative products made from marijuana, such as Marinol… There certainly are legitimate studies and accepted evidence that some products like Marinol may be effective.

MediReview: You once said that the anecdotal evidence of medical marijuana’s effectiveness was “stunning.” Can you give examples?

Miron: Qualitatively, there are people who were resistant to the idea of using medical marijuana, but they were suffering from a serious condition… for which marijuana was widely thought to be useful and efficacious. And finally they were convinced by relatives or friends to try it and they did and then saw dramatic improvement.

But unfortunately, those people then became nervous that somehow it was still wrong to use marijuana or they were worried that they were putting their grandchildren in jeopardy by having them score marijuana for them at their local high school, and so they stopped, and when they did, their symptoms got worse again. So is that a perfectly controlled experiment? No. But is it a quasi-controlled experiment? Is that a little bit like an experiment? Yes, because you have a before, during and after. So that’s what I mean by anecdotal evidence, and it’s very suggestive.

MediReview: You also once said that the medical marijuana approach to legalization seems “sneaky.” What did you mean by that?

Miron: I do think has a real problem in that the way it’s implemented in many states looks like it’s just backdoor legalization. Many doctors seem to write [recommendations] without much compunction… and so that gives critics some basis in fact to say, “This is not just about helping sick people, this is about recreational use, and medicalization is helping to allow recreational use.”

Now, I have no objection to recreational use. I think [marijuana] should be legal for absolutely everything… And medicalization certainly has some benefits, because it means more people are able to purchase marijuana without the risk of going to jail, but it also has its unfortunate side effects of looking hypocritical, of looking like not telling the truth.

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Tagged Cato Institute, harvard university, Jeffrey Miron, Jeffrey Miron drugs, marijuana, marijuana legalization, Marinol, medical marijuana, obama marijuana, public opinion marijuana

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Anger swells after NSA phone records collection revelations

 

 

Senior politicians reveal that US counter-terrorism efforts have swept up personal data from American citizens for years

• NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal

 

The scale of America's surveillance state was laid bare on Thursday as senior politicians revealed that the US counter-terrorism effort had swept up swaths of personal data from the phone calls of millions of citizens for years.

After the revelation by the Guardian of a sweeping secret court order that authorised the FBI to seize all call records from a subsidiary of Verizon, the Obama administration sought to defuse mounting anger over what critics described as the broadest surveillance ruling ever issued.

A White House spokesman said that laws governing such orders "are something that have been in place for a number of years now" and were vital for protecting national security. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the Verizon court order had been in place for seven years. "People want the homeland kept safe," Feinstein said.

But as the implications of the blanket approval for obtaining phone data reverberated around Washington and beyond, anger grew among other politicians.

Intelligence committee member Mark Udall, who has previously warned in broad terms about the scale of government snooping, said: "This sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking." Former vice-president Al Gore described the "secret blanket surveillance" as "obscenely outrageous".

The Verizon order was made under the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) as amended by the Patriot Act of 2001, passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But one of the authors of the Patriot Act, Republican congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, said he was troubled by the Guardian revelations. He said that he had written to the attorney general, Eric Holder, questioning whether "US constitutional rights were secure".

He said: "I do not believe the broadly drafted Fisa order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American."

The White House sought to defend what it called "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats". White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Fisa orders were used to "support important and highly sensitive intelligence collection operations" on which members of Congress were fully briefed.

"The intelligence community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to a public statute with the knowledge and oversight of Congress and the intelligence community in both houses of Congress," Earnest said.

He pointed out that the order only relates to the so-called metadata surrounding phone calls rather than the content of the calls themselves. "The order reprinted overnight does not allow the government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls," Earnest said.

"The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber. It relates exclusively to call details, such as a telephone number or the length of a telephone call."

But such metadata can provide authorities with vast knowledge about a caller's identity. Particularly when cross-checked against other public records, the metadata can reveal someone's name, address, driver's licence, credit history, social security number and more. Government analysts would be able to work out whether the relationship between two people was ongoing, occasional or a one-off.

The disclosure has reignited longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.

Ron Wyden of Oregon, a member of the Senate intelligence committee who, along with Udell, has expressed concern about the extent of US government surveillance, warned of "sweeping, dragnet surveillance". He said: "I am barred by Senate rules from commenting on some of the details at this time, However, I believe that when law-abiding Americans call their friends, who they call, when they call, and where they call from is private information.

"Collecting this data about every single phone call that every American makes every day would be a massive invasion of Americans' privacy."

'Beyond Orwellian'

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. It's a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents.

"It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies."

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice under President Obama.

The order names Verizon Business Services, a division of Verizon Communications. In its first-quarter earnings report, published in April, Verizon Communications listed about 10 million commercial lines out of a total of 121 million customers. The court order, which lasts for three months from 25 April, does not specify what type of lines are being tracked. It is not clear whether any additional orders exist to cover Verizon's wireless and residential customers, or those of other phone carriers.

Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific, named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual.

Senators Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Saxby Chambliss, the vice chairman, speak to reporters about the NSA cull of phone records. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Feinstein said she believed the order had been in place for some time. She said: "As far as I know this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the [foreign intelligence surveillance] court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress."

The Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement that the secret court order was unprecedented. "As far as we know this order from the Fisa court is the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued: it requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon [business services] subscribers anywhere in the US.

"The Patriot Act's incredibly broad surveillance provision purportedly authorizes an order of this sort, though its constitutionality is in question and several senators have complained about it."

Russell Tice, a retired National Security Agency intelligence analyst and whistleblower, said: "What is going on is much larger and more systemic than anything anyone has ever suspected or imagined."

Although an anonymous senior Obama administration official said that "on its face" the court order revealed by the Guardian did not authorise the government to listen in on people's phone calls, Tice now believes the NSA has constructed such a capability.

"I figured it would probably be about 2015" before the NSA had "the computer capacity … to collect all digital communications word for word," Tice said. "But I think I'm wrong. I think they have it right now."

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