Marijuana

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

Hosted by Chris Deaton.

The league has an abuse problem with narcotics and with Toradol. Marijuana could be an off-ramp. Also: GM, GHWB, and GA football folds.

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

As legalization looms, psychiatrists and public health advocates are spreading awareness.

When pot goes legal nationwide, what will become of the drug-sniffing K9s?

Kusha-Cola

Colorado legalized marijuana in 2014 and the Pot Rush is on—but the ERs are filling up and a generation of kids is at risk.

Colorado legalized marijuana in 2014 and the Pot Rush is on—but the ERs are filling up and a generation of kids is at risk.

Marijuana sellers have cute ways to get around D.C.’s legal loopholes, but trying to bank their cash becomes money laundering in the eyes of the feds.

More Republicans are embracing legalized marijuana, for medicinal or recreational use.

Yes, and the number is growing.

Berkeley, California, has long occupied a soft spot in the liberal heart. In popular mythology, it's the 1960s birthplace of the free speech movement, in which idealistic young hippies helped push for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War.

An older online myth resurfaced this week, claiming that Malboro was set to release marijuana cigarettes in four states.

President Donald Trump said during his campaign he was in favor of keeping marijuana regulation a states’ rights issue, according to a recording released Thursday by the Colorado Springs Gazette.

Winners this Election Day ranged from governors-elect Ralph Northam and Phil Murphy to new Virginia state rep. Danica Roem, far from the first transgender legislator in the land, and the 93-year-old new mayor of Tinton Falls, New Jersey. But they weren’t the only ones: The legal marijuana industry…

The recent campus rioting against unpopular or conservative political views is awful, but I have discovered the solution—by accident.

Conventional wisdom has been bullish regarding the potential profits from investing in commercial marijuana businesses, now considered legal in several states but not under federal law. There have even been glossy brochures from consulting firms, offering the lure of potential billions in sales for…

The closing reports on the Obama administration's drug policy were delivered this week. Drug-induced deaths for the year 2015 were reported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on December 8, and the youth school survey of drug use for 2016, Monitoring the Future (MTF), was just released by the…

Are these the droids I'm looking for?

Leaders in the health sector from Washington state and Colorado, where marijuana's recreational use is widespread and often ineffectively regulated, know enough by now to take a step back and consider the ill effects. They presented findings and concerns on the health effects of cannabis Thursday…

The results of a Gallup survey released this week reinforce the message from several recent national monitoring instruments that use of marijuana by American adults is surging. From seven percent reporting regular use in 2013, the figure has nearly doubled to 13 percent answering in the affirmative…

Cleveland

It has been another rough couple of weeks for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). After the long-running scandals of shameful wait times, neglect to the point of lives lost, and the need for new leadership, they have faltered again recently with tone-deaf comparisons to Disneyland visits and…

Colorado Springs

A group of marijuana activists advocating for the decriminalization of marijuana will light up across the street from the White House Saturday afternoon.

In this political season, the results of polling have proven as problematic as they have consequential. Questions of validity increasingly plague polls at the very moment that the body politic most bends to their will (or to that of the media outlets reporting on them).

President Obama's National Drug Control Strategy in 2010 first proclaimed the major policy goals of the administration's approach to the drug problem and the goals were to be met by 2015. Not only have they not been met, in critical instances, the policies have been going in the wrong direction,…

Democrats have won votes by alleging that Republican positions amount to a "war on women." Yet politicians and pundits are now saying that a constellation of liberal policies favored by Democrats, on issues ranging from entitlements and healthcare to education and the economy, constitutes a war on…

While she opposed marijuana decriminalization during her first run for the presidency in 2007, according to Politico, candidate Hillary Clinton now provides support for so-called “medical marijuana.” She attributes her decision to “medical research,” which leads her further to seek a liberalization…

Congressional lawmakers and presidential candidates are currently debating criminal justice reform, offering to lessen the legal consequences for “non-violent drug offenders.” For most, the underlying motive is compassion for drug offenders, giving them the chance to avoid a criminal record. Yet…

Ed Feulner, the former president of the Heritage Foundation, writes about our culture's double standards for tobacco cigarettes and for marijuana. Here's an excerpt:

“We … say for first time non-violent drug offenders, no more prison. They are going to mandatory inpatient drug treatment because this is a disease, and the war on drugs has been a failure. . . . And what we need is a country and a President who will stand up and say this is a disease and we need…

Libertarians in Colorado are flying high after their success in getting marijuana legalized in the state. In our little town of Aspen, there are now seven stores in which eager consumers – I perhaps should say addicts because one user recently held up a store, threatening staff with a hammer,…

Vice President Joe Biden posed for a picture with a man wearing a marijuana themed t-shirt on a recent visit to Colorado. The t-shirt, from High Times, reportedly says, "I got high in Colorado."

President Obama this week told an audience in Jamaica that U.S. efforts against illegal drugs were “counterproductive” because they relied too much on incarceration—particularly for “young people who did not engage in violence.” 

Barack Obama took a shot at the war on drugs at a town hall event today in Jamaica. The president, responding to a question from an audience member, even went so far as to call the effort "counterproductive."

California’s terrible drought has become -- like just about everything else in the United States -- a political issue. Many liberals have taken to blaming anthropogenic climate change for the drought, while some conservatives have placed the blame at the feet of “liberal environmentalists.” The…

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg criticized pot legalization in recent remarks in Aspen. "This is one of the stupider things that’s happening across our country," said Bloomberg.

The Colorado Gazette reports this week that “Colorado is taking a novel approach to marijuana education — not telling people to avoid the drug, just to use it safely.”

For at least eight months in 2013 and 2014, letter carrier Devona Charley of Washington, D.C., delivered more than just letters and junk mail. The twenty-seven year old now-former U.S. Postal Service employee was sentenced to a year and a day in prison plus 6 months of home detention, part of three…

A poll reported in the Washington Post on September 23 offers positive news for those troubled by the movement to legalize marijuana. It also does not augur well for those pushing more states to follow Colorado and Washington, where legalization is already underway.

There's now a smaller percentage of American who believe pot should be legalized than there were a year ago.

The Washington Post editorial board was in favor of decriminalizing pot. But it is not in favor of legalizing it.

While the New York Times continues to editorialize in favor of the legalization of marijuana (Wednesday's installment posits the federal ban is "rooted in myth and xenophobia"!), others are pushing back against legalizing the drug. At the Wall Street Journal, Pete Wehner argues the push for the…

A leading drug policy researcher, David Murray, has a must-read piece up at the Hudson Institute website, "Comparing Marijuana and Alcohol: Seriously." Murray's article is a devastating deconstruction of claims that marijuana is relatively safe, or at least safer than alcohol. And, as he points…

President Obama visited Denver this week, was offered marijuana, and laughed.  His administration made possible the open marketing and use of marijuana in Colorado and Washington state by directing that federal law not be enforced. The president is joined by Hillary Clinton and Rand Paul in…

President Obama was asked whether he wanted to smoke marijuana by a fellow patron of a Denver bar last night. The offer came from Instagram user manton89, who posted video of the ask on his Instagram account. "Asked him if he wanted a hit of pot...he laughed!" writes manton89 .

When asked during a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour last night whether she used drugs, Hillary Clinton was admirably firm. Had she done marijuana? “Absolutely not,” she replied. “I didn't do it when I was young, I'm not going to start now.” She is, however, more wavering when it comes to…

Like many supporters of marijuana law reform, Democratic congressman Earl Blumenauer of Oregon makes his case for legalizing pot by...talking about how terrible alcohol is. A marijuana legalization “FAQ” posted on the congressman’s official web page informs readers not only that “marijuana is less…

The legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington has spawned reports of increased use, declining perception of risk, increased neonatal risk, drug tourism, diversion of public assistance to fund use, creation of significantly more powerful forms of the drug, and new financial rules to…

The legalization of marijuana has acquired an aura of inevitability. But is there really no choice? Must Americans resign ourselves to the social acceptability, legal entrenchment, and widespread availability (including to our kids) of marijuana? 

A study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that "[m]arijuana use makes tobacco use more pleasurable and may increase the user’s risk for becoming addicted to nicotine." Experiments involving rats found that those animals exposed to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana,…

The front page of today's Denver Post skips Easter. Its main focus? Marijuana.

Attorney General Eric Holder tells the Huffington Post that he had "youthful experimentation" of marijuana. In other words, he smoked pot in college.

Monday morning, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) blog at Whitehouse.gov published an entry titled: "Support for National Association of School Nurses' [NASN] Position on the Legalization of Marijuana." However, the original link for the post is now meet with a "Sorry, the page…

The head of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration is now openly criticizing Barack Obama for his recent comments over the question of marijuana legalization, according to multiple reports.

In an interview with the New Yorker, President Obama says that he believes marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol.

An email from the National Cannabis Industry Association (yes, even the potheads have lobbyists now) landed in The Scrapbook’s inbox last week. The PR blast announced: “30+ Cannabis Industry Leaders Head to D.C. to Deliver a Message to Congress: ‘Tax Us—Fairly.’ ” (“Legalize it, don’t criticize…

The economist Leonard E. Read once explained the effectiveness of free markets with the parable of the pencil: Pencils seem simple enough, just some wood with graphite inside and a bit of rubber at the end​—​but, he said, “no one in the world knows how to make a pencil.”

Peter Wehner writes in the Washington Post:

When asked whether he favored legalizing marijuana, former president Jimmy Carter made clear that he did.

A new poll finds that assisted suicide and medical marijuana are popular in the state of Massachusetts.

"Charles and David Koch are not going to be silenced. They are principled men and we have a principled company.”

Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor and a likely 2012 Republican presidential candidate, hasn’t been shy about his support for marijuana legalization or his personal use of the drug during his younger days. “I never exhaled,” he joked in a recent interview with The New Republic. But in an…

Politico reports that Proposition 19, which would have legalized recreational marijuana in California, has failed:

The Atlantic's Josh Green recommends some weekend reading (as if you haven't already read it):