Doctors group backs marijuana for medical uses

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters ) - A leading U.S. doctors group has endorsed using marijuana for medical purposes, urging the government to roll back a prohibition on using it to treat patients and supporting studies into its medical applications.

The American College of Physicians , the second-largest doctors group in the United States, issued a policy statement on medical marijuana this week after it was approved by its governing body, the group said on Friday.

The group cited evidence that marijuana is valuable in treating severe weight loss associated with AIDS, and nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy in cancer patients.

"Additional research is needed to clarify marijuana's therapeutic properties and determine standard and optimal doses and routes of delivery. Unfortunately, research expansion has been hindered by a complicated federal approval process , limited availability of research-grade marijuana and the debate over legalization," the group said.

The Philadelphia-based group, founded in 1915, is made up of 124,000 doctors who treat adults.

"The richness of modern medicine is to carefully evaluate new treatments. Marijuana has been in a special category because of, I suppose, its abuses and other concerns," Dr. David Dale, the group's president and a University of Washington professor of medicine, said in a phone interview.

Right-wing Republican Kevin Mannix has filed two initiatives that would abolish the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program (OMMP), instantly making criminals of over 16,000 sick and disabled Oregon patients. Mannix, an insurance defense attorney and former chairman of Oregon's Republican Party, not only wants to treat patients like criminals, but he even hopes to hand a tax-payer-funded-gift to the pharmaceutical industry by requiring the state of Oregon to purchase less-effective perscription drugs that patients don't even want. 

Mannix knows that he can't take on the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act (OMMA) in a fair fight because the OMMP is a popular state program that protects patients, saves state resources, and generates revenue.  Instead of attempting a repeal of OMMA in a stand-alone-initiative, Mannix is attempting to mislead Oregon voters by hiding behind so-called anti-crime provisions.  

Marijuana's $42 Billion Question
Quentin Hardy 10.01.07, 6:00 AM ET

The U.S. marijuana is a $113 billion annual business that costs taxpayers $41.8 billion in enforcement costs and lost tax revenues, according to a study to be published later Monday.

The study, "Lost Taxes and Other Costs of Marijuana Laws," by Jon Gettman, contends that marijuana sales are mostly the province of teenagers and young adults. His numbers also imply that the industry is supported, in both demand prices, by a relatively few extremely heavy users.

The study used diverse sources including government studies, private research and even High Times magazine to determine that about 25 million Americans consume an estimated total of 31 million pounds of pot annually. The number of users, and the price paid for pot, have changed little over recent years, despite continual government interdiction and incarceration efforts, the study says.

Based on government assumption that some 28.7% of U.S. gross domestic product ends up as tax revenue on a federal, state or local basis, the $113 billion could yield $31 billion in taxes. Assuming that marijuana offenses, which are 5.54% of all arrests, take an equal share of the country's $193 billion in annual criminal justice expenditures, Gettman finds another $10.7 billion in annual savings.

Gettman, who has a Ph.D. in public policy from George Mason University and publishes extensively on the pot business, admits that his numbers are at best rough, but contends they represent an accurate study of what keeping pot illegal costs. "The real answers are somewhere inside the bands" of all the published studies, he says. "It would be interesting to see what the government did with another $42 billion."

Police seize nearly twice as much pot as last year

Oregon - Law enforcement has found 220,000 plants as of September in state's remote, rural areas

Sunday, September 30, 2007

KATE TAYLOR

Harvest season this year has law enforcement scrambling to deal with the largest crop of marijuana in Oregon history.

From counties long known for illegal foliage to those where marijuana is rare, narcotics agents say they are tracking and hacking an unprecedented number of plants in remote and rugged rural areas.

By mid-September, they had seized about 220,000 plants statewide, nearly a 100 percent jump from last year's haul of about 120,000 plants. Almost all of the crops, DEA officials say, are grown by Mexican drug cartels expanding their California operations. 

Drug enforcement officials believe that overcrowding and heavy competition between marijuana growers in California are pushing the cartel-run operations into Oregon, Washington and other states.