Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill) will introduce the first bill in the history of the U.S. Senate to provide an affirmative defense to medical marijuana users facing federal pot charges--the Truth in Trials Act. From the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP):

For the first time ever, a federal law recognizing the validity of state medical marijuana laws will be introduced in the U.S. Senate. U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) will introduce the Senate version of the Truth in Trials Act in October. Now is the time for you to write to your U.S. senators urging them to be original cosponsors of this medical marijuana legislation.

Please take two minutes to fax your senators a pre-written letter explaining why it is necessary to provide federal protections to patients and caregivers who use and provide medical marijuana in compliance with state laws. Visit here, enter your address, select a letter, and click a button to send it to your senators.

The Truth in Trials Act would create an affirmative defense that could be used against the outrageous federal prosecutions of patients and caregivers acting with the approval of state authorities and in accordance with state medical marijuana laws. The Department of Justice is holding medical marijuana patients in federal prison and actively trying to increase their numbers....It is urgent that your senators hear your outrage!

Health Canada, which supplies legal marijuana to medical users in Canada, is under sharp attack from users of its product:

Some of the first patients to smoke Health Canada's government-approved marijuana say it's "disgusting" and want their money back.

"It's totally unsuitable for human consumption," said Jim Wakeford, 58, an AIDS patient in Gibsons, B.C. "It gave me a slight buzziness for about three to five minutes, and that was it. I got no other effect from it."

Barrie Dalley, a 52-year-old Toronto man who uses marijuana to combat the nausea associated with AIDS, said the Health Canada dope actually made him sick to his stomach.

"I threw up," Dalley said Monday. "It made me nauseous because I had to use so much of it. It was so weak in potency that I really threw up."

Mark Kleiman is all over the retraction of the ecstasy report--seems there are some problems with Riucarte, the study's principal researcher.

The experiment was purportedly intended to represent in an animal model the consequences of human "recreational" MDMA use, and perhaps of therapeutic use of the drug were it ever approved for that purpose. In the experiment, two out of fifteen animals died. The death rate among human MDMA users is no more than one in a million.

Yet it appears that the researchers failed to investigate the causes of those deaths. Moreover, they went on to draw inferences about the effects of MDMA on humans from the observed damage to the brains of the remaining animals. That didn't seem to trouble the reviewers for Science or the administrators at the National Institute on Drug Abuse who trumpeted the findings as evidence of the dangers of MDMA. (Science is published by the AAAS, whose president, Alan Leshner, was the Director of NIDA when the grant in question was awarded; he made MDMA his particular crusade.)

Our initial report is here.

Barbara Comstock, the Justice Department's spokesperson, is resigning to take a job in the private sector. [Link via Liquid List]

Comstock is the fourth high-ranking Justice official to leave this year.

Others are Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, the criminal division chief, Michael Chertoff and Viet Dinh, head of the Office of Legal Policy.

Think Ashcroft will take the hint?

We love this op-ed piece in today's Detroit News by Robert Sharpe blasting the drug war for contributing to police corruption:

The combination of informants culled from the criminal underworld and overzealous prosecutors have dangerous implications. Whether or not a defendant is actually guilty, the informant profits when he snitches on someone else, even if it's a lie. This practice lends itself to entrapment and incarceration of innocent people.

Good cops aren't immune to the profit motive. Civil asset forfeiture laws provide an incentive for police to legally seize the cars, cash and homes of suspected drug offenders, and the temptation to steal proves too great for some.

....The institutional corruption created by the drug war stretches from coast to coast and reaches the highest levels. The Los Angeles Rampart scandal involved anti-drug officers selling drugs and framing gang members. And it's not just cops. ....The drug war doesn't fight crime, it fuels crime.

Sharpe points out the absurdity of the war against marijauana: Usage is far higher in the U.S. which prohibits it than in European countries where it has been decriminalized.

He concludes:

The land of the free now has the highest incarceration rate in the world in large part due to the war on illicit drugs. It's not possible to wage a moralistic war against consensual vices unless privacy is eliminated, along with the Constitution. If America is to be a free country, the war on drugs must stop.

We've only included some highlights, so go read the whole thing.

The U.S. Marijuana Party writes in that they now have chapters in 25 states. If your state doesn't have one, they'll help you start one. From the site's goal statement:

The goal of forming a Marijuana Party in your state is to become the king-maker in your state election. It is not to actually win any seats in your state house of representatives or senate. Although if you could pull this off your job is definitely well done.

....One of the easiest and least expensive ways to challenge the system is run a Marijuana Party candidate for governor of your state. But the best scenario is to run a full slate of candidates for your state senate or house of reps.

Why? Because in many electoral districts the margin of victory is very narrow, often down to hundreds of votes. Never forget that President Bush won by about 450 votes in one state. This is a lesson about the power of 450 votes. If you get only 1000 votes average for each electoral district in your state, chances are very good that you will cost 10% of the present state legislators their jobs.

The website also has an online tv page where you can watch videos. If this is your issue, go visit.

In the "Emily Litella Never Mind" department:

A scientific study warning of great risks associated with ecstasy use has been retracted.

A report submitted for publication last year by the team conducting a study on Ecstasy at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine claimed that one night's use of ecstasy could result in permanent brain damage and symptoms resembling Parkinsons' Disease. Other scientists said hogwash, it would take massive doses of the drug to cause brain damage.

Turns out the scientists got their drugs mixed up. They hadn't injected ecstasy at all into the monkeys and baboons who were the test subjects, but d-methamphetamine.

In an unexpected announcement, the Energy Department said it will decrease the number of polygraphs administered to employees with access to "nuclear secrets," particularly in the nation's weapons laboratories.

The deputy energy secretary, Kyle E. McSlarrow, said at a Senate hearing that the new policy was likely to reduce the number of people given polygraph tests to 4,500, mainly in sensitive arms and intelligence posts, from some 20,000 now.

McSlarrow said there has been increasing criticism of the techniques used in polygraphs and the department agreed with some of the critics. The increase in use was a result of the Wen Ho Lee case.

In 2001, Congress instructed the Department of Energy to adopt widespread polygraph screening in reaction to the case of Wen Ho Lee, the scientist at the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico who was suspected of being a spy but was freed from jail in September 2000 after admitting to a security violation. That order raised an outcry from experts who ridiculed lie detector tests as pseudoscientific and a potential threat to national security.

Last October, in a report requested and paid for by the Energy Department, a panel convened by an arm of the National Academy of Sciences said polygraph testing was too flawed to use for security screening. The panel said lie detector tests did a poor job of identifying national security risks and were likely to produce accusations against innocent people.

The Senate panel conducting the hearing was chaired by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) who added:

"This is a smart decision. I have been appalled by the D.O.E.'s continued massive use of polygraph tests in the wake of a national study condemning the reliability of these tests. Our national scientists deserve better."

The Netherlands this week will become the first country to make marijuana available in pharmacies, by prescription.

The Netherlands will this week become the world's first country to make cannabis available as a prescription drug in pharmacies to treat chronically ill patients, a top Dutch health official said on Sunday.

The Dutch government has given the country's 1,650 pharmacies the green light to sell cannabis to sufferers of cancer, HIV, multiple sclerosis (MS) and Tourette's Syndrome in a ground-breaking acceptance of the drug's medicinal use.

"It's a historic step. What is unique is that we are making it available on a prescription only basis through pharmacies," said Willem Scholten, head of the Office of Medicinal Cannabis at the Dutch Health Ministry.

The Netherlands, where prostitution and the sale of cannabis in coffee shops are regulated by the government, has a history of pioneering social reforms. It was also the first country to legalise euthanasia.

This is major. The FBI has begun a new probe into the testimony of former FBI crime lab director Steven Burmeister at the OKC bombing trial of Timothy McVeigh. New documents, undisclosed to the defense, show Burmeister may have lied about the results of critical lab tests at the trial.

The FBI internal affairs office is investigating the crime lab's chief of scientific analysis about his conduct in the Oklahoma City bombing case, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The Associated Press reported last spring that a transcript of a Justice Department interview showed that FBI scientific analysis unit chief Steven Burmeister initially had alleged in 1995 that his lab colleagues performed shoddy work in Timothy McVeigh's case, but then retracted several statements before appearing as a prosecution witness at the trial.

AP also reported that lawyers for some FBI lab employees sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2001, just days before McVeigh was executed for the April 1995 bombing, alleging Burmeister may have been pressured to give false testimony in the case. No action was taken and the allegation was never divulged to McVeigh's lawyers.

Read the whole thing.

A new report by the Justice Policy Institute says states spend too much money on prisons and not enough on education. The statistics tell the story.

African-American men who drop out of high school are four times more likely to be imprisoned than white males who fail to graduate, according a study by a Washington-based think tank on criminal justice. The report, which will be released today by the Justice Policy Institute, shows that 52 percent of black male dropouts will have been incarcerated by their early 30s compared with 13 percent of white men who do not complete high school.

The authors of the report draw the conclusion that state governments, including Maryland's, are devoting too much money to prisons and not enough to education.

"States can find the money they need to reinvest in education and communities by reducing prison populations and creating alternatives to cut incarceration costs," the report states.

The full report, Education and Incarceration, is available for free download.

Another report by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics has been released. Crime Victimization, 2002 finds that,

...overall violent victimization and property crime rates in 2002 are the lowest recorded since the inception of the NCVS in 1973.....

Violent crimes included in the report are rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault and simple assault (from the NCVS), and homicide (from the FBI's UCR program). Property crimes examined are burglary, motor vehicle theft, and property theft.

Some other findings:

The rate of violent crime dropped 21% from the period 1999-2000 to the period 2001-02.

Reporting to the police increased from 43% of all violent crimes in 1993 to 49% in 2002; reporting of property crimes increased from 34% to 40%.

From the Press Release:

The rate of every major violent and property crime measured by BJS declined from 1993 through 2002. Rape/sexual assault was down 56 percent, robbery down 63 percent, aggravated assault down 64 percent, simple assault (no weapon or serious injury) down 47 percent, household burglary down 52 percent, motor vehicle theft down 53 percent and property theft down 49 percent.

The decline in violent victimization between 1993 and 2002 was experienced by persons in every demographic category considered –– gender, race, Hispanic origin and household income. Property crime rates also fell for every demographic group examined –– region, property tenure, location and household income.

The San Francisco Chronicle has this analysis o f the report.