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Opponents of marijuana reform often try to act like it's already no big deal. They say no one really gets in much trouble for it and it's not a top priority for police. It's a pretty desperate and counterintuitive strategy. It's also total bullshit:

(AP) — TIGARD, Ore. - The Tigard Police Department has ended a sex-for-marijuana Internet sting because officers posting the online ads posed as promiscuous women, not prostitutes.
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The officers posting the Craigslist ads posed as women willing to a have casual sexual encounter with men who had marijuana. No cash was involved. When the men showed up for the encounter, they were charged with prostitution and delivery of drugs.

Defense attorneys say the program was entrapment.

Ya think? I couldn't ask for a better example of police taking advantage of people in order to put them in jail. The whole thing is perverted and I'm not talking about the people who responded to the ad.

This story should be posted on every police department bulletin board in the country with "DON'T DO STUFF LIKE THIS" scrawled across the top of the page. Remember before the drug war, when the police officer's job was to prevent bad things from happening to people? Now we've got cops who think the best use of their time (and our money) is to trick people into breaking the law and then ruining their lives.

When we talk about ending the drug war, it's not because we want more freedom to take drugs. It's because we want to take away any incentive our police have to do stupid and insane crap like this.

ABC News has one of those classic pot propaganda pieces that relies on anecdotal accounts to sound the alarm about marijuana addiction. We learn the sad stories of a couple people who smoked way too much pot for way too long and ended up unhappy. Meanwhile, buried within all of this is the one relevant statistic that puts it all in perspective:

About 40 percent of all Americans aged 12 and older -- about 94 million -- have tried marijuana at least once, according to a 2003 survey by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA). Of those, about 3.6 million were daily users.

Overwhelmingly, people who try marijuana don't get "addicted" to it. They also don't go on to try harder drugs. They don’t get lung cancer, or psychosis, or any of the other horrible outcomes that are so commonly and shamelessly associated with America's most popular illegal drug.

Yet according to ABC News, marijuana is dangerously addictive, and worse still, it's the legalization movement's fault that people don't know how bad it is:

Since the 1970s, when marijuana was the symbol of political protest, the risks of marijuana dependency have been clouded by the legalization debate and long-held beliefs that the illicit drug is harmless.

Nonsense. The reason so many people think marijuana is safe is because they've tried it and it was safe.

Update: If you'd like to read some more about this ABC News story and why it's bad, then this post is for you.

new video from Common Sense for Drug Policy:

Just Chiming in, I Thought Prohibition was supposed to save us from ourselves? To protect us in some way?

Some interesting news from New Mexico:

On June 30, 2009 in the Federal District Court of New Mexico, Assistant US Attorney John Anderson agreed, on the record, to Honor the Medical Marijuana Recommendation of Charles Smith of Shasta Lake, California. Federal District Court Magistrate Judge Lorenzo Garcia further agreed to accept the State’s proposed recommendation of a Conditional Discharge upon provision of Mr. Smith’s Medical Marijuana Recommendation to the US Attorney’s office. This historic moment occurred during the federal Government’s prosecution of cases related to the Annual Rainbow Gathering that occurs in different states around the country and involves a large Federal Law Enforcement presence.
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This is the first time in modern history, in which it is known that the US Attorney and the Federal District Court agreed to accept medical marijuana recommendations and licenses in order to dismiss marijuana possession charges.

And the universe didn’t collapse. Not only that, the story has gotten no press whatsoever. Often, when the government refrains from doing something cruel to someone, there isn't much of a news story left to report. This just goes to show how silly it is to assume that there's a political imperative requiring us to continue aggressively enforcing bad drug laws. There isn’t.

See how easy it is to just leave patients alone? Next time, try not arresting them in the first place.