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It's official. The British government is reclassifying marijuana to make possession a more serious offense. Use has been declining since they reduced penalties in 2004. However, instances of morons claiming marijuana can kill you have increased dramatically. Looks like the morons won this round:

Smith's expected announcement (Watch the video here.) comes just days after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown — who has been afflicted with a severe case of 'Reefer Madness' since taking office last June — raved that consuming cannabis can be fatal, and that strict penalties on pot are necessary in order to "send a message" to young people that marijuana smoking is "unacceptable."

Ironically, the Home Secretary’s formal announcement contradicts the official recommendations of Britain’s Advisory Panel on the Misuse of Drugs, which released its own report today finding that pot lacks the potential health risks of most other illicit drugs, and that its use is unlikely to trigger mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. [NORML]

As people around the world continue to die from everything except marijuana, one begins to realize how destructive it really is to go around making such a spectacular fuss about it. The time and resources spent pretending marijuana is so dangerous + the time and resources spent pretending to protect us from it with laws that don't even work = a whole mess of actual bad things that could be dealt with more effectively. There will never be one minute of a police officer's time or one dollar of a nation's crime control budget that is best spent combatting marijuana use. Not ever.

Marijuana has been failing to hurt people for thousands of years. If only the same could be said for police, politicians, and the press.

AKRON, Ohio - A medical examiner must change her autopsy findings to delete any reference that stun guns contributed to the deaths of three people involved in confrontations with law enforcement officers, a judge ruled.

Friday's decision was a victory for Taser International Inc., which had challenged rulings by Summit County Medical Examiner Lisa Kohler, including a case in which five sheriff's deputies are charged in the death a jail inmate who was restrained by the wrists and ankles and hit with pepper spray and a stun gun. [kstar.com]
I can't speak to the specific cases at issue here, but we're hearing more and more about this dubious "excited delirium" diagnosis that's being offered when people die in police custody. Drug use is often a factor, thus we must consider the possibility that tasers, though not typically lethal, may pose heightened risk of fatality when used on people who are under the influence. After all, people who are super wasted are among the most likely recipients of a thorough tasing by police.

I wouldn't want tasers to be erroneously identified as a cause of death, just as I wouldn’t want marijuana use to be, but as fatal outcomes involving these weapons are reported with increasing frequency, it's clear that more research is needed.

In the meantime, scratching these weapons out of autopsy reports sounds to me like the opposite of what we should be doing to address growing concerns about their alleged safety.*

*None of this is intended to disparage the fine people at Taser International, Inc. I'll say or do anything to avoid being sued or tased by those nice folks.