Ben Morris at MPP makes an interesting observation regarding Martha Coakley's high-profile loss in Massachusetts:

To state it simply, the Democrats chose a bad candidate. They backed one of the most vocal and public opponents of the MPP-funded ballot initiative, Question 2, which decriminalized marijuana possession in Massachusetts in 2008. Question 2 was more popular than President Obama on Election Day, garnering 65% of the vote compared with the president’s 62%. All but three towns in the state supported the initiative.

The point here isn't that Martha Coakley lost because her anti-marijuana advocacy from 2008 was fresh in everyone's mind as they entered the polls on Tuesday. This campaign wasn't about marijuana at all, and that's the problem.

You see, Coakley's victorious opponent Scott Brown had actually championed a sparsely-publicized effort to re-criminalize certain marijuana offenses in the aftermath of question 2. It went nowhere, of course, and could easily have been wielded against him on the campaign trial, had Brown's challenger for the vacant Senate seat not been a rabid prohibitionist herself. In a state where 65% of voters endorsed decriminalization, a pro-reform message could easily have given some heft to the Democrats failed campaign strategy.

This is advanced pot politics, to be sure, and I certainly wouldn't expect to see such strategies deployed deftly by the major parties in the short term. But as the issue continues to heat up, it's just a matter of time before someone figures out how to use it effectively. And that will be fun as hell to watch.

Much like every other bad thing that's ever been said about marijuana, complaints about the role of medical dispensaries in creating crime have turned out to be wild exaggerations. If you don't believe me, try asking someone a little more qualified to opine on the matter, like, for example, the frickin' Police Chief of Los Angeles:

Despite neighborhood complaints, most medical marijuana clinics are not typically the magnets for crime that critics often portray, according to Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck.

"Banks are more likely to get robbed than medical marijuana dispensaries," Beck said at a recent meeting with editors and reporters of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Opponents of the pot clinics complain that they attract a host of criminal activity to the neighborhoods, including robberies. But a report that Beck recently had the department generate looking at citywide robberies in 2009 found that simply wasn't the case. [LA Daily News]

Well, how do you like that? Banks are robbed constantly by angry gun-wielding assholes, but you've never heard anyone lobbying to keep them 1,000 feet away from schools and parks. Meanwhile, the biggest security threat at the dispensaries has typically been the DEA (and yes, they were routinely grabbing money from dispensaries at gunpoint until the DOJ told them to find something better to do)

The very notion of dispensaries attracting crime is largely illogical on its face, given that the whole purpose of their existence is to remove sick people from the black-market marijuana economy. Legal medical marijuana providers reduce crime on a massive scale simply by opening their doors each day. Even The Washington Post has observed the role of dispensaries in undermining cartel profits, and one couldn’t possibly calculate the cumulative crime-control benefits of millions of marijuana transactions that would otherwise have occurred in the shadows.

Cheap and unfounded claims about dispensaries attracting crime have served only to discredit their authors, while infusing needless controversy and confusion into the regulatory process. As advocates for medical marijuana, we have no opposition to sensible regulations, but policy debates should be aimed at serving the interests of patients and the community, not indulging fictitious fears at the expense of helping real people.

Each time we ask the question, more people get it right:

With New Jersey this week poised to become the 14th state to legalize medical marijuana, 81 percent in this national ABC News/Washington Post poll support the idea, up from an already substantial 69 percent in 1997. Indeed the main complaint is with restrictions on access, as in the New Jersey law. [ABC]

Yes, the only controversy that remains with regards to medical marijuana is how best to distribute it. So here's my question: Will we see presidential hopefuls in the 2012 republican primaries still making fools of themselves by supporting a federal war on medical marijuana?

I'm honestly beginning to doubt that we will. Especially if this guy's on stage.

That makes 14 states, with several more to come in the next couple years. Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to make this possible. Oh, and while you're at it, Governor, how bout pardoning John Wilson?