The Marijuana Policy Project will be joining Kush LA Magazine and DailyBuds.com, LA’s fastest growing marijuana media outlets, at an epic two-day concert for reform hosted by Cheech and Chong and featuring Cypress Hill. 

Concert headliners include Slipknot, the Deftones, special guest Sublime, and a cannabis expo.  Rapper Mickey Avalon and “celebreality” star Adrianne Curry will appear to greet visitors and sign copies of Kush LA magazine’s October issue featuring Cheech and Chong. MPP will share with concertgoers the latest news in their work to end criminal penalties for marijuana use, and ensure safe and legal access to medical marijuana. 

We’ll have literature, merchandise, and a chance to play the “Wheel of Reform” for anyone who wants to help them make history.

The concert runs from noon to 11 pm on October 23 and 24 at the San Manuel Amphitheatre and festival grounds in San Bernardino, CA. Tickets and concert info are available here: http://www.guerillaunion.com/smokeout/.

Time and time again, White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has said that legalization is “not in the president’s vocabulary, and it’s not in mine.” MPP is concerned that Pres. Obama doesn’t know this word. If it’s not in his vocabulary, how can he make an informed decision about its merits?

To clear things up, we created a Web page that allows you to email Pres. Obama the definition of the word legalization. It also gives you a chance to let him know that you support ending marijuana prohibition.

Go here to help put the word "legalization" in Obama's vocabulary: https://secure2.convio.net/mpp/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=361

Thanks for your support!

The Marijuana Policy Project is now hiring fall interns to work in our State Policies, Federal Policies, and Outreach departments. These are unpaid, part-time internships (2-3 days/week) for the fall semester, with class credit available.

MPP internships have few similarities to a traditional internship. You will not be getting coffee, stuck at a photocopier all day, or hidden in a dark corner with nothing to do. You'll be doing real, substantive work in a fast-paced environment, surrounded by smart people, and you'll be helping to change laws.

Interns in MPP's State Policies and Federal Policies departments assist with news monitoring, generating pressure on legislators, Web updates, activist outreach, research projects, and more.

Interns in MPP's Outreach department assist with MPP's video production work, including digitizing and cataloguing MPP's archived video footage and helping with the production of TV ads and original shorts.

Interested? Please visit http://www.mpp.org/jobs for more information about each position and to apply.

Your name
Your phone (home and/or cell)
Days you're willing to volunteer (Saturday and/or Sunday)
Time slots you are available

10:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. (3.5 hours)
1:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. (3.5 hours)
5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. (3 hours)

(Feel free to sign up for more than one shift!)

Okay, let me say right up front that a) I know that headline is provocative, and b) neither I nor anyone can answer the question with any certainty given what we know and don’t know so far about Michael Jackson’s death. But the question needs to be asked.

It needs to be asked because suspicions that prescription painkillers may have been involved in Jackson’s death are strong enough that the federal Drug Enforcement Administration has been brought into the investigation. And we know that he had a documented history of battling pain and at least some acknowledged problems with prescription painkillers.

We don’t know yet what pain drugs Jackson was on or what they were prescribed for. But if he was addicted to prescription painkillers, that addiction almost certainly started with legitimate and needed treatment for real pain. And that’s where medical marijuana might have helped.

We know — repeat, we know — that marijuana can be effective against certain types of pain. As The Lancet Neurology put it a few years ago, “cannabinoids inhibit pain in virtually every experimental pain paradigm.” We know that human clinical trials such as this one have found marijuana to be effective, particularly for neuropathic pain.

And there is considerable evidence that marijuana and cannabinoids can act synergistically with opioid painkillers, providing better pain relief at lower doses than either class of drugs by itself. For example animal studies have reported that such combination therapy avoids the development of tolerance and allows effective relief with lowered opioid doses — avoiding the pattern of escalating doses that can lead to addiction and overdose risk.

And there is evidence that this same effect occurs in people. For example, in a series of cases reported in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management (which, alas, you can only access by paying for it — sorry!), patients on morphine and other narcotics were able to cut their doses roughly in half when smoked marijuana was added to their regimen.

At MPP, we hear similar stories from patients all the time: Again and again, patients tell us that use of medical marijuana allows them to cut back or eliminate the heavy doses of narcotic painkillers they’d been taking, while obtaining equal or better relief. There is enough science corroborating these accounts that they deserve to be taken seriously.

We can’t yet say that medical marijuana could have saved Michael Jackson, and we may never know that for sure. But there is simply no reasonable doubt that marijuana can help some chronic pain patients reduce both their suffering and their consumption of addictive and potentially deadly narcotics. If the U.S. government acknowledged that reality instead of denying it, lives could be saved — maybe lots of them.