In the United States, 13 states currently allow citizens to use marijuana for medicinal purposes, but even these limited rights are under threat.

Have you read the headlines? The 'War on Drugs' Is Over!

What happens when you shoot up heroin and decide to do a Letterman interview? Watch the drugged out interview(s) and see him fall off stage while pretending to be a rapper. Joaquin Phoenix has either become a comedian or is Hollywood's newest train wreck.

Drinking and driving, bong hits, Vegas strippers… as American as Thanksgiving dinner!

Now that the Iraq campaign has drawn to a close, President Obama urges us to focus on political challenges closer to home. Good idea. In fact, why don't we take an important lesson from Iraq (i.e., phantom WMDs) and start paying attention to real national security threats to boot. In that case, let's review the gruesome evidence pouring out of Mexico these da...

In a small study, people who had chronic pain as a result of damage to the nervous system reported feeling less pain, as well as less depression and anxiety, when they smoked marijuana compared to when they smoked a drug-free placebo. The pain reduction was "modest" - less than 1 point on an 11-point scale for the strongest marijuana - and patients reported ...

Often a platform for boozy pictures, racy promotions and profanity-peppered wall posts, Facebook is hardly a model of conservative principles. Nevertheless, the company drew a clear line this week when it announced that ads for Proposition 19, California’s Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010, would be pulled from the site. The ads, which prominentl...

Today is International Overdose Awareness Day around the world. But for hundreds of thousands of Americans who have lost someone we love to a preventable death, every single moment of every day is Overdose Awareness Day. From mothers and fathers to spouses and children– nearly everyone in the country has been touched by the tragedy. I can assure you that no m...

One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don't drink actually tend to die sooner than those who do. The standard Alcoholics Anonymous explanation for this finding is that many of those who show up as abstainers in such research are actually former hard-core drunks who ha...

Police on Monday captured a Texas-born accused drug kingpin known for his unlikely nickname — La Barbie — and for ruthlessly ordering the beheadings of his enemies. Edgar Valdez-Villarreal, 37, was captured in the town of Lerma in the state of Mexico, about 20 miles from the capital, marking the third major accused drug lord to fall in Mexico in less than a ...

Last September I penned an essay for Alternet entitled Five Things the Corporate Media Don’t Want You to Know About Cannabis. In it I proposed, “[N]ews outlets continue to, at best, underreport the publication of scientific studies that undermine the federal government's longstanding pot propaganda and, at worst, ignore them all together.” Nearly one year la...

"A wounded man, blood-covered and frantic, approached a military checkpoint in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, 100 miles south of Brownsville, Texas, with a horrifying story. Reportedly shot in the neck himself, the Ecuadorian would-be migrant to the United States led members of the Mexican Naval Forces to an even more horrendous scene. Seventy-two migrants from C...

Social news aggregator Reddit.com today agreed to host for free advertisements from marijuana advocacy group Just Say Now, after Conde Nast, the site’s parent company rejected all marijuana legalization display ads. The Reddit community revolted to the censorship, with hundreds of users saying they’d turn on “ad blockers” to deny Reddit and Conde Nast ad rev...

"Our opposition to legalizing marijuana is grounded not in ideology but in facts and experience," say drug czar Gil Kerlikowske and his five predecessors in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece that urges Californians to vote against Proposition 19. They argue that voters should listen to them because they are "experts in the field of drug policy, policing, preven...

Facebook is facing down another embarrassing episode of censorship this week after refusing to show ads submitted by the Just Say Now marijuana legalization campaign. The gag is an important reminder that social networks like Facebook — while useful, interesting, and pretty — are "walled gardens" with overseers whose interests can overwrite free speech, open ...

Hot on the heels of Facebook censoring marijuana leafs in ads on the social network, and Google’s decision to accept and run nearly identical ads, a third major Internet site took a side on legalization ads. Social news site Reddit, owned by publishing company Conde Nast, told Just Say Now that the site would not run any display advertising relating to marij...

The bodies of 72 people have been found dumped at a ranch in northern Mexico after a shootout with gunmen from a suspected drugs cartel in a state that Lindsey Hilsum argues is under threat from the drugs barons." Tags: drug war Immigration

Stashing cash in spare tires, engine transmissions and truckloads of baby diapers, couriers for Mexican drug cartels are moving tens of billions of dollars in profits south across the border each year, a river of dirty money that has overwhelmed U.S. and Mexican customs agents. Tags: drug war

To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the "war on poverty". It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub-machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death toll in Tijuana – one of the front lines of this war – is now higher than in Ba...

Facebook is censoring marijuana. Just last week, the social networking giant abruptly changed its policies and decided to ban images of marijuana leaves from ads, claiming pictures of the plant promote “tobacco products.” Just Say Now, our campaign for marijuana legalization with Students for Sensible Drug Policy, ran ads promoting our campaign that showed ...

Coffee is probably the most consumed beverage on the planet and there are many reasons why. It's both a stimulant and a laxative. So it wakes you up and makes you go... in more ways than one. For marketing purposes, coffee is often cited as a high antioxidant beverage, which may account for a recent flood of media reports that coffee is a health drink! But, ...

"The decapitated bodies of four men were hung from a bridge Sunday in this central Mexican city besieged by fighting between two drug lords. A gang led by kingpin Hector Beltran Leyva took responsibility for the killings in a message left with the bodies, the attorney general's office of Mexico state said in a statement. The beheaded and mutilated bodies we...

"A Venezuelan drug lord sought on drug trafficking charges in the United States and for murder in Venezuela and Colombia was arrested Friday in Cucuta, near the Venezuelan border, Colombia's top police officer said. Walid Makled, 47, was included in a US extradition list "by direct request of the White House, as one of the world's most wanted drug trafficker...

As California gets set to vote on Prop 19 – an initiative to legalize marijuana statewide – some people’s minds are being completely blown, man. But it’s not the people smoking the stuff, it’s the people trying to keep it banned. I’ve collected the eight craziest claims about a post-legalization state of California predicted by opponents of Prop 19. Stunni...