The governors of Washington and Rhode Island announced today they’ve petitioned the federal government to move marijuana off its list of most-restricted drugs so that their states can implement their medical marijuana laws without conflict.

Sounds like good news for drug-reform advocates, right? Not exactly. Some of the nation’s most prominent drug reformers agree with the governors’ request, but not their motivation for making it; others caution there’s still much more to be done.

Rhode Island has a medical-marijuana law on the books since 2006 but Gov. Lincoln Chafee has balked at implementing a planned system of dispensaries. Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire earlier this year vetoed parts of her state’s medical marijuana bill dealing with establishment of dispensaries. Both governors cited federal prosecutors’ threats.

Drug Policy Alliance founder and executive director Ethan Nadelmann said the governors should be asserting their states’ rights and implementing their laws, not using federal law’s ban as a reason to punt.

“The governors’ call for re-scheduling marijuana so that it can be prescribed for medical purposes is an important step forward in challenging the federal government’s intransigence in this area,” he said. “But their call should not serve as an excuse for these two governors to fail to move forward on responsible regulation of medical marijuana in their own states. Governors in states ranging from New Jersey and Vermont to Colorado and New Mexico have not allowed the federal government’s ban on medical marijuana to prevent them from approving and implementing statewide regulation of medical marijuana. Governors Gregoire and Chafee should do likewise.”

Steph Sherer, executive director of the Oakland-based Americans for Safe Access, was somewhat more satisfied, “strongly applauding” the governors’ move.

“We look forward to a time when patients do not have to live in fear,” she said, but she also encouraged both governors to go ahead with medical marijuana production and distribution programs in the meantime.

Marijuana Policy Project executive director Rob Kampia agreed the two governors’ request is “a good first step, in that it shows that politicians are catching up with the scientific consensus, which is that marijuana has medical value.”

“Rescheduling marijuana, however, will not change the federal penalties for possessing, cultivating, or distributing medical marijuana. That is the change we really need,” Kampia said. “These governors should be insisting that the federal government allow them to run their medical marijuana operations the ways they see fit, which in these cases includes allowing regulated distribution centers to provide patients with safe access to their medicine and not force them to turn to illicit dealers.”

Only Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), issued a statement of unmitigated support – unmitigated even by adequate punctuation, creating the most awesome run-on sentence I’ve seen recently:

(T)o finally witness governors so frustrated with the absurdly mis-scheduled cannabis plant as being dangerous, addictive and possessing no medical utility (wrongly grouped with heroin and LSD) that they are reaching out to the president to fix this clear injustice and warping of science is a clear demonstration that the friction between the federal government’s recalcitrance on accepting medical cannabis (or for that matter ending Cannabis Prohibition in total) and state politicians who can no longer justify towing the fed’s ridiculous ban on physician-prescribed cannabis to sick, dying and sense-threatened medical patients is coming to a dramatic conclusion in a government showdown, one that may bode well for the larger Cannabis Prohibition reforms needed, festering just below the surface of the public’s mass acceptance of medical access to cannabis.

I ran out of breath just reading that.

Medical marijuana advocates gathered Tuesday morning in San Francisco to urge President Obama, arriving in the city later in the day, to call off federal prosecutors’ crackdown on dispensaries across the state.

“This is getting a little Kafkaesque for my blood,” said Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, said at a news conference a few blocks from where the president was scheduled to raise funds a few hours later. “They’re acing rather like thugs.”

“I’m an Obama fan, however I also believe in loyal opposition, and I’m very loyally opposed to what’s happening here,” he said. “We are asking that he intervene here.”

Ammiano said he has asked House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and other California House members to help set up a meeting with Justice Department and IRS officials to discuss their intentions; he said he also wants more input from Gov. Jerry Brown and state Attorney General Kamala Harris. “But right now, zip is happening, and it’s a slap in the face to all the people who voted for (Proposition) 215.”

San Francisco Supervisor David Campos said there’s “a great deal of disappointment that those of us who have supported and continue to support President Obama have about how this is being handled.” Such people now call upon him “to do what he promised, to do the right thing,” Campos said; he said he’ll introduce a resolution to the Board of Supervisors that takes a stand against the crackdown and asks the federal government to respect state law. “This is a states’ rights issue, and California voters have spoken on this.”

Stephen DeAngelo, whose Harborside Health Center in Oakland was recently hit with a multimillion-dollar tax bill after IRS auditors said it can’t use the same deductions as other small businesses, said a glance at who the federal prosecutors are targeting proves they’re not limiting themselves to profiteers and interstate bootleggers as they’d said they would.

Instead, he said, they’ve targeted places like his own dispensary, the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana and Northstone Organics in Mendocino County, all of which have been “100 percent compliant and have never diverted a single gram of marijuana out of state.” All the federal authorities are doing is threatening the security of tens of thousands of patients, denying local governments many millions in tax revenue, and putting thousands of people out of work, he said.

“They should either learn how to aim, or learn how to tell the truth,” DeAngelo said.

Lots more, after the jump…
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The RAND Corporation today retracted the study it had released last month questioning the long-held law enforcement assertion that medical marijuana dispensaries contribute to neighborhood crime.

The study of 600 marijuana dispensaries – some of which shut down, some of which stayed open – over a three-week period in 2010 had indicated crime actually rises in surrounding neighborhoods when dispensaries close. “Overall crime increased almost 60 percent in the blocks surrounding closed clinics in the ten days following their closing,” the report had said.

It was immediately touted by medical marijuana advocates from coast to coast as evidence that police complaints of criminal activity at or near dispensaries were bogus. Law enforcement replied the study was too small a sample over too short a time.

RAND announced Monday that questions raised after the study’s publication prompted the prominent think tank “to undertake an unusual post-publication internal review of the study,” its press release said. “That review determined the crime data used in the analysis are insufficient to answer the questions targeted by the study.”

In fact, RAND said, the big problem with the study was that the data described as covering the city of Los Angeles and surrounding areas did not include crime data reported by the Los Angeles Police Department. RAND researchers will conduct a new analysis after gathering adequate crime data, a process that could take many more weeks.

“This was a rare failure of our peer review system,” said Debra Knopman, vice president of the RAND Infrastructure, Safety and Environment division. “We take our commitment to quality and objectivity seriously so we have retracted the study in order to correct it.”

We’ll have a full story on this later today: I’ll be talking to the RAND folks in about an hour, and have reached out to law enforcement and medical-marijuana advocates for comment.

UPDATE @ 3:10 P.M.: Click here to read the full story.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris has now issued a brief statement about the recently announced federal crackdown on California’s medical marijuana dispensaries:

“Californians overwhelmingly support the compassionate use of medical marijuana for the ill. We should all be troubled, however, by the proliferation of gangs and criminal enterprises that seek to exploit this law by illegally cultivating and trafficking marijuana. While there are definite ambiguities in state law that must be resolved either by the state legislature or the courts, an overly broad federal enforcement campaign will make it more difficult for legitimate patients to access physician-recommended medicine in California. I urge the federal authorities in the state to adhere to the United States Department of Justice’s stated policy and focus their enforcement efforts on ‘significant traffickers of illegal drugs.”

Of course, that’s exactly what the feds say they’re doing, anyway.

The California Medical Association has adopted an official policy recommending that marijuana be legalized and regulated, the first statewide medical association in the nation to take this official position.

The policy is based on a white paper which concluded doctors should have access to better research, which isn’t possible under the current federal ban. The association’s board of trustees, a representative body of physician delegations across the state, adopted the policy without objection.

“CMA may be the first organization of its kind to take this position, but we won’t be the last. This was a carefully considered, deliberative decision made exclusively on medical and scientific grounds,” CMA President-elect Dr. James Hay said in a news release. “As physicians, we need to have a better understanding about the benefits and risks of medicinal cannabis so that we can provide the best care possible to our patients.”

Marijuana is currently listed on Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, a list of drugs that “have a high potential for abuse, have no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and there is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.” The CMA policy says it should be rescheduled to a less-restrictive status.

“There simply isn’t the scientific evidence to understand the benefits and risks of medical cannabis,” CMA Board Chair Dr. Paul Phinney said. “We undertook this issue a couple of years ago and the report presented this weekend is clear- in order for the proper studies to be done, we need to advocate for the legalization and regulation.”

The CMA Council on Scientific Affairs developed medical cannabis recommendation guidelines for physicians indicating the limited conditions for which the medical use of cannabis may be effective, but current literature is inadequate, dosages aren’t well standardized and side effects may not be tolerated.

But the CMA’s new policy also calls for regulation and evaluation of recreational marijuana use.

“We need to regulate cannabis so that we know what we’re recommending to our patients,” Phinney said. “Currently, medical and recreational cannabis have no mandatory labeling standards of concentration or purity. First, we’ve got to legalize it so that we can properly study and regulate it.”

Doctors in California can merely “recommend” medical marijuana, not prescribe it, due to the conflict between state and federal laws.

Almost lost in the hubbub of this week’s IRS and Justice Department crackdowns on California’s medical marijuana dispensaries was another revelation of federal action: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is telling gun sellers it’s illegal for medical marijuana patients to own firearms.

The Sept. 21 letter from ATF Assistant Director Arthur Herbert states, “ Any person who uses or is addicted to marijuana, regardless of whether his or her state has passed legislation authorizing marijuana use for medicinal purposes, is prohibited by Federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition.”

A lot of advocates – be they advocates of medical marijuana or the Second Amendment – are boiling mad.

“ATF’s blatant discrimination against Americans whose use marijuana legally under state law is outrageous,” Drug Policy Alliance Executive Director Ethan Nadelmann said Thursday. “It’s not just that ATF is riding roughshod over the rights of citizens who use marijuana legally with a doctors’ recommendation and thumbing its nose at laws enacted by sixteen states. It’s that there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that use of marijuana – whether for medical purposes or otherwise – is linked to reckless use of guns. … There should be zero tolerance for this sort of discrimination by the federal government.”

Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock and U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who serve one of the 16 states with medical marijuana laws, each wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney Eric Holder earlier this week to protest the policy.

“We’re reviewing the matter,” Lynda Gledhill, spokeswoman for California Attorney General Kamala Harris, said Friday; the office of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said the same thing. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and the National Rifle Association didn’t immediately respond to inquiries today.

Eva Rodriguez, an editorial writer at the Washington Post, blogged an interesting take last night on why a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on an Oakland-based medical marijuana case could predict the court’s course on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

She’s saying that “the four more liberal justices on the court — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — should have no trouble reading the Constitution as bestowing broad powers on the federal government to regulate all manner of commerce.”

That’s not surprising. But she notes that the Gonzales v. Raich marijuana case – brought by Oakland medical marijuana patient and activist Angel Raich – might be significant here because conservative justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy joined with their liberal colleagues in 2005 to uphold the Controlled Substances Act’s ban on marijuana under the government’s Commerce Clause powers.

Joan McCarter, writing this morning at the Daily Kos, dug into Scalia’s concurrence to find the relevant language:

Our cases show that the regulation of intrastate activities may be necessary to and proper for the regulation of interstate commerce in two general circumstances. Most directly, the commerce power permits Congress not only to devise rules for the governance of commerce between States but also to facilitate interstate commerce by eliminating potential obstructions, and to restrict it by eliminating potential stimulants.[...]

As the Court put it in Wrightwood Dairy, where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, “it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”

This, Rodriguez and McCarter seem to believe, indicates Scalia might feel the same way about the Affordable Care Act’s individual health insurance mandate.

Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed a bill that would’ve barred medical marijuana dispensaries from being located with 600 feet of a school or residential area, unless city or county officials enact their own ordinances.

The bill was SB 847 by state Sen. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana. The state Senate had passed it 31-2 in June; the Assembly had passed it 68-5 in August; and the state Senate had concurred in the Assembly’s amendments on a 34-4 vote in August.

“I have already signed AB 1300 that gave cities and counties authority to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries – an authority I believe they already had,” Brown said in his veto message. “This bill goes in the opposite direction by preempting local control and prescribing the precise locations in which dispensaries may not be located. Decisions of this kind are best made in cities and counties, not the State Capitol.”

SB 847 had originated with the city of Anaheim and was supported by groups such as the Peace Officers Research Association of California; advocates contended it would create a buffer zone until local governments can enact their own ordinances.

Groups including Americans for Safe Access, the Drug Policy Alliance and the Marijuana Policy Project had opposed SB 847, saying it would force a one-size-fits-all zoning scheme on local governments, and would lead to a lack of access to medical marijuana in some high-density urban areas.

Don Duncan, Americans for Safe Access’ California director, blogged today that the veto followed a groundswell of opposition from medical marijuana advocates, proving “that grassroots participation makes a difference.”

Secretary of State Debra Bowen this morning cleared proponents of a new marijuana-legalization ballot initiative to start gathering petition signatures.

Here’s the official title and summary prepared by the attorney general’s office:

MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION. INITIATIVE STATUTE. Decriminalizes marijuana sales, distribution, possession, use, cultivation, processing, and transportation by persons 21 or older. Dismisses pending court actions inconsistent with its provisions. Prohibits advertising, except medical marijuana. Prohibits zoning restrictions on marijuana cultivation and processing. Applies existing agricultural taxes and regulations to marijuana; exempts noncommercial production up to 25 flowering plants or 12 pounds processed marijuana annually. Authorizes retail sales of marijuana with one percent THC or more to persons 21 or older; if less, no age limit. Directs state and local officials to not cooperate with enforcement of federal laws inconsistent with its provisions. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local governments: The fiscal effects of this measure could vary substantially depending on: (1) the extent to which the federal government continues to enforce federal marijuana laws and (2) the specific taxes and regulations applied to marijuana. Savings of potentially several tens of millions of dollars annually to state and local governments on the costs of incarcerating and supervising certain marijuana offenders. Potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in net additional tax revenues related to the production and sale of marijuana products. (11-0011.)

The proponents of the “The Regulate Marijuana Like Wine Act of 2012” – James Gray, William McPike and Steve Kubby – have until Dec. 19 to collect valid signatures of at least 504,760 registered voters (five percent of the total votes cast for governor in 2010) in order to qualify the measure for the ballot.

These are familiar names. Gray, a former Orange County Superior Court presiding judge and the 2004 Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, is a longtime drug reform advocate. McPike is a Fresno attorney specializing in marijuana law. And Kubby, of Lake Arrowhead, is a longtime marijuana advocate and the 1998 Libertarian gubernatorial nominee.

But they are not affiliated with the Coalition for Cannabis Policy Reform, the Oakland-based group that grew out of last year’s campaign for Proposition 19, another legalization measure. The coalition folks are working on an initiative of their own for 2012.

Medical marijuana advocates asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia today to overturn the Drug Enforcement Administration’s decision to keep the cannabis on its list of most-restricted drugs.

The DEA denied advocates’ petition – filed in 2002 by the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis – two weeks ago. That means the drug, at least for now, remains on Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, which lists drugs deemed to have a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety under medical supervision.

Joe Elford, chief counsel for the Oakland-based Americans for Safe Access, filed the notice of appeal today, and will file a brief in the next few weeks.

“By ignoring the wealth of scientific evidence that clearly shows the therapeutic value of marijuana, the Obama Administration is playing politics at the expense of sick and dying Americans,” Elford said in a news release. “For the first time in more than 15 years we will be able to present evidence in court to challenge the government’s flawed position on medical marijuana.”

Advocates argue the federal government’s refusal to reclassify marijuana has stifled meaningful research into therapeutic uses such as pain relief, appetite stimulation, nausea suppression, and spasticity control, among others.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws allowing medical use of marijuana, and the National Cancer Institute – part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – earlier this year added cannabis to its list of complementary alternative medicines. And the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians both have urged the federal government to review marijuana’s status as a Schedule I substance.