Question to Barack from Balko

In the same vein as my mention of HR 5843, Radley Balko writes a column asking Barack some questions, and one is directly concerned with his stance on decriminalization:

In your autobiography, you admit to using marijuana and cocaine in high school and college. Yet you largely support the federal drug war — a change from several years ago when you said you'd be open to decriminalizing marijuana. Would Barack Obama be where he is today if he had been arrested in college for using drugs? Doesn't the fact that you and our current president (who has all but admitted to prior drug use) have risen to such high stature suggest that the worst thing about illicit drugs is not the drugs themselves, but what the government will do to you if you're caught?

Bingo. The number of people in our country who have at least tried pot is staggeringly high, with at least 15 million people in the US having smoked marijuana within the last month. This while the overwhelming majority of those people go on to lead completely normal lives drug-free later one (I am one). Why ruin their chances to have good jobs and educational opportunities [Federal law prohibits people who've been caught with pot from receiving financial aid]?

It's far past time to decriminalize, for a plethora of reasons.

Copeland continues to stonewall Congress

The investigation of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) into the tax-free practices of some religious organizations turned up a few rocks, and some especially slimy creatures are scurrying away from the harsh sunlight:

Already a well-known figure, Copeland has come under greater scrutiny in recent months. He is one target of a Senate Finance Committee investigation into allegations of questionable spending and lax financial accountability at six large televangelist organizations that preach health-and-wealth theology.

All have denied wrongdoing, but Copeland has fought back the hardest, refusing to answer most questions from the inquiry's architect, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa.
...
Swicegood said the church's independent compensation committee approves all payments to board members.

Marilyn Phelan, a Texas Tech University law professor and author on nonprofit law, said the practice could pose problems. Both the IRS and Texas state law prohibit benefits beyond reasonable compensation for insiders, including board members, she said. If violations are found, nonprofits can lose their tax-exempt status and board members can face penalty taxes.

As the Senate Finance Committee considers its next step, Copeland is not backing down. His ministry is portraying the inquiry as an attack on religious liberty.

At the same time, it is moving forward with a big fund-raising project: soliciting donations for new television equipment so Copeland can be broadcast in high-definition.

I'd love to see this crook thrown in jail, but it's enough to hope for all the money he's misused to be taxed. From their supposed needs for private jets to their staying in $5,000 a night resorts during "evangelistic trips" and driving Bentleys that they write off as "work-related vehicles"...it all just makes me sick. Paula and Randy White have probably cooperated more than anyone else, but with their ongoing divorce and financial issues, it's understandable that they can't take any more heat.

Gay marriage redux

Last January (2007), I wrote a short piece in response to the statistics on single women and the general decline of marriage among women until later life in my generation. I pointed out that gay marriage can't really be blamed for these trends, given the virtual non-existence of it at that time, and even now, only a few places allow it. This humorous video shows the fallacy of blaming gays for heterosexual divorces is like blaming Jews.

Stanford issued a press release in 1995 that summarized, even way back then, the genetic and hereditary evidence that homosexuality was not merely an arbitrary lifestyle choice. Given the new research just reported this week that shows a fundamental difference in the brain structures of gay men and women versus straight men and women, arguing that being attracted to the same sex is a "choice" is without merit. That's the first hurdle anti-gay advocates face: showing how discrimination against them is fundamentally different from discrimination based on race or gender.

About a week ago, a colleague emailed me an article by Chuck Colson (former corrupt Nixonian) about gay marriage and, quote:

There is nothing in the California majority opinion that necessarily limits “loving and long-term relationships” to two people, or even people who are unrelated to one another. The biggest impediment is our revulsion at polygamy and incest—revulsions that can be swept aside by activist judges as easily as the millennia-old revulsion toward same-sex “marriage.”

That would only leave the argument that these arrangements pose a threat to the health and well-being of children.

I want to look at this common "slippery slope"-style argument.

First, I want to make it clear that a lot of the "issues" swirling about here should be clearly delineated:

1. What is the "compelling interest" of the state to involve itself in any fashion in marriage?
2. What role(s) have the state and federal government played in regulating marriage in the past?
3. What are the government-related benefits of marriage?
4. What can be said about the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and marriage?
5. Would people be satisfied if gays were given equal rights and benefits but it was called a "civil union" rather than a "marriage"? What is the non-semantic difference?
   

Marriage certainly pre-dates written history and the logic of marriage is simple and compelling: as social creatures, humans have a lot of required investment in raising their young. Unlike other primates, whose young become self-sufficient for food after a maximum six years in gorillas and chimps, human young are highly dependent on their mothers for much longer. As such, this enormous divestment of time and energy is a trade-off that pays for itself in learning -- the longer the developmental period, the more learning and behavior that can be passed between generations. Given that we males are just as biologically and evolutionarily invested in the survival of our young, the formation of families or family groups is something seen in all primates. Although our current concept of monogamy seems logical and moral, we have seen polygamy's place in ancient (check your Bible!) and modern history, and our closest cousins, the great apes, certainly do not form strictly-monagomous pairing.

Institutionalized marriage probably began as a simple property transfer. Fathers literally sold their daughters off to suitors for a reasonable "bride price", overseen by local authorities, and this has a lot of precedent in the Bible and the earlier Babylonian Hammurabi's Code (see #138). It's understandable from a moral and pragmatic point of view that in these times, fathers were responsible for and controlled their daughter's welfare up until puberty, keeping her safe and getting value out of her by the work she did around the household. Once she was old enough to take care of herself (and a family), then her "value" in work around her father's household would have to be compensated for by the prospective groom. Primitive? Of course, but logical enough...

It should be quite obvious that divorces have happened as long as marriages have (again, see Hammurabi's Code #138). The "threats" to marriage, then, have been around long before "them queers" started asking for the legal rights to marry. The divorce rate in our country is fairly high, and if you want to talk about slippery slopes, the "remedy" proposed by many groups is to make no fault divorces illegal. This is another case where conservatives are completely inconsistent: they are adamant that raising taxes is horrible because it circumvents individual liberties and call themselves champions of states' rights. On the other hand, when they have a moral argument about restricting alcohol sales on Sundays, or laws against marijuana, or laws about gay marriage, this whole notion of civil liberties gets pretty damned fuzzy, and they want the government to step in and limit individual freedoms.

Given the paucity of logic or evidence that allowing gay marriage would somehow "undermine" or "threaten" marriage as an institution, the argument to prevent gay marriages must rest mainly on legal precedent. Unfortunately for antagonists of gay marriage, much of the legal precedent concerning "equal protection" will not work out well in their favor, unless the judges involved want to completely ignore the clear letter and spirit of the law. The Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment guarantees (aptly enough) equal protection to all groups under the law; it has been used with increasing scope to prevent discrimination based on race, gender, disability, religion, &c. The next logical step is to use it to prevent discrimination based on sexual identity/preference, and this is exactly what the courts in California and Massachusetts have done.

Now, perhaps I feel that marriage should not even be the purview of government, and that really all the government should have to do with it is in recognizing my wife's status in order for her to execute legal documents on my behalf and as co-owner of my property. What is the government's interest in regulating marriage, after all? Is the government a giant family planning organ that serves to try to help citizens propagate the species? Unbelievably, this is exactly the argument that some of these quote, pro-family, groups and anti-gay writers use in predicting "the demise of civilization":

Because civilization provides the best odds for their children to live to adulthood. So even though civilized individuals can't pursue the most obviously pleasurable and selfish (i.e., natural) strategies for reproduction, the fact is that they are far more likely to be successful at reproduction in a civilized society -- whether they personally like the rules or not.

Civilizations that enforce rules of marriage that give most males and most females a chance to have children that live to reproduce in their turn are the civilizations that last the longest. It's such an obvious principle that few civilizations have even attempted to flout it.

Even if the political system changes, as long as the marriage rules remain intact, the civilization can go on.

Get that? The impetus on government is to protect and prolong our society and civilization. This takes the primary aim of marriage as reproduction. Of course, given that many marriages are childless, either because one or both of the spouses are infertile, or because they simply don't want kids, one must wonder if in this paradigm it would entail that government should regulate marriage further than it already does and restrict it to only couples who are fertile and want children. It's already clear that these anti-gay so-called "family advocates" are in favor of tightening restrictions on divorce, overturning a woman's right to choose, as well as making birth control less readily available, so it's obvious that they think that the government's compelling interest is not just to keep the "rules of marriage" immutable, but to literally control the reproduction of society.

If the "rules of marriage" are loosened, let's say all the way to the point that people could marry animals or be polygamous (or start sex cults), would it logically follow that heterosexual couples would stop marrying? Would they stop breeding? To assert, "yes" to either of those questions is to admit to a credulity beyond that which I am capable. What you are asserting is that people would no longer have a rational justification for committed monogamous relationships if the imprimatur of the government was not attached to it. This conveniently overlooks the fact that people engaged in such relationships before governments regulated them; whether or not the government "sponsored" marriage, people would choose to live in a committed monogamous relationship that mirrors, in all respects, marriage.

Slippery slope arguments like the one employed in the article by Colson assert that to allow two people to marry of the same sex removes the threshold of rationality from deciding what marriage is, and would open the door to bestiality or polygamy. These arguments are simply horrible. These same exact arguments have been historically employed in the following way:

1. Lincoln wants to give blacks the right to vote? Well, what's next? WOMEN?
2. They're going to give women the right to vote? What's next? Civil rights for blacks?
3. They're going to give people of different colors the right to marry? What's next gay marriage?

Now, we hear:

1. They're going to give gays the right to marry? What's next, will we be able to marry dogs or multiple people?

The slippery slope argument ignores the fact that people can draw rational distinctions between categories, and that humans cannot correctly divine rational and irrational behavior. It gives no credit to the powers of human reason to limit change, implying that one change must entail another, even one of a completely different nature, which commits a category error. Imagine that I said the following:

1. Lincoln wants to give blacks the right to vote? What's next, dogs?
2. Women will be given the vote? What's next, dogs?

The category error here is clear: the ability to vote is already held by white men, so extending it to black men is including another part of the category "man". Extending it to dogs would be absurd. Ditto with women: they belong to the category "human" and so extending the right to vote to them is simply saying, "All humans have the right to vote," rather than saying, "Everything has a right to vote."

By the same logic:

1. An adult man and woman are allowed to marry: this is a definition of marriage. It is completely consistent with me using a gender-neutral definition: two adult people are marrying one another.
   
2. If a man and man are allowed to marry, this entails no substantive expansion of the definition: two adult people can choose to get married. Ditto with a woman and woman.
   
3. It does not follow that the definition of marriage has been altered to allow more than two adults to marry, nor to allow adult persons to marry animals.
4. If not substantive change in the definition of marriage occurs, then the supposed "snowball effect" of change is undermined.
   

Those who make the slippery slope argument imply that to broaden the definition of marriage from "one man, one woman" to "two adult persons" would be enabling the definition to be broadened even further to "more than two adult persons" or "persons and animals" but this is a categorical mistake.

This mistake is akin to someone who argues that, "If you make it illegal for me to punch you in the face (assault), then what's next? Will I be arrested for patting you on the shoulder for a job well done?" It implies, again, that human reason cannot differentiate between degree and quality of action or definition. Basically, the slippery slope argument is employed by those who have no valid arguments or evidence on their side to make people afraid that change in tradition will snowball in effect and run amok. The problem is that history has taught us, again and again, that people are able to adapt and change and modify law and make progress without the destruction of civilization.

...at least, so far.

Conclusions:

There is more and more evidence that gay people are physiologically determined as such. Denying them marriage rights runs afoul of the Equal Protection clause. The slippery slope argument often commits a category error and always ignores the ability of people to make distinctions and refinements and progress in existing law and culture; it implies that humans cannot act rationally and control the changes in the status quo, because change will snowball and multiply and wreak havoc on civilization. This has been shown logically fallacious and historically inaccurate.

Conservative judges

I remember walking from the parking in with a colleague at UF and discussing our voting logic in November 2004. At the time, I am ashamed to admit, I was not yet cognizant of many facts surrounding the Iraq War. I still had a large degree of trust in the President and his handling of our national security. There was no excuse for my ignorance, save ignorance itself -- I was unaware of the growth of internet sites like the ones I now frequent, and got all my news from (gulp) CNN.

If I had been a peruser of blogs back then like Think Progress and TPM and The Carpetbagger Report, I would've known the following already:

01/04 -- Chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay resigns, saying he doesn’t believe Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction ever existed.
05/04 -- Army acknowledges it is investigating at least thirty-five cases of abuse or torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
06/04 -- U.S. commission investigating September 11 finds “no credible evidence” linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks; Dick Cheney continues to claim “overwhelming evidence” of a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
08/04 -- For third consecutive year, more Americans in poverty and without health insurance; national poverty rate hits 12.5 percent, 45 million people lack health coverage.
09/04 -- Iraqi Health Ministry statistics show U.S. and allied forces and Iraqi police are killing twice the number of Iraqis—mostly civilians—as the insurgents; officials announce that Health Ministry will no longer provide casualty statistics to reporters.
10/04 -- Chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer reports that Iraq had no biological or chemical weapons and no nuclear program before the U.S. invasion; in fact, Duelfer finds no evidence that Iraq had produced any WMDs after 1991.

Talk about an "if-then" situation. If I'd known the above (and more, so much more), I would certainly have had a different political frame of mind at the time. But I did not, and so I was telling my colleague that I thought the Supreme Court should move a little to the right as I felt, at the time, it was perhaps a little too far left-of-center.

Talk about watching what you wish for. Since then, Bush appointed two justices, one of whom -- Samuel Alito -- is so far right-of-center that he makes Hitler look liberal, and even McCain had reservations about him. Alito undersigned the unitary executive legal theory that in effect grants Bush monarchical powers. Although Roberts is not quite so bad (who is?), there were some early signs that he may have been more conservative than moderates believed. And those have proven prescient.

Today's NYT contains an op-ed reviewing McCain's stand on a case that went before the Court in 2006 concerning Lily Ledbetter. The reason this case popped up is that Congress was just voting on a bill to try to fix the problem represented by the Ledbetter case -- unequal pay for women -- a vote that McCain opposed allowing to even occur by voting against cloture (more record GOP filibustering and obstructionism). How did the far right Court rule back then?

The fact that workers generally have no idea what other people are making when they start a job did not concern the court nearly as much as what Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, called “the burden of defending claims arising from employment decisions that are long past.” In other words, pay discrimination is illegal unless it goes on for more than six months.

Ledbetter did not even get her back pay. And Goodyear billed her $3,165 for court-related costs.

I feel so guilty for my complicity in supporting a more conservative SCOTUS now. What kind of screwed up logic states that a systemic corporate policy of discrimination is a crime for only six months? Not that the Court's illogic stops with anti-labor legal rulings. It goes deeper and darker -- to the death penalty, state-church separation and the Bill of Rights for persons accused in crimes. What I now know is the absolutely crucial role of a President in picking justices. A horrid executive leads to horrid justices, which is what we saw in 2005. The next president had better damn well be liberal and nominate liberal justices in order to bring back a semblance of balance to the far-right court as it exists today. I'll be doing my part.

VT shooting & gun laws

It's hard to believe that it's been a year since the VT shootings. It's harder still to believe that Virginians refused to amend gun statutes to protect citizens from mentally-disturbed persons making gun purchases.

NRA continues to hold dominion over Virginia
Posted January 26th, 2008 at 9:30 am

Guest Post by Morbo

After the Virginia Tech massacre, I wrote a post predicting that the horrific incident would do nothing to change our gun policy. I secretly hoped I’d be proven wrong. Sadly, it looks like I won’t.

In Virginia, lawmakers have rejected modest legislation closing a loophole that allows people to buy weapons at gun shows without undergoing a background check. This should be a no-brainer after what happened, but still the measure failed.

Reported The Washington Post:

Gun-control advocates, including survivors of the April 16 shooting rampage that took the lives of 32 victims at Virginia Tech, poured into a Senate committee meeting to support a bill that would require background checks for all gun-show sales. They then staged a “lie-in,” lying on their backs outside the Capitol to draw attention to gun deaths in Virginia last year.

Some of the survivors offered compelling personal testimony. Colin Goddard, 22, who survived the shootings and is now a senior at the school, cut to the chase when he said: “People tell me I am alive because of God or luck or a bunch of other stuff. I don’t know how much I can accept any of those, but one thing I can’t accept is that it was just criminals being criminals and I was just caught in the wrong situation at the wrong time.”

Amazingly, several gun nuts attended this event with weapons strapped on their hips. That’s right — in Virginia, it is legal to attend a public meeting of government representatives wearing a pistol. One complained that background checks are “onerous” because they can take as long as one day to complete.

At the hearing, some of the surviving students were approached by gun nuts who explained to them that had the students been armed, they could have taken out the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui. These gun nuts are clearly disturbed — yet the legislature listens to them, not the families of those who were killed.

A panel of the Virginia House of Delegates had already voted down closing the loophole. The Senate hearing was an attempt to revive it, but on Wednesday the members of the Courts of Justice Committee voted it down 9-6. All seven Republicans on the committee voted against it, as did two Democrats.

To the gun nuts, “gun control” is synonymous with seizure of weapons. They do this on purpose to frighten people. Thus, the debate becomes whether people can have guns or not instead of what reasonable restrictions we can put in place to make sure the wrong people don’t have access to guns. I don’t want to take away the rifle your uncle Fred uses to hunt deer. I do want to make sure that a deranged person can’t go to a gun show, walk out with an assault rifle and head for the nearest middle school.

If Virginia won’t even pass a baby-step measure like this in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings, then all hope for any sensible gun laws in that state is lost. As I said back in April, we are left to wait until some other deranged person decides to top Cho Seung-Hui’s grim record.

After this was written, we had the NIU shootings. Did he get those guns illegally? Nope.

The graduate student bought two of his four guns at a Champaign, Ill., gun store Saturday — indicating that he had been planning his assault for at least six days, ABC News' Richard Esposito and Pierre Thomas report. The other weapons were purchased from the same store in December and August 2007.

Some politics notes

Ezra asks,

for whatever reason, our politicians seem achingly incapable of simply leaving Iraq. So it's worth asking if a military deployment is really the most cost-effective way to spend billions and billions in Iraq. This site, in fact, asks the question well. "The US budget for Iraq in FY 2006 comes to $3,749/Iraqi. This is more than double their per person GDP. It's like spending $91,000 per person in the US. Why not just bribe the whole country?" But seriously: Why not just bribe the whole country? If we're determined to commit an enormous amount of resources to the Iraqi people, why not let the Ghost of Milton Friedman take over and simply design some sort of program that offers enormous economic benefits in exchange for reductions in violence?

A win for progress in the war against "the war on drugs" -- the harsh crack sentencing guidelines are coming into line with those for powdered cocaine:

African-Americans were nearly 82 percent of defendants sentenced in federal court for dealing crack, but only 27 percent of those sentenced for dealing powder cocaine, according to 2006 federal statistics. Each year, federal courts handle about 11,000 cocaine sentences, which are roughly evenly divided between crack and cocaine cases.

The issue long has been a source of contention between government prosecutors and civil rights advocates, who argue crack dealers are often targeted for longer prison terms because that drug is prevalent in urban and minority communities, while the powdered version is more commonly associated with higher-income users.

I've said it before:

I strongly disagree with complete libertarians with respect to drug policy who think that controlling substances is unnecessary/illegal on the part of the government, especially in light of drugs like Oxycontin(TM). That said, the legalization of marijuana is necessary, even if it may cause a slowdown of brain processing speed. I don't even smoke it (honest, not since 1999), but it is definitely far past the time to de-criminalize it for a plethora of reasons.

I'd go further and point out that people who are convicted of felonies for using drugs are much less able to go on to lead productive lives afterwards due to their criminal record. This all but insures that they will remain trapped in a criminal lifestyle, and converts many formerly-productive citizens into drug dealers. I think many substances ought to be controlled by the government, but de-criminalized.

Remember, government-provided health care is terrible and will lead to a decline in quality, and Dick Cheney is proof of this!

The Dems have caved again, this time on the omnibus bill.

A few religion-related things

Stanley Fish has redeemed himself a little since his last foray into comment on religion. This time, he emphasizes sound legal logic:

...the issues Locke identified and analyzed will never be resolved. In her dissent in Boerne, Justice O’Connor wrote, “Our Nation’s Founders conceived of a Republic receptive to voluntary religious expression, not a secular society in which religious expression is tolerated only when it does not conflict with generally applicable law.”

Yes, that’s the question. Do we begin by assuming the special status of religious expression and reason from there? Or do we begin with the rule of law and look with suspicion on any claim to be exempt for it, even if the claim is made in the name of apparently benign religious motives? [emphasis mine]

His language is tilted towards the former policy, and that means he's gained back a little of my respect.

Also, a great day for the Constitution and church-state separation as the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the state-sponsored religious program of Chuck Colson in prisons.

And on another religious note, there's an interesting new analysis of the Gospel of Judas, and one which claims the other interpretations are thoroughly wrong:

So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the “Thirteenth.” In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons — an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal.

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was a harsh critic of mainstream Christianity and its rituals. Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.

The author strongly criticizes National Geographic for getting it wrong. Interesting, but not very likely to impact the scholarly Christian rejection of the document either way. Mainstream Evangelicals would probably be more likely to support the document now, though, since it jives better with their interpretation of Judas.

The Boy Scouts of Philly & discrimination

Looks like one of the more famous discrimination cases for the Boy Scouts, this one regarding the "Cradle of Liberty Council" is coming to a head...much to the dismay of the AFA and their fallacious reasoning.

Death penalty article in the NYT

A new article in the NYT covers the timely debate on the merits of the death penalty, given that the high court is going to review the method of lethal injection as to its "cruel and unusual punishment" quality. I've mentioned twice my opposition to the death penalty, and the reasoning behind it is pretty simple and sound:

1. Some innocent people are put to death, which is exactly the same thing as murder, and thus makes the state itself an instrument of the very crime to which it believes the death penalty should be applied. (Motive doesn't matter, only the consequences thereof.)
2. The deterrent effect is highly dubious. All of the claimed evidence for it comes from econometric studies, while all opposing evidence is sociological and demographic. See the bottom for references.
   

From the NYT article today:

The studies have been the subject of sharp criticism, much of it from legal scholars who say that the theories of economists do not apply to the violent world of crime and punishment. Critics of the studies say they are based on faulty premises, insufficient data and flawed methodologies.

The death penalty “is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,” John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005. “The existing evidence for deterrence,” they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”

Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 and has followed the debate, said the current empirical evidence was “certainly not decisive” because “we just don’t get enough variation to be confident we have isolated a deterrent effect.”

But, Mr. Becker added, “the evidence of a variety of types — not simply the quantitative evidence — has been enough to convince me that capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of offenses.”

also,

“I am definitely against the death penalty on lots of different grounds,” said Joanna M. Shepherd, a law professor at Emory with a doctorate in economics who wrote or contributed to several studies. “But I do believe that people respond to incentives.”

But not everyone agrees that potential murderers know enough or can think clearly enough to make rational calculations. And the chances of being caught, convicted, sentenced to death and executed are in any event quite remote. Only about one in 300 homicides results in an execution.

The first sentence of the second paragraph should be seized upon. An overwhelming majority of murders are not committed by people in a cool, calm, rational frame of mind. Besides, if killing murderers is effective at preventing future murders, so too would life imprisonment with no chance of parole. This latter option would actually be cheaper, not to mention more moral, as there would be no chance of killing an innocent person and any innocent parties would have ample time to file appeals and work towards showing exculpatory evidence.

One of the ways I wish our system would strengthen punishment is towards child molesters, whose "cure" rate is all but zero and who habitually go from bad to worse as they employ violence to cover up their crimes once they've been caught the first time. Think Jessi Lunsford.

As a father, I would have a hard time not wanting to execute vigilante justice on that motherfucker John Couey. I just hope I'll not ever be put in a position in which it is necessary to restrain my wrath.

References:

PRO-Abolition:

1. ...THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the American Psychological Association: Calls upon each jurisdiction in the United States that imposes capital punishment not to carry out the death penalty until the jurisdiction implements policies and procedures that can be shown through psychological and other social science research to ameliorate the deficiencies identified above.
2. "Since 1973, over 120 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. (Staff Report, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil & Constitutional Rights, Oct. 1993, with updates from DPIC). In 2000, 8 inmates were freed from death row and exonerated; in 2001 – 2002, another 9 were freed; and in 2003, 12 were exonerated. In 2004, there were 6 exonerations." (Death Penalty Info)
3. "Consistent with previous years, the 2004 FBI Uniform Crime Report showed that the South had the highest murder rate. The South accounts for over 80% of executions. The Northeast, which has less than 1% of all executions, again had the lowest murder rate." (Death Penalty Info)
4. "According to a survey of the former and present presidents of the country's top academic criminological societies, 84% of these experts rejected the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. (Radelet & Akers, 1996)" (Death Penalty Info)

1) Deterrence and the Death Penalty: The Views of the Experts
Michael L. Radelet, Ronald L. Akers
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-), Vol. 87, No. 1 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 1-16
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1143970 FULL-TEXT (.pdf)

2) Capital Punishment and Homicide: Sociological Realities and Econometric Illusions
Ted Goertzel, Ph.D. Sociology Department -- Rutgers U
http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-07/capital-punishment.html FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)

3) The Changing Nature of Death Penalty Debates
Michael L. Radelet; Marian J. Borg
Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26. (2000), pp. 43-61.
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.43 FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)
excerpt -- "...Overall, the vast majority of deterrence studies have failed to support the hypothesis..."

PRO-Death Penalty:

4) Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect? New Evidence from Postmoratorium Panel Data
Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul H. Rubin and Joanna M. Shepherd
American Law and Economics Review V5 N2 2003 (344-376)
http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/2/344 FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)

5) The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Evidence from a "Judicial Experiment"
Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Joanna M. Shepherd
Economic Inquiry 2006 44(3):512-535; doi:10.1093/ei/cbj032
http://ei.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/44/3/512 FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)

6) Does Capital Punishment Deter Homicide?
[A Response to (2) above]
http://libertycorner.blogspot.com/2004/10/does-capital-punishment-deter-homicide.html
excerpt -- "...Now, I must say that I don't care whether or not capital punishment deters homicide. Capital punishment is the capstone of a system of justice that used to work quite well in this country because it was certain and harsh. There must be a hierarchy of certain penalties for crime, and that hierarchy must culminate in the ultimate penalty if criminals and potential criminals are to believe that crime will be punished. When punishment is made less severe and less certain -- as it was for a long time after World War II -- crime flourishes and law-abiding citizens become less secure in their lives and property."

Paper: "From Dayton to Dover"

A thorough summary of the history of education-related court cases involving the teaching of evolution and creationism in public schools:

• Radan, Peter, "From Dayton to Dover: The Legacy of the Scopes Trial" (September 2007). Macquarie Law Working Paper No. 2007-6 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1012221

HERE is the download link. The paper explores the cultural backdrop against which the Scopes trial played out, including important immigrational considerations that are often neglected in such analyses. It is both a legal commentary and a philosophical one.

God Finally Talks

Everyone has heard by now of Ernie Chambers' attempt to sue God. This morning I read that God was granted immunity from the suit by the Douglas County District Court and that the Almighty had a message:

It adds that blaming God for human oppression and suffering misses an important point.

"I created man and woman with free will and next to the promise of immortal life, free will is my greatest gift to you," according to the response, as read by Friend.

Oh come on, God, that canard doesn't hold up to logical analysis.

1) The free will theodicy fails under the analysis of making "freedom" an unqualified, universal highest good and goal, unconditioned by its consequences:

If you really believe that it is better to honor someone's freedom to do as they wish than to restrict that freedom when it causes harm, then you would committed to having to introduce, at every opportunity, the option to do wrong, since this represents free will, no matter the consequences. Thus, the next time your toddler asks for scissors or a knife or a gun, if you deny her, you are not being God-like and giving her unconditional freedom. That's a retarded claim, isn't it?

Also, the capacity for humans to act out their will/intentions must be separated out from the will/intent itself. The rapist who waits for a jogger in the park will only succeed if the contingencies, such as when a jogger decides to go jogging, whether she is carrying pepper spray, whether she has taken self-defense classes, whether a cop goes by at the same time...etc., etc., etc., are all correctly in place. God is supposed to be in control of these contingencies that allow evil to actually occur.

Also, why would one person's will be granted, while both another person's and God's own wills are overturned?

2) The free will theodicy fails under the burden of natural, impersonal evils:

No one wills for a tsunami to wipe out 200,000 people in Indonesia. No one wills for AIDS to eradicate millions of human beings and orphan millions more. No one wills for natural disasters and natural evils at all...except the one in control of Nature, apparently...

Quit fooling around and just admit you don't exist, God! :)

In related news, please explain to me, someone, anyone, how your 10 Commandments form the basis of our Constitutional Repupublic and its laws? Go down the list of the Bill of Rights and you find direct conflicts between the 10C and the 10A (amendments). It takes a mental contortionist to hold to the otherwise. Our laws are in no wise based on the ancient Jewish laws, and societies had laws against murder and theft and perjury long before (and long after) the Jews did.

One of the major reasons we should oppose the death penalty

From the NYT Select: (read it free with a .edu email)

In April, Jerry Miller, an Illinois man who served 24 years for a rape he did not commit, became the 200th American prisoner cleared by DNA evidence. His case, like the 199 others, represented a catastrophic failure of the criminal justice system.
...
Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false — yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice.

And people wonder why I'm against the death penalty...

So Depressing

So sad to read about Hein v. FFRF.

SCOTUS is just what the theocrats had wet dreams it would be -- completely unmoved by the idea that the Executive Branch using tax money to further religion is unconstitutional.

Taxpayers, he said, "set out a parade of horribles that they claim could occur" by allowing such faith-based funding to continue, suggesting the federal government could build a national house of worship, or buy Jewish Stars of David and distribute them to public employees.

"Of course none of these things has happened," said Alito, and "in the unlikely event that any of these executive actions did take place, Congress could quickly step in."

*sigh*

Things very similar to this have happened -- the government funds appropriated for "abstinence-based sex ed" have been used to promote religious ideology over scientific fact at the expense of the health of millions of people. The exponential rise of AIDS in Africa can rightly be framed as a serious implication of such policies, in concert with Vatican dogma against condom usage.

Alito is the author of the unitary executive legal theory which all but confers dictatorial powers to the President, which he has cited numerous times in his usage of "signing statements" to bypass him having to actually obey the law. This should come with little surprise. Everyone knew that Kennedy was the swing vote.
________________
Technorati tags: God, Religion, Church-state, Politics

Studies on the death penalty

There are subtleties and intricacies involved in every intellectual debate. In the debate over death penalty, there are moral, financial, legal and empirical concerns. We must consider whether it is morally correct to kill people for crimes committed, whether it is cost-efficient, legally sound (this would include the ability to eradicate killing innocent people), and whether it has the intended effect, if any, to deter crime or otherwise improve society.

I will stake out at the fore that I am against the death penalty.

It seems that those who argue that it deters crime rely almost entirely upon econometric analyses in which questionable "correcting variables" are introduced and regressions are done that can always be likened to "fitting the data to the presupposed conclusion", or,

Statistician Francis Anscombe (1973) demonstrated how bizarre the Flatland assumption can be. He plotted four graphs that have become known as Anscombe’s Quartet. Each of the graphs shows the relationship between two variables. The graphs are very different, but for a resident of Flatland they are all the same. If we approximate them with a straight line (following a “linear regression equation”) the lines are all the same (figure 2). Only the first of Anscombe’s four graphs is a reasonable candidate for a linear regression analysis, because a straight line is a reasonable approximation for the underlying pattern.

The data on capital punishment and homicide, when plotted in figure 3, look a lot like Anscombe’s fourth quartet. Most of the states had no executions at all. One state, Texas, accounts for forty of the eighty-five executions in the year shown (the patterns for other years are quite similar). An exceptional case or “outlier” of this dimension completely dominates a multiple regression analysis. Any regression study will be primarily a comparison of Texas with everywhere else. Multiple regression is simply inappropriate with this data, no matter how hard the analyst tries to force the data into a linear pattern.

Unfortunately, econometricians continue to use multiple regression on capital punishment data and to generate results that are cited in Congressional hearings. In recent examples, Mocan and Gittings (2001) concluded that each execution decreases the number of homicides by five or six while Dezhbaksh, Rubin, and Shepherd (2002) argued that each execution deters eighteen murders. Cloninger and Marchesini (2001) published a study finding that the Texas moratorium from March 1996 to April 1997 increased homicide rates, even though no increase can be seen in the graph (figure 1). The moratorium simply increased homicide in comparison to what their econometric model said it would have otherwise been. Of all the econometric myths, the wildest is this: We know what would have been.

This is from a professor of sociology at Rutgers, one who, I'm sure, is familiar with statistical analyses. But he dismisses the sorts of analyses done which point to a deterrent effect because he believes that there are overwhelming evidences that there simply is no such thing. He believes that the regression analyses which purport to show an effect of this sort are "rigged" by the variables introduced by the analyst.

Since this is outside my area of expertise, I will simply cite some references below. The only papers I could find purporting support for a deterrent effect were econometric in nature. All of the sociological studies I found were pro-abolitionist.

One rather interesting factoid I found while searching for papers was a study done in the Netherlands in 2003 which found that about 35% of the citizens there disagreed with the country's abolitionist stance. They found that the 35% was largely comprised of the young and the uneducated, and blame attitudes of dissatisfaction with the judicial system on support of the death penalty. (DOI):

It is shown that support can be modeled quite well, partly in terms of general attitudes to criminal justice, partly in terms of political and sociodemographic parameters. Within the criminal justice attitudes complex, more support is found among those endorsing harsh treatment of offenders, those willing to grant far-reaching powers to justice authorities, those believing that the government is not delivering on the topic of crime fighting, and those who are concerned about the level of crime. Within the political context, more support is enlisted among people who abstain from voting and those who vote at either extreme of the political spectrum as opposed to central parties' supporters. In sociodemographic segments it is the younger and poorly educated who are the strongest supporters of capital punishment. It is suggested that endorsing capital punishment can be better understood as an expressive act, displaying dissatisfaction with judicial and political elites in the country.

It sounds like the more willing you are to give up liberties in favor of security, the more likely you are to favor the death penalty. A telling, and unsurprising, indicator of underlying attitudes. If you're willing to give up your own liberties, it is unsurprising you're willing to throw another's' life under the bus as well. I've had my say...read the below papers for a good idea of where current research stands.

PRO-Abolition:

1. ...THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the American Psychological Association: Calls upon each jurisdiction in the United States that imposes capital punishment not to carry out the death penalty until the jurisdiction implements policies and procedures that can be shown through psychological and other social science research to ameliorate the deficiencies identified above.
2. "Since 1973, over 120 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. (Staff Report, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil & Constitutional Rights, Oct. 1993, with updates from DPIC). In 2000, 8 inmates were freed from death row and exonerated; in 2001 – 2002, another 9 were freed; and in 2003, 12 were exonerated. In 2004, there were 6 exonerations." (Death Penalty Info)
3. "Consistent with previous years, the 2004 FBI Uniform Crime Report showed that the South had the highest murder rate. The South accounts for over 80% of executions. The Northeast, which has less than 1% of all executions, again had the lowest murder rate." (Death Penalty Info)
4. "According to a survey of the former and present presidents of the country's top academic criminological societies, 84% of these experts rejected the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. (Radelet & Akers, 1996)" (Death Penalty Info)

1) Deterrence and the Death Penalty: The Views of the Experts
Michael L. Radelet, Ronald L. Akers
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-), Vol. 87, No. 1 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 1-16
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1143970 FULL-TEXT (.pdf)

2) Capital Punishment and Homicide: Sociological Realities and Econometric Illusions
Ted Goertzel, Ph.D. Sociology Department -- Rutgers U
http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-07/capital-punishment.html FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)

3) The Changing Nature of Death Penalty Debates
Michael L. Radelet; Marian J. Borg
Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26. (2000), pp. 43-61.
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.43 FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)
excerpt -- "...Overall, the vast majority of deterrence studies have failed to support the hypothesis..."

PRO-Death Penalty:

4) Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect? New Evidence from Postmoratorium Panel Data
Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul H. Rubin and Joanna M. Shepherd
American Law and Economics Review V5 N2 2003 (344-376)
http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/2/344 FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)

5) The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Evidence from a "Judicial Experiment"
Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Joanna M. Shepherd
Economic Inquiry 2006 44(3):512-535; doi:10.1093/ei/cbj032
http://ei.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/44/3/512 FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)

6) Does Capital Punishment Deter Homicide?
[A Response to (2) above]
http://libertycorner.blogspot.com/2004/10/does-capital-punishment-deter-homicide.html
excerpt -- "...Now, I must say that I don't care whether or not capital punishment deters homicide. Capital punishment is the capstone of a system of justice that used to work quite well in this country because it was certain and harsh. There must be a hierarchy of certain penalties for crime, and that hierarchy must culminate in the ultimate penalty if criminals and potential criminals are to believe that crime will be punished. When punishment is made less severe and less certain -- as it was for a long time after World War II -- crime flourishes and law-abiding citizens become less secure in their lives and property."
________________
Technorati tags: Religion, Politics

Liberty Counsel Moves to Dismiss Case Against Dixie County: No Plaintiffs Named

Things look a little dim for the ACLU's case to remove the infamous Decalogue of Dixie County. You must have standing to sue. Once they have it, things will be dim for Dixie.

I talked with Mathew D. Staver, President and General Counsel for Liberty Counsel, on the phone a few days ago. He told me that the ACLU had no named plaintiffs in the case, as I had previously hoped. I thought that the ACLU had filed an order to keep the names of the plaintiffs out of the public record. In talking with Mathew [yes, just one "t"], he informed me that, because they had full discovery, he would know if that was the case -- and that it wasn't.

Therefore, the Liberty Counsel has filed a motion to dismiss the case against Dixie County. I am betting it will be dismissed because there are no plaintiffs.

Keep in mind what this doesn't mean: that the county will win if and when plaintiffs do file suit. Quite the opposite, in fact. Once the ACLU or FFRF finally have some plaintiffs, the county will lose, and lose soundly, even though their attorneys feel emboldened about their win in the Eighth Circuit. This monument has an explicit endorsement of religion which no other monument, ever, has had ("Love God and Keep His Commandments"), and our Eleventh Circuit already has a ruling on the books for stare decisis, one with which we're all familiar (Roy Moore's case).

The Liberty Counsel won't pay the plaintiff's legal fees, and the county will waste money that should and could go to doing something real and tangible -- like educating its schoolchildren, repairing roads, or buying the impoverished food and shelter. It makes me nauseated. Keep in mind that the county's liability insurance carrier dropped them like a hot potato, and so they will bear the brunt of the costs whenever there is a plaintiff with standing:

The Board voted unanimously to let Liberty Counsel represent the county in the lawsuit filed by the ACL. The ACLU filed the lawsuit in an attempt to have the Ten Commandments monument moved from the courthouse steps. County Attorney Leenette McMillan informed the Board that by choosing Liberty Counsel to represent the county in the lawsuit, the county will not be covered by its existing liability company. The Board chose Liberty Counsel because of the firm’s expertise in this type of lawsuit. Liberty Counsel has agreed to represent the county free of charge. (source) [bold emphasis mine]

I hope someone comes forward and is willing to be named as plaintiff. I really, really hope so.

My interview on FauxNews can be watched here, my detailed analysis of the legal issues can be found here, and everything I've written on this situation, including extensive local media coverage, here.

1. Gainesville Sun -- 11/28
2. Dixie County Advocate -- 11/30
3. Alligator -- 11/30
4. Alligator -- 12/1 (editorial)
5. FFRF Press Release -- 12/1
6. Gainesville Sun -- 12/02
7. 3 Letters to the Editor at the Sun -- pro, pro, con (12/2)
8. Dixie County Advocate -- 12/7
9. 2 More Letters to the Editor at the Sun -- pro (12/12), con (12/17)
10. St. Petersburg Times -- 1/3/07
11. St. Petersburg Times -- letter (con) 1/13/07 (4th letter down; response to 1/3/07 article above)
    
12. Gainesville Sun -- 2/7
13. ACLU News Release -- 2/7
    
14. Reuters (Miami) -- 2/7
    
15. Gainesville Sun -- 2/8
16. St. Petersburg Times -- 2/8
17. Alligator (LTE): -- 2-9 (con), (I wrote this one, see more HERE)
18. Dixie County Advocate -- 2/15
19. Gainesville Sun (LTE) -- 2/17 (pro)
20. Dixie County Advocate (LTE) -- 2/24 (con)
21. Liberty Counsel -- 3/8
22. Florida Humanists Association -- 4/9, (also here and here)

________________
Technorati tags: Religion, Church-state, Politics

Balkin on Hein v. FFRF

Prof. Jack Balkin has an excellent commentary on the Hein v. FFRF case I mentioned as integral to the issue of bringing legal challenges against the federal government on Establishment grounds. Lawmemo sees a conservative victory, with the Court's majority denying standing to the FFRF. Also, from SCOTUSblog,

In today's New York Times, Linda Greenhouse has this recap of yesterday's argument in Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation; Robert Barnes of the Washington Post reports here; Karoun Demirjian has this article in the Chicago Tribune; and Tony Mauro reports here for the Legal Times at Law.com.

Dahlia Lithwick has this audio segment with Alex Chadwick on NPR's "Day to Day" and this article at Slate discussing the church-state separation case. At FindLaw, Rodger Citron has this essay on the case.

Here is a convenient link to do a blogsearch for more recent developments on Hein: search
________________
Technorati tags: Religion, Church-state

Legal Setback

The FFRF filed a suit last April against the Veterans Affairs for incorporating religious beliefs into their treatment of patients. The AP and Capital Times reported yesterday that a 7th District Court upheld the constitutionality of the practice. This is a real legal setback for separationists, and is rather disturbing to me as I read about the judge,

"He just didn't get it. Part of his decision stated that VA chaplains are there to bring healing through God's grace and he said it without putting it in quotes. Does his courtroom operate that way, too?" Gaylor said.

Read the decision here, and notice what she mentioned occurred twice -- on pgs. 13 and 26.

Check out Prof. Friedman's excellent coverage: 1/10/07 & 4/22/06
________________
Technorati tags: God, Religion, Church-state

Falwell Could Learn from The Grinch

From Dr. Seuss:

"Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store.
"Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!"

The Grinch figured it out, but Falwell apparently hasn't. To Falwell, and millions of other apparently-retarded Americans, Christmas must come from a store, from the mouths of its clerks, from the logos and ads they use, and the commercialism inherent in it all.

His Liberty Counsel (quite the oxymoron) has published a scathing exposé on an arbitrary list of retailers who are either "naughty" or "nice", depending upon their conformation to the 11th Commandment -- "thou shalt use 'Merry Christmas' in as gratuitous a fashion as possible".

I've been hearing on the Gainesville forums over and over and over how "we" (the Evil Atheist Conspiracy^®, of course) want to "take away" the "meaning" of Xmas. Hilarious. People like that have less appreciation of their own values, and less of an ability to apparently maintain them without social validation, than my beautiful dogs.

Perhaps the loss of Wally World just made me bitter, perhaps my festive indulgement in Christmas Holiday art didn't perk me up, and maybe legal clarity didn't uncloud my mind...

...or maybe I'm right: "culture warriors" Jerry Falwell, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are just fu*%tards with baaaa-ing sheep following him around mindlessly. PS: Don't go find out that FoxNews was selling "holiday ornaments" while they were fanning the flames under the asses of their sycophants in the "War on Xmas". See this and this.

(HT: UTI)
________________
Technorati tags: Xmas, Religion

The War on Xmas -- Legal Insight

From sarcasm and satire to esquire -- I found a paper (HT: RC) by Perry Dane on Christmas and government displays that is quite consonant with my own views, and explicates the precarious balance between anti-religious secularism and "true" neutral secularism in government endorsement:

When government privileges the so-called secular aspects of Christmas over the religious aspects, or when it detaches the cultural accessories of Christmas from their religious roots, it is, in effect, taking the anti-religious side in the continuing struggle over the meaning of Christmas as a cultural resource. And it is in that sense establishing, not the neutral secularism that is built into our constitutional dispensation, but an anti-religious secularism that is foreign to that dispensation. (p.8, Dane, Perry, "Christmas" (November 2006). Available at SSRN)

His argument is, in short, that using government property to display Xmas trees and Santas, absent their religious context, is deleterious to our establishment-centered Constitutional provisions; the clearest, but least popular, solution is to not use government property to celebrate or endorse any aspect of any holidays. He recognizes that accomodationist positions of embracing pluralism won't work, and would be likely to cause more legal issues than they solve. And he admits that the austerity here isn't attractive, but it is, incontrovertibly, a true legal solution, and perhaps the only workable one.
________________
Technorati tags: God, Religion, Church-state

Last Dance with Mary Jane

I was reading about Pat Robertson's financial woes in Radar Online, and noticed another article, Stoners vs. Six-Year-Olds: A Radar Investigation. In the (hilarious) article, two stoner adults were pitted against two (hopefully sober) young children and multiple species of monkeys. The results? The stoners failed versus kids and beasts. After reading it, though, it piqued my interest into the scientific evidence for long-term brain effects associated with marijuana use. No one disputes the acute effects, but are they reversed over time with abstinence? Apparently not, it turns out...

I still have to say that I can see no solid reasoning as to why alcohol is legal but marijuana is not. Although I do not now smoke [I promise], I support the legalization of marijuana. It is a well-known fact that long-term alcohol use can lead to as many, if not more, health defects as pot. Also, I've never heard of a "pot-related traffic accident". I used to smoke, and never had any problems operating any kind of machinery. In general, most people suspect that the government just won't legalize it because they can't tax it as effectively as they'd like. But this isn't an issue with which I'm intimately familiar, so I'll refer readers to NORML, MLO, Balanced Politics, SoYouWanna, LegalizationofMarijuana.com, CNN's special index, Wikipedia and Leighann Hedman's article.

The following is a long compilation of articles I found using simple PubMed searches. The results, summarized, are that long-term users of marijuana, even after stretches of abstinence as long as a month, show significant brain function impairment and brain structure alteration. Visit the articles for more details:

Effects of frequent marijuana use on memory-related regional cerebral blood flow

Robert I. Block, Daniel S. O'Leary, Richard D. Hichwa, Jean C. Augustinack, Laura L. Boles Ponto, M. M. Ghoneim, Stephan Arndt, Richard R. Hurtig, G. Leonard Watkins, James A. Hall et al.
Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, Volume 72, Issues 1-2, May 2002, Pages 237-250
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0091-3057(01)00771-7

It is uncertain whether frequent marijuana use adversely affects human brain function. Using positron emission tomography (PET), memory-related regional cerebral blood flow was compared in frequent marijuana users and nonusing control subjects after 26+ h of monitored abstention. Memory-related blood flow in marijuana users, relative to control subjects, showed decreases in prefrontal cortex, increases in memory-relevant regions of cerebellum, and altered lateralization in hippocampus. Marijuana users differed most in brain activity related to episodic memory encoding. In learning a word list to criterion over multiple trials, marijuana users, relative to control subjects, required means of 2.7 more presentations during initial learning and 3.1 more presentations during subsequent relearning. In single-trial recall, marijuana users appeared to rely more on short-term memory, recalling 23% more than control subjects from the end of a list, but 19% less from the middle. These findings indicate altered memory-related brain function in marijuana users

Effects of marijuana on neurophysiological signals of working and episodic memory.

Ilan AB, Smith ME, Gevins A. San Francisco Brain Research Institute & SAM Technology, 425 Bush Street, San Francisco, CA 94108, USA. aaron@eeg.com
Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2004 Nov;176(2):214-22. Epub 2004 May 7.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00213-004-1868-9
http://www.springerlink.com/content/b1x80ux5k8g3mh7x/

The primary psychoactive constituent of marijuana, Delta9-THC, activates cannabinoid receptors, which are especially abundant in the frontal cortex and hippocampus. Acute marijuana smoking can disrupt working memory (WM) and episodic memory (EM) functions that are known to rely on these regions. However, the effects of marijuana on the brain activity accompanying such cognitive processes remain largely unexplored. OBJECTIVES: To examine such effects on performance and neurophysiological signals of these functions, EEG recordings were obtained from ten subjects (5M, 5F) performing cognitive tasks before and after smoking marijuana (3.45% Delta9-THC) or a placebo. WM was assessed with a spatial N-back task, and EM was evaluated with a test requiring recognition of words after a 5-10 min delay between study and test. RESULTS: Marijuana increased heart rate and decreased global theta band EEG power, consistent with increased autonomic arousal. Responses in the WM task were slower and less accurate after smoking marijuana, accompanied by reduced alpha band EEG reactivity in response to increased task difficulty. In the EM task, marijuana was associated with an increased tendency to erroneously identify distracter words as having been previously studied. In both tasks, marijuana attenuated stimulus-locked event-related potentials (ERPs). CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that marijuana disrupted both sustained and transient attention processes resulting in impaired memory task performance. In subjects most affected by marijuana a pronounced ERP difference between previously studied words and new distracter words was also reduced, suggesting disruption of neural mechanisms underlying memory for recent study episodes.

Cerebrovascular perfusion in marijuana users during a month of monitored abstinence

Ronald I. Herning, PhD, Warren E. Better, MS, Kimberly Tate, BS and Jean L. Cadet, MD
NEUROLOGY 2005;64:488-493
© 2005 American Academy of Neurology
http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/64/3/488

Objective: To determine possible effects of prolonged marijuana use on the cerebrovascular system during a month of monitored abstinence and to assess how the intensity of current use might have influenced cerebrovascular perfusion in these marijuana users.
Method: The authors recorded blood flow velocity in the anterior and middle cerebral arteries using transcranial Doppler sonography in three groups of marijuana users who differed in the intensity of recent use (light: n = 11; moderate: n = 23; and heavy: n = 20) and in control subjects (n = 18) to assess the nature and duration of any potential abnormalities. Blood flow velocity was recorded within 3 days of admission and 28 to 30 days of monitored abstinence on an inpatient research unit in order to evaluate subacute effects of the drug and any abstinence-generated changes.
Results: Pulsatility index, a measure of cerebrovascular resistance, and systolic velocity were significantly increased in the marijuana users vs control subjects. These increases persisted in the heavy marijuana users after a month of monitored abstinence.
Conclusions: Chronic marijuana use is associated with increased cerebrovascular resistance through changes mediated, in part, in blood vessels or in the brain parenchyma. These findings might provide a partial explanation for the cognitive deficits observed in a similar group of marijuana users.

Abnormal brain activity in prefrontal brain regions in abstinent marijuana users

Dana A. Eldretha, John A. Matochikc, Jean L. Cadetd and Karen I. Bollaa,
NeuroImage Volume 23, Issue 3 , November 2004, Pages 914-920
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.07.032

We used PET 15O and a modified version of the Stroop task to determine if 25-day abstinent heavy marijuana (MJ) users have persistent deficits in executive cognitive functioning (ECF) and brain activity. Performance on a modified version of the Stroop task and brain activity was compared between 25-day abstinent, heavy marijuana users (n = 11), and a matched comparison group (n = 11). The 25-day abstinent marijuana users showed no deficits in performance on the modified version of the Stroop task when compared to the comparison group. Despite the lack of performance differences, the marijuana users showed hypoactivity in the left perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the left lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and hyperactivity in the hippocampus bilaterally, when compared to the comparison group. These results suggest that marijuana users display persistent metabolic alterations in brain regions responsible for ECF. It may be that marijuana users recruit an alternative neural network as a compensatory mechanism during performance on a modified version of the Stroop task. These differences in brain activity may be a common denominator in the evolution of maladaptive behaviors such as substance abuse and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

Neural substrates of faulty decision-making in abstinent marijuana users

Karen I. Bollaa, b, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, Dana A. Eldretha, c, John A. Matochikd and Jean L. Cadete
NeuroImage Volume 26, Issue 2 , June 2005, Pages 480-492
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.02.012

Persistent dose-related cognitive decrements have been reported in 28-day abstinent heavy marijuana (MJ) users. However, the neural substrates of these decrements in cognitive performance are not known. This study aimed to determine if 25-day abstinent MJ users show persistent dose-related alterations in performance and brain activity using PET H215O during the Iowa Gambling Task-IGT (a decision-making task). Eleven heavy MJ users and 11 non-drug users participated. The MJ group resided in an inpatient research unit at the NIH/NIDA-IRP for 25 days prior to testing to ensure abstinence. A dose-related association was found between increased MJ use and lower IGT performance and alterations in brain activity. The MJ group showed greater activation in the left cerebellum and less activation in the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) than the Control group. When the MJ group was divided into Moderate (8–35 joints/week) and Heavy users (53–84 joints/week), the Heavy MJ group showed less activation in the left medial OFC and greater activation in the left cerebellum than the Moderate group. However, brain activity and task performance were similar between the Moderate MJ users and the Control group, suggesting a “threshold effect”. These preliminary findings indicate that very heavy users of MJ have persistent decision-making deficits and alterations in brain activity. Specifically, the Heavy MJ users may focus on only the immediate reinforcing aspects of a situation (i.e., getting high) while ignoring the negative consequences. Thus, faulty decision-making could make an individual more prone to addictive behavior and more resistant to treatment. Finally, it is unclear if these neurologic findings will become progressively worse with continued heavy MJ use or if they will resolve with abstinence from MJ use.

Neurovascular Deficits in Cocaine Abusers

Ronald I Herning Ph.D, Deborah E King MS, Warren E Better MS and Jean L Cadet MD
Neuropsychopharmacology (1999) 21
http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v21/n1/abs/1395324a.html

The nature of the neurological and cerebrovascular deficits in cocaine abusers and whether they persist in abstinence is unclear. Blood flow velocity of the anterior and middle cerebral arteries was measured by transcranial Doppler sonography in cocaine abusers (n = 50) and control subjects (n = 25). Blood flow velocity was measured within 3 days and again after about 28 days after being admitted to an inpatient research ward to determine whether blood flow velocity improved during monitored abstinence conditions. The mean, systolic, and diastolic velocities as well as the pulsatility index in middle and anterior cerebral arteries significantly differed between controls and cocaine abusers (p < .05). Cerebrovascular resistance is increased in cocaine abusers and the increase persists for over a month of abstinence. Further research is needed to determine whether cerebrovascular resistance can be improved by pharmacological manipulations and whether improved blood flow relates to improved treatment outcome. Reflection Impulsivity in Current and Former Substance Users.

L. Clark, T. Robbins, K. Ersche, B. Sahakian
Biological Psychiatry, Volume 60, Issue 5, Pages 515-522
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.11.007

Background: Chronic drug use is associated with increased impulsivity, risky decision making, and impaired behavioral control, but the underlying mechanisms of this neurocognitive profile remain unclear. We investigated impulsive responding in the context of decision making, using a novel behavioral measure of reflection impulsivity: the tendency to gather and evaluate information before making a decision.
Methods: The Information Sampling Task was administered to current substance users dependent on amphetamines (n = 24) or opiates (n = 40), former users of amphetamines or opiates abstinent for at least 1 year (n = 24), and non–drug-using control subjects (n = 26).
Results: Current users of amphetamines and opiates sampled less information than control subjects and responded at a lower probability of making a correct response. Amphetamine- and opiate-dependent subjects did not differ. Reduced reflection was also apparent in the former substance users, who did not differ from the current users. Questionnaire ratings of impulsivity (on the Barratt Impulsivity Scale, version 11) were also inflated in three groups of substance users but were not significantly correlated with performance on the behavioral task.
Conclusions: Reduced reflection is suggested to represent a cognitive marker for substance dependence that does not recover with prolonged abstinence and is associated with multiple drugs of abuse.

Challenges of marijuana research

Ponto, L.L.B.
Brain.2006; 129: 1081-1083
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brain/awl092

The use of any drug ideally represents a decision based on objective, scientifically based cost–benefit analyses that factor in both the short and long-term effects of that exposure. Pharmacological, toxicological, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic investigations that are deemed to be essential for the rational use of any therapeutic agent are therefore part of the usual drug approval process. With regard to marijuana, sociopolitical factors have intervened in this scientific process. Three major lay perspectives appear to dominate the societal view of marijuana—the ‘reefer madness’ camp holding the view that there are no redeeming attributes to the ‘evil weed’, the ‘innocuous’ camp who consider it to be a harmless recreational substance and the ‘medical marijuana’ camp that believes marijuana to be a panacea for a multitude of aches, pains and chronic diseases with, of course, every shade of opinion in-between. On the scientific front, three trends preface nearly every recent journal article...
[you'll want to check this one out full-text, so just pull it up on-campus, and save it to the computer in .pdf format, and email it to yourself]

Neurological assessments of marijuana users.

Cadet JL, Bolla K, Herning RI.
Methods Mol Med. 2006;123:255-68
Here

This chapter summarizes the neurological approaches used to assess the potential long-term effects of drugs on the nervous system of drug abusers. These include the use of neuropsychological assessments, transcranial Doppler (TCD) sonography, and electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings. Neuropsychological procedures are used in an effort to provide an unbiased estimate of the individual's cognitive capacity, and included tests of language skills, attention, memory, and motor skills. TCD allows for the measurements of blood flow in the anterior cerebral and middle cerebral arteries, which supply blood to the cortex. An EEG recording was included in our assessment on marijuana abusers using a sound-attenuated, electronically shielded chamber. These neurological approaches have allowed the detection of various neurological and neurovascular deficits that are associated with the abuse of marijuana.

Marijuana smoking and head and neck cancer

M Hashibe, DE Ford, and ZF Zhang
The Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 2002; 42:103-107
http://jcp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/11_suppl/103S

A recent epidemiological study showed that marijuana smoking was associated with an increased risk of head and neck cancer. Among high school students and young adults, the prevalence of marijuana use was on the rise in the 1990s, with a simultaneous decline in the perception that marijuana use is harmful. It will be a major public health challenge to make people aware of the harmful effects of marijuana smoking, when some people view it as the illicit drug with the least risk. The carcinogenicity of delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is not clear, but according to laboratory studies, it appears to have antitumor properties such as apoptosis as well as tumor-promoting properties such as limiting immune function and increasing reactive oxygen species. Marijuana tar contains similar carcinogens to tar from tobacco cigarettes, but each marijuana cigarette maybe more harmful than a tobacco cigarette since more tar is inhaled and retained when smoking marijuana. More molecular alterations have been observed in bronchial mucosa specimens of marijuana smokers compared to nonsmokers. Field cancerization may be occurring on the bronchial epithelium due to marijuana smoking exposure. Several case studies were suggestive of an association of marijuana smoking with head and neck cancers and oral lesions. However, in a cohort study with 8 years of follow-up, marijuana use was not associated with increased risks of all cancers or smoking-related cancers. Further epidemiological studies are necessary to confirm the association of marijuana smoking with head and neck cancers and to examine marijuana smoking as a risk factor for lung cancer. It will also be of interest to examine potential field cancerization of the upper aerodigestive tract by marijuana and to explore marijuana as a risk factor for oral premalignant lesions.

Cardiovascular consequences of marijuana use

S Sidney
The Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 2002; 42:64-70
http://jcp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/11_suppl/64S

This review describes what is known about effects of marijuana and cannabinoids in relation to human physiological and disease outcomes. The acute physiological effects of marijuana include a substantial dose-dependent increase in heart rate, generally associated with a mild increase in blood pressure. Orthostatic hypotension may occur acutely as a result of decreased vascular resistance. Smoking marijuana decreases exercise test duration in maximal exercise tests, increases the heart rate at submaximal levels of exercise. Tolerance develops to the acute effects of marijuana smoking and delta9-tetrahydrocannibol (THC) over several days to a few weeks. The cardiovascular responses that occur in response to THC are mediated by the autonomic nervous system, with recent findings also demonstrating that the human cannabinoid receptor system plays a role in regulating the cardiovascular response. Although several mechanisms exist by which marijuana use might contribute to the development of chronic cardiovascular conditions or acutely trigger cardiovascular events, there are few data regarding marijuana/THC use and cardiovascular disease outcomes. A large cohort study showed no association of marijuana use with cardiovascular disease hospitalization or mortality. However, acute effects of marijuana use include a decrease of the time until the onset of chest pain in patients with angina pectoris; one study has shown that marijuana may trigger the onset of myocardial infarction. Patients who have coronary heart disease or are at high risk for the development of CHD should be cautioned about the potential hazards of marijuana use as a precipitant for clinical events. Research directions might include more studies of cardiovascular disease outcomes and relationships of marijuana with cardiovascular risk factors, studies of metabolic and physiologic effects of chronic marijuana use that may affect cardiovascular disease risk, increased understanding of the role of the cannabinoid receptor system in cardiovascular regulation, and studies to determine if there is a therapeutic role for cannabinoids in blood pressure control or for neuroprotection after stroke.

Clinical consequences of marijuana

JH Khalsa, S Genser, H Francis, and B Martin
The Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 2002; 42:7-10
http://jcp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/11_suppl/7S

As documented in national surveys, for the past several years, marijuana has been the most commonly abused drug in the United States, with approximately 6% of the population 12 years and older having used the drug in the month prior to interview. The use of marijuana is not without significant health hazards. Marijuana is associated with effects on almost every organ system in the body, ranging from the central nervous system to the cardiovascular, endocrine, respiratory/pulmonary, and immune systems. Research presented in this special supplement will show that in addition to marijuana abuse/dependence, marijuana use is associated in some studies with impairment of cognitive function in the young and old, fetal and developmental consequences, cardiovascular effects (heart rate and blood pressure changes), respiratory/pulmonary complications such as chronic cough and emphysema, impaired immune function leading to vulnerability to and increased infections, and the risk of developing head, neck, and/or lung cancer. In general, acute effects are better studied than those of chronic use, and more studies are needed that focus on disentangling effects of marijuana from those of other drugs and adverse environmental conditions.

The residual cognitive effects of heavy marijuana use in college students.

Pope HG Jr, Yurgelun-Todd D.
JAMA. 1996 Feb 21;275(7):521-7.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/275/7/521

OBJECTIVE: To assess whether frequent marijuana use is associated with residual neuropsychological effects. DESIGN: Single-blind comparison of regular users vs infrequent users of marijuana. PARTICIPANTS: Two samples of college undergraduates: 65 heavy users, who had smoked marijuana a median of 29 days in the last 30 days (range, 22 to 30 days) and who also displayed cannabinoids in their urine, and 64 light users, who had smoked a median of 1 day in the last 30 days (range, 0 to 9 days) and who displayed no urinary cannabinoids. INTERVENTION: Subjects arrived at 2 PM on day 1 of their study visit, then remained at our center overnight under supervision. Neuropsychological tests were administered to all subjects starting at 9 AM on day 2. Thus, all subjects were abstinent from marijuana and other drugs for a minimum of 19 hours before testing. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Subjects received a battery of standard neuropsychological tests to assess general intellectual functioning, abstraction ability, sustained attention, verbal fluency, and ability to learn and recall new verbal and visuospatial information. RESULTS: Heavy users displayed significantly greater impairment than light users on attention/executive functions, as evidenced particularly by greater perseverations on card sorting and reduced learning of word lists. These differences remained after controlling for potential confounding variables, such as estimated levels of premorbid cognitive functioning, and for use of alcohol and other substances in the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: Heavy marijuana use is associated with residual neuropsychological effects even after a day of supervised abstinence from the drug. However, the question remains open as to whether this impairment is due to a residue of drug in the brain, a withdrawal effect from the drug, or a frank neurotoxic effect of the drug.

Neuropsychological deficits in long-term frequent cannabis users

Lambros Messinis, PhD, Anthoula Kyprianidou, BSc, Sonia Malefaki, PhD and Panagiotis Papathanasopoulos, MD, PhD
NEUROLOGY 2006;66:737-739
http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/66/5/737

The authors examined neuropsychological functioning in 20 long-term (LT), 20 shorter term (ST) heavy frequent cannabis users, and 24 controls after abstinence for ≥24 hours prior to testing. LT users performed significantly worse on verbal memory and psychomotor speed. LT and ST users had a higher proportion of deficits on verbal fluency, verbal memory, attention, and psychomotor speed. Specific cognitive domains appear to deteriorate with increasing years of heavy frequent cannabis use.

Repeated cannabinoid exposure during perinatal, adolescent or early adult ages produces similar longlasting deficits in object recognition and reduced social interaction in rats

Melanie O'Shea, Iain S. McGregor, Paul E. Mallet
Journal of Psychopharmacology, Vol. 20, No. 5, 611-621 (2006)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0269881106065188

There is mounting evidence that chronic cannabis use might result in lasting neurobehavioural changes, although it remains unclear whether vulnerability diminishes with age. The current study compared the effects of cannabinoid exposure at three developmental periods on subsequent measures of memory and anxiety. Male rats aged 4 days (perinatal), 30 days (adolescent) and 56 days (young adult) were injected with vehicle or incremental doses of the cannabinoid receptor agonist CP 55940, daily for 21 consecutive days (0.15, 0.20 or 0.30mg/kg for 7 days per dose, respectively). Following a 28-day drug-free period, working memory was assessed in an object recognition task. One week later, social anxiety was assessed in a social interaction test. Two days later, generalized anxiety was assessed in an emergence test. Results revealed that CP 55940 impaired working memory and social interaction similarly at all three ages. CP 55940 had no effects in five of six emergence test measures, but a modest but significant reduction in anxiety was noted in one measure following adolescent exposure. We conclude that chronic cannabinoid exposure leads to long-term memory impairments and increased anxiety, irrespective of the age at which drug exposure occurrs.

Cannabis, Cognition, and Residual Confounding

Harrison G. Pope, Jr, MD
JAMA. 2002;287:1172-1174.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/287/9/1172

In this issue of THE JOURNAL, Solowij and colleagues1 report a variety of neuropsychological deficits in long-term cannabis users who were tested a median of 17 hours after their last reported cannabis intake. Their findings of impairments in memory and attention are not surprising since several large and well-controlled studies have found similar deficits on neuropsychological tests administered to long-term cannabis users after 12 to 72 hours of abstinence.2-5 If these deficits are brief and reversible (ie, due to a residue of cannabinoids lingering in the brain or to withdrawal effects from abruptly stopping the drug), they might not be a serious threat. However, if these deficits are prolonged or irreversible (ie, due to neurotoxicity from years of cumulative cannabis exposure), they become a matter of grave concern. The findings of Solowij and colleagues favor the latter possibility in that longer-term...
[you'll want to check this one out full-text, so just pull it up on-campus, and save it to the computer in .pdf format, and email it to yourself]

Marijuana use is associated with a reorganized visual-attention network and cerebellar hypoactivation

L. Chang, R. Yakupov, C. Cloak and T. Ernst
Brain 2006 129(5):1096-1112;
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brain/awl064
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/129/5/1096

Attention and memory deficits have been reported in heavy marijuana users, but these effects may be reversible after prolonged abstinence. It remains unclear whether the reversibility of these cognitive deficits indicates that chronic marijuana use does not alter cortical networks, or that such changes occur but the brain adapts to the drug-induced changes. Blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) was performed in 24 chronic marijuana users (12 abstinent and 12 active) and 19 age-, sex- and education-matched control subjects during a set of visual-attention tasks with graded levels of difficulty. Neuropsychological tests were also administered on each subject. The two marijuana user groups showed no significant difference in usage pattern (frequency or duration of use, age of first use, cumulative joints used, averaged >2000 joints) or estimated cumulative lifetime exposure of {Delta}-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) (mean 168 ± 45 versus 244 ± 135 g). Despite similar task and cognitive test performance compared with control subjects, active and abstinent marijuana users showed decreased activation in the right prefrontal, medial and dorsal parietal, and medial cerebellar regions, but greater activation in various frontal, parietal and occipital brain regions during the visual-attention tasks (all with P ≤ 0.001, corrected, cluster level). However, the BOLD signals in the right frontal and medial cerebellar regions normalized with duration of abstinence in the abstinent users. Active marijuana users, with positive urine tests for THC, showed greater activation in the frontal and medial cerebellar regions than abstinent marijuana users and greater usage of the reserve network (regions with load effect), suggesting a neuroadaptive state. Both earlier age of first use and greater estimated cumulative dose of THC exposure were related to lower BOLD signals in the right prefrontal region and medial cerebellum. The altered BOLD activation pattern in the attention network and hypoactivation of the cerebellum suggest neuroadaptive processes or alteration of brain development in chronic marijuana users. These changes also may be related to marijuana-induced alteration in resting cerebral blood volume/flow or downregulation of cannabinoid (CB1) receptors. The greater activation in the active compared with abstinent marijuana users demonstrates a neuroadaptive state in the setting of active marijuana use, while the long-term chronic effect of marijuana on the altered brain network may be reversible with prolonged abstinence.

Cognitive Functioning of Long-term Heavy Cannabis Users Seeking Treatment

Nadia Solowij, PhD; Robert S. Stephens, PhD; Roger A. Roffman, DSW; Thomas Babor, PhD, MPH; Ronald Kadden, PhD; Michael Miller, PhD; Kenneth Christiansen, PsyD; Bonnie McRee, MPH; Janice Vendetti, MPH; for the Marijuana Treatment Project Research Group
JAMA. 2002;287:1123-1131.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/287/9/1123

Context: Cognitive impairments are associated with long-term cannabis use, but the parameters of use that contribute to impairments and the nature and endurance of cognitive dysfunction remain uncertain.
Objective: To examine the effects of duration of cannabis use on specific areas of cognitive functioning among users seeking treatment for cannabis dependence.
Design, Setting, and Participants: Multisite retrospective cross-sectional neuropsychological study conducted in the United States (Seattle, Wash; Farmington, Conn; and Miami, Fla) between 1997 and 2000 among 102 near-daily cannabis users (51 long-term users: mean, 23.9 years of use; 51 shorter-term users: mean, 10.2 years of use) compared with 33 nonuser controls.
Main Outcome Measures: Measures from 9 standard neuropsychological tests that assessed attention, memory, and executive functioning, and were administered prior to entry to a treatment program and following a median 17-hour abstinence.
Results: Long-term cannabis users performed significantly less well than shorter-term users and controls on tests of memory and attention. On the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, long-term users recalled significantly fewer words than either shorter-term users (P = .001) or controls (P = .005); there was no difference between shorter-term users and controls. Long-term users showed impaired learning (P = .007), retention (P = .003), and retrieval (P = .002) compared with controls. Both user groups performed poorly on a time estimation task (P<.001 vs controls). Performance measures often correlated significantly with the duration of cannabis use, being worse with increasing years of use, but were unrelated to withdrawal symptoms and persisted after controlling for recent cannabis use and other drug use. Conclusions: These results confirm that long-term heavy cannabis users show impairments in memory and attention that endure beyond the period of intoxication and worsen with increasing years of regular cannabis use.

I'm sending a link of these studies to all of the people I know who I suspect would have more than an academic and impersonal interest in the findings...mom, dad, the sister, Mr. John P. Mitchell, of 3011 W. Northbury Lane, 222-1144 [just a joke].
________________
Technorati tags: Marijuana