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At a recent backyard barbecue in Miami's Upper Eastside, a group of middle-age, middle-class folks tamely sipped berry cocktails and beers. Among them: a couple of lawyers, a couple of city administrators and an arts administrator. Somewhere between the skirt steak and the apple pie, somebody lit a joint and passed it around. Nobody blinked. Even in mainstream, white-collar settings, smoking marijuana can be commonplace and unremarkable, like having a little wine with dinner. Once a stamp of the arty, the marginal and the counterculture, today marijuana's popularity cuts across social boundaries. Yet several high-profile marijuana arrests have recently made...

Cannabis may be bad for the lungs, but the active ingredient in marijuana may help combat lung cancer, new research suggests. In lab and mouse studies, the compound, known as THC, cut lung tumor growth in half and helped prevent the cancer from spreading, says Anju Preet, PhD, a Harvard University researcher in Boston who tested the chemical. While a lot more work needs to be done, “the results suggest THC has therapeutic potential,” she tells WebMD. Moreover, other early research suggests the cannabis compound could help fight brain, prostate, and skin cancers as well, Preet says. The findings were...

The New Hampshire House voted Thursday to allow farmers to grow hemp - a close relative of marijuana - despite federal hurdles to planting the controversial crop. Supporters pointed out that hemp, which has a very low content of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, has unfairly been characterized as the same as marijuana. "You don't smoke hemp. A wheelbarrow full would only make you sick," insisted Hopkinton Democrat Derek Owen. "Hemp is one of the oldest and most useful and strongest natural plants known to man," he told the House. Peterborough Republican Andrew Peterson spoke briefly against the bill,...

Ten years ago, British scientist Jonathan Slack set off an international furor when he told a reporter that his lab had created a headless tadpole, and that it might be possible to do the same thing with human embryos. One critic called it “a modern monster story.” Another blasted it as “scientific fascism.” He was reviled in print from South Korea to Brazil. For Slack, the new director of the University of Minnesota’s Stem Cell Institute, it was a lesson he’ll never forget. As a scientist, he thought he was engaging in a hypothetical discussion. But he woke up as...

HONG KONG -- China's fastest-rising currency isn't the yuan. It's the QQ coin -- online play money created by marketers to sell such things as virtual flowers for instant-message buddies, cellphone ringtones and magical swords for online games. In recent weeks, the QQ coin's real-world value has risen as much as 70%. It's the most extreme case of a so-called virtual currency blurring the boundaries between the online and real worlds -- and challenging legal limits.

For the millions of Americans whose vision is slowly ebbing due to degenerative diseases of the eye, the lowly neural progenitor cell may be riding to the rescue. In a study in rats, neural progenitor cells derived from human fetal stem cells have been shown to protect the vision of animals with degenerative eye disease similar to the kinds of diseases that afflict humans. The new study appears today (March 28) in the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) One. The lead author of the study, University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher David Gamm, says the cells - formative brain cells that...

A WEEK ago Friday, moments before an opening-day showing of the movie “300” at Seattle’s Cinerama, a 20-something moviegoer rushed to the front of the theater, dropped his shoulders, curled his arms into a mock-Schwarzenegger pose and bellowed out a timeless remark of King Leonidas of Sparta that has in the last week become the catchphrase of the year: “Spartans! Tonight we dine in hell!” Groans, roars, macho hooting noises and sardonic applause rained down on him. The audience had been standing in line for an hour. Only a few of them were dressed as Greek hoplites. They were much...

A federal judge dismissed money laundering and tax charges against "Guru of Ganja" Ed Rosenthal on Wednesday, gutting the government's case by ruling the new charges amounted to vindictive prosecution. The government said the new charges it filed against Rosenthal in October resulted from their re-evaluation of the case, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco noted, but "it is apparent that it decided to re-evaluate its strategy in response to Rosenthal's (and his supporters') public criticism of the trial. "In other words, the government's deeds — and words — create the perception that it added the new charges...

Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Souder recently took to the airwaves to defend one of the Bush administrationÂ’s sacred cows: the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. If youÂ’ve had access to a television or a newspaper over the past few years, youÂ’re familiar with the federal ad campaign. ItÂ’s the one thatÂ’s spent over $2 billion since 1998 to produce public-service announcements implying that smoking pot supports al-Qaida and may make you pregnant, among other dubious anti-drug messages. So dubious, in fact, that the campaign has flopped miserably among its target audience. Of course, this fact matters not to the White...

<p>BREAKING NEWS -- Divided three-judge D.C. Circuit panel holds that the District of Columbia's gun control laws violate individuals' Second Amendment rights: You can access today's lengthy D.C. Circuit ruling at this link.</p> <p>To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Antifederalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment's civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.</p>

A proposal that once inspired fears and jokes about drug abuse -- legalizing the use of marijuana for medical reasons -- stands a good chance of passage in the Minnesota Legislature this year. Political support for that controversial step is coming from unlikely places. Advocates for a bill to allow seriously ill patients to use marijuana with their doctors' recommendation say that as many as half of the 49 Republicans in the House would support the measure in a floor vote. Former House Speaker Steve Sviggum, a Republican, is co-author of the medical marijuana bill and says he became a...

Medical marijuana advocates tried a new approach Wednesday in their tug-of-war with the federal government, filing suit under a law that requires the government to correct its own misstatements -- including, the advocates say, the assertion that marijuana has no medical value. "Citizens have a right to expect the government to use the best available information for policy decisions,'' said Alan Morrison, a Stanford Law School lecturer and an attorney in the lawsuit by Americans for Safe Access. The suit was filed in federal court in San Francisco under the Data Quality Act, a little-known statute signed by President Bush...

The cannabis plant has been used as a medicine for thousands of years. In the United States, doctors could prescribe marijuana cigarettes to patients for a variety of conditions until the 1940s, when it was banned. Marijuana's status as an illegal drug has removed it from the official medical arsenal, but its therapeutic power is still attracting attention, especially its pain-killing properties. About 30 percent of HIV patients develop painful nerves during the course of their illness, and this neuropathy is extremely difficult to treat with standard pain medications. Dr. Donald Abrams, of the University of California at San Francisco,...

Medical researchers need more marijuana sources because government supplies aren't meeting scientific demand, a federal judge has ruled. In an emphatic but nonbinding opinion, the Drug Enforcement Administration's own judge is recommending that a University of Massachusetts professor be allowed to grow a legal pot crop. The real winners could be those suffering from painful diseases, proponents believe. "The existing supply of marijuana is not adequate," Administrative Law Judge Mary Ellen Bittner ruled. The federal government's 12-acre marijuana plot at the University of Mississippi provides neither the quantity nor quality scientists need, researchers contend. While Bittner didn't embrace those criticisms,...

A new study suggests that a tendency toward delinquency or living in a neighborhood where drugs are readily available are just as important in determining whether a young person will abuse marijuana as whether or not he tries cigarettes or alcohol first. The findings call into question the "gateway" hypothesis - that is, that youths at risk of drug abuse progress from using alcohol and cigarettes to illegal "soft" drugs like marijuana to "hard" drugs like cocaine and heroin, Dr. Ralph E. Tarter of the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy and colleagues write in the American Journal of Psychiatry....

Medical tourism is accelerating, as well it should. Advancing biotechnology, computing power and materials science means that (a) the practice of good medicine is coming down to pretty much the cost of regulation plus the cost of the people running the show, and (b) many more regions of the world have the technology base, medical community and level of economic success to do the job well. A Filipino doctor has partnered with a Hong Kong-based company to give his countrymen hope in experiencing renewed health and strength with autologous stem cell transplants. There is so much controversy surrounding stem-cell research...

Embryonic stem cells, the controversial and versatile cells that seem able to do just about anything, have now expanded their repertoire into cancer prevention. A vaccine made from these cells shields mice against developing lung cancer under conditions thought to mimic the effects of smoking. Safety concerns about injecting stem cells into humans mean that regulatory agencies are unlikely to approve human tests of the vaccine, says lead researcher John Eaton at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. Nevertheless, he thinks the vaccine is worth testing in people at high risk of developing cancer, such as heavy smokers or people...

NEW YORK — In a city where you can get just about anything delivered to your door _ groceries, dry cleaning, Chinese food _ pot smokers are increasingly ordering takeout marijuana from drug rings that operate with remarkable corporate-style attention to customer satisfaction. An untold number of otherwise law-abiding professionals in New York are having their pot delivered to their homes instead of visiting drug dens or hanging out on street corners. Among the legions of home delivery customers is Chris, a 37-year-old salesman in Manhattan. He dials a pager number and gets a return call from a cheery dispatcher...

October 14, 2006 A GOP PRE-MORTEM: So is it over for the GOP majorities in Congress? It's still too early to say, I guess, but when even John Hinderaker is sounding extremely gloomy that's certainly the way to bet. So I want to stress, for the edification of any Republican leaders who might pay attention, that this is the result of a series of unforced errors on their part. Following is a (partial) list: 1. The Terri Schiavo affair: The bitterness it aroused, which was substantial, opened a fracture in the GOP coalition: Social-conservatives against the rest. And as I...

Advocates of replacing the income tax with the FairTax — a consumption tax in the form of a national retail sales tax (NRST) on new goods and services — regularly point to the complexity of the tax code, the millions of hours and dollars wasted on compliance costs, the evils of the withholding tax, and the abuses of the IRS to bolster their case for the FairTax. The twin truths that taxation is theft (no matter how the money is collected) and that the US government should never be given a budget that is in the trillions (no matter how...