Friday, December 15, 2017

2017 Tokey Awards

Tokin' Woman of the Year: Kathy Bates


The venerable actress Kathy Bates not only played a medical marijuana dispensary owner on the Netflix series Disjointed this year, she also made the rounds of the interview circuit, talking up the medicinal uses of marijuana and candidly speaking about her own use.

Asked by the New York Times if she smokes pot, Bates replied, "Yeah, I do. I’ve had a prescription for some time for chronic pain. I’ve really become a believer. I find it just as, if not more, effective than other pain relief." She also said she supports legalization "even more so now that I’ve become more educated about what its properties are" and mentioned meeting NFL players in the Gridiron Cannabis Coalition.

AARP Magazine's headline was Kathy Bates: She's Smokin', and Stephen Colbert introduced her as "an Academy Award–winning actress who terrified us in Misery, inspired us in Titanic, and now she sells us weed on the Netflix show Disjointed." She demonstrated her technique for using a vape pen for Stephen, and gifted Chelsea Handler with a cannabis wrist corsage for her interview on Chelsea.

Bates also played a marijuana-smoking lawyer in the 2011-12 TV series "Harry's Law," and portrayed Alice B. Toklas's lover Gertrude Stein on film in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris." In 2014 she said she'd shared "some good sh##" with Susan Sarandon and Melissa McCarthy.

Gotta say, though, having just seen Bates in "The Great Gilly Hopkins" (2015), it made me wish the writing for cannabis-themed movies and TV could approach a great film like that one.

Outie of the Year


Olivia Newton-John

Gwynneth Paltrow

Anne Hathaway

Admission of the Year 


Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on parties where marijuana "may have been present"

“It’s never fun to work in drug prevention,” said Drug Free America’s Deputy Director Amy Ronshausen.


Top Activist

Peachtree NORML founder Sharon Ravert (pictured at right with members of the NC Women and others) lobbied to bring the Drug Policy Alliance conference to Atlanta this year. Just before the event, Atlanta, which had the worst-in-the-nation record for arresting blacks over whites for marijuana, passed a decriminalization measure. NORML is working to pass more reform measures throughout Georgia and Sharon produces a segment on 420radio.com highlighting the stories and work of other women in the fight to end marijuana prohibition.

Honorable mentions

Alexis Bortell - 12-year-old suing Sessions over marijuana policy

In Peru, mothers rouse support for legalizing medical marijuana

Women could push marijuana legalization across the finish line in Texas



Political She-Ro Award 


Elizabeth Warren Wants Marijuana Answers From Trump Health Nominee and Seeks to Pull Pot Shops Out of Banking Limbo

New York Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal introduces bill to allow cannabis for menstrual cramps

Harwell Open to Medical Marijuana Law in Tennessee

Kamala Harris to Trump: Leave Grandma's Marijuana Alone

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard on the future of marijuana legalization

Minister of Women and Child Development in India Wants Medical Cannabis



Best Commentary (Written) 


Dr. Jocelyn Elders: Health Care is a Human-Rights Issue

NORML Women of Washington: Profit vs. access on Facebook, our digital town square


Best Commentary (TV)


Samantha Bee Rips Jeff Sessions

John Oliver on MJ Legalization

Bill Maher: Opiate of the Masses Now Officially Opiates (and Booze)

Dr. Oz Shocks "Fox & Friends"


Funniest TV Moment 


The Daily Show: Roy on Drugs

Saturday Night Live: Leslie Jones's Jamaican Vacation

Russell Brand on His Favorite (and non-favorite) Drugs

Kathryn Hahn's Wake and Bake on "I Love Dick"

Family Feud Contestant Wins with Weed



Phattest Film 

Mary Janes: The Women of Weed

Girls Trip

The Only Living Boy in New York 


Best Video or Series

Kelsey Darragh: I Tried Medical Marijuana For 30 Days 
To See If It Could Cure My Chronic Pain

Damian Marley: Meet Medical Cannabis Patient Michelle Aldrich

Now This: This Grandma Wants You to Smoke Weed

Nohttps://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/947211465949188096
Merry Jane: Queens of the Stoned Age


Best Commercial


Martha Stewart and Snoop Dog: T-Mobile Super Bowl Ad



Top Tweets (Politicos)


Tulsi Gabbard
Dina Titus
Kirsten Gillibrand
Julia Brownley
Kamala Harris



Top Tweets (Entertainers)


Paula Poundstone
Elayne Boosler
Susan Sarandon



Best Album


Jhené Aiko: Trip


Best Musical Moment
Sheryl Crow wailing on the harmonica to Willie Nelson's "Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die" at Farm Aid

Best Dance Moment
Stella Abrera performing "Soul Bossa Nova/Dear Quincy" (with pipe) in tribute to Carmen de Lavallade at the Kennedy Center Honors. See Carmen dancing it. 





Best Book

Ashley Picillo & Lauren Devine: Breaking The Grass Ceiling: Women, Weed and Business

Debby Goldsberry: Starting and Running a Marijuana Business

Ayelet Waldman: A Really 
Good Day

Paula Poundstone: The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness


Excellence in Reporting


Amanda Chicago Lewis: Medical Pot Is Our Best Hope to Fight the Opioid Epidemic

Paul Armentano, NORML: Blowing the Lid Off the "Marijuana Treatment" Racket

Sofia Miselem, AFP: 'Grandma's magic remedy:' Mexico's medical marijuana secret

Tom Angell, The Marijuana Moment: Teen Marijuana Use Down In Most Legalized States, Federal Data Says 

Brooke Edwards Staggs: The Cannifornian


Best Interview

Arnie Cooper, The Sun - Hooked: Maia Szalavitz Debunks Myths About Addiction 



Best Public Art


Hollyweed Sign

"I Thought the KKK was OK" (pictured)


Best Speech

Diane Goldstein accepting the H.B. Spear Award for Achievement in the Field of Law Enforcement at the Drug Policy Alliance Conference. 

Kathleen Harrison: Cannabis and Spirituality


Best Event


Women's Visionary Congress: Women and Cannabis Salon 

Best Billboard

The "moving hand" billboard on Sunset Strip for Disjointed. (See it moving at night.)


Top Studies


Cannabis and pregnancy: Maternal child health implications during a period of drug policy liberalization

People Who Smoke Weed Have 20 Percent More Sex

Women Who Smoke Marijuana Are Smarter Than Women Who Don't

Delaying marijuana smoking to age 17 cuts risks to teens' brains, new study suggests

Medical Marijuana for Children with Cancer? What Providers Think

Middle-aged women prescribed the most opioids, report finds

Children More Likely to Overdose If Mothers Are Prescribed Opioids

Energy Drinks Are a Gateway to Cocaine and Alcohol


States of Shame


Kansas Jails Cancer-Stricken Grandmother for Driving After Taking Anti-Nausea Drug

Proposed Wyoming Bill Equates Giving Substances Like Cannabis to Pregnant Women as Homicide

Alabama's crackdown on pregnant marijuana users

One North Texas Mother Convicted of Five Felonies for Breastfeeding One Child on Pot

Texas Cops Spent 11 Minutes Searching a Woman's Vagina, Found No Drugs


"What Were They Smoking?" Award


Ann Coulter: Marijuana use is “destroying the country”

Sen. McCaskill: If Pot is Legal "Kids Will Get Handed Joints Like They Get Handed Beers"

Rob Portman Claims MJ Laced with Fentanyl

Himachal Pradesh local women destroy cannabis plantations

Feds block a product aimed at keeping drugs out of kids’ hands

Feds Authorized Montana Woman's Hemp Farm, but Now They're Killing It


Marijuana legalization and gay activist
Gilbert Baker,
who designed the Rainbow Flag

A Fond Farewell To:

Gilbert Baker
Chuck Berry
David Cassidy
Hugh Hefner
Joanne Kyler
Joanna McKee
Roger Moore
Mary Tyler Moore
Jeanne Moreau
Tom Petty
Anita Pallenberg
Jacki Rickert

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Why Does Jerry Brown Keep Insulting Potheads?

Once more, as he had in 2014, California Governor Jerry Brown has insulted (and then kinda praised) potheads, this time in a Rolling Stone interview, where he said when asked about California's new law legalizing marijuana: 

"It's a bold experiment! We don't know how many people will be stoned, how long. Is it going to reduce the influence of criminals and cartels? Or is it going to lead to just another - you know: There they go! [Droops his head back on the couch, pretends to be a stoner.] 'Well, I'm gonna have another joint; don't worry about climate change.' [Makes huge inhaling noise as he pantomimes smoking a doobie.] 'It's all great…'

Brown continued, "[Colorado Gov. John] Hickenlooper says it's working pretty good. He has more experience. I would say the devotion and the zeal of the marijuana people is extraordinary. And far exceeds the mainline church community's, as I encounter it."

Is this more distancing by Brown from his "Governor Moonbeam" image? As Jessica Mitford recorded in a letter on April 23, 1992, SF Chronicle columnist Herb Caen joked that while Bill Clinton claimed he didn't inhale, Jerry Brown had never exhaled. Johnny Carson repeated the joke.

In 1992, I had just learned about the hemp/marijuana connection, from a guy who'd taken me to a Brown for President campaign event for our first date. Inspired by Jerry's reason and passion, I decided to delve back into politics, both as a hemp activist (mainly for environmental reasons) and as a volunteer for Brown's presidential campaign. Far from being a lazy so-and-so who didn't care about important issues, I was working around the clock: at my paying job, as well as on my two nonpaying political causes.

Brown's campaign was going well, until suddenly on April 9 the lead story on the ABC Evening News showed two different men with their faces and voices obscured alleging that marijuana (and cocaine) were used in The Governor's Mansion while Brown was in office and dating Linda Ronstadt. (An accusation which made little sense since Brown famously didn't live in the Mansion, preferring a more modest dwelling. After all, he had worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta.)

My fellow hemp/Brown activists and I tried advising his staff that he ought to make light of the accusations, but instead he issued a blistering response, calling them "false, malicious and absurd" and "part of the Gong Show of presidential politics."

He'd allowed himself to be put on the defensive, and never recovered. Clinton emerged as the front runner, and Brown had to reinvent his career, first as Mayor of Oakland and California Attorney General before being reelected as Governor.

Does Brown blame marijuana for the demise of his 1992 campaign? At least he now acknowledges that cannabis activists are a committed bunch, although he thinks we're too stoned all the time to care about important issues like global warming. I've been a cannabis activist ever since and would like nothing better than for its persecution to end so that I could work on other causes, like voting rights or environmental issues.

I'd warrant that marijuana smokers are in general more aware and active in greater causes than are, say, beer or wine enthusiasts. In fact a booklet published for parents in 1998 by the Salt Lake Education Foundation, featuring a forward by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, included "excessive preoccupation with social causes, race relations, environmental issues, etc." as a warning sign of marijuana use. Interestingly enough, Hatch has now introduced a sweeping medical marijuana research bill.

To his credit, Brown signed the bill to decriminalize marijuana in California in 1975 during his first term. Recently, he signed a bill legalizing hemp farming in California (but only after it was amended to only make it legal once the feds did). He also approved a bill ending the practice of kicking medical marijuana patients off organ transplant lists in 2015. But in California, people can still lose their jobs for using marijuana, even with a doctor's recommendation, and cannabis-using patients are routinely kicked off their prescription medications, forced instead onto more dangerous opiate drugs. [These last two changed years years after Brown's RS interview, in bills signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.]

Update 6/18: Journalist Sy Hersch recalls smoking pot with Eugene McCarthy and Brown in 1968. “The stuff did little for McCarthy, so he said, but it did much more for Brown,” Mr. Hersh writes. Again, Brown denies. 

9/18: He's done it again

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Penny Marshall on Pot

Marshall as Laverne (to Cindy Williams's Shirley)
Penny Marshall's 2012 memoir My Mother Was Nuts tells how she became a TV star, married Rob Reiner, motorcycled across Europe with Art Garfunkel, became a film director....and smoked pot.

After studying dance and appearing in musical theatre in her youth, Marshall decided to move to Los Angeles with some fellow cast members. She writes:

"On the night before we left,  Bill, Randy, and I went to the drive-in and saw The Trip, director Roger Corman's movie abut a TV director who takes LSD and goes on a mind-bending journey. Bill lit up a joint, and I smoked pot for the first time. It didn't even make me hungry."

Marshall says she liked Reiner because he "wore pajamas and didn't do drugs. His wild days were behind him." But after they married, "our house becomes a hangout for comedy's elite," naming Albert Brooks, Jerry Belson, Billy Crystal, Richard Dreyfuss, and Charles Grodin, among others.

"These were the pot-smoking years, and a lot of it was smoked at our house," she writes. "I cleaned the seeds and stems in a shoebox top. It was a skill, and I was good at it." Women weren't invited into the club. Belson would interrupt Brooks's comedy routines to say, "Can we take a break and smoke a joint?" and Brooks would get the munchies so badly he would eat Marshall's daughter's brown bag lunch meant for school the next day.

She mentions smoking cigarettes frequently, a habit she started while still in junior high. While working with Steven Speilberg, "I tried to get a Quaalude in him. They were my drug of choice. I constantly joked about wanting to know what he would be like if he relaxed."

Once, she flushed a bag of heroin down the toilet when her friend John Belushi offered it to her. "I had tried heroin once. It made me carsick," she wrote. "Artie [Garfunkel] didn't like it either, thank God. When others were chipping on the weekends, he was my ally in not doing it, and I will always be grateful to him for giving me the wherewithal to keep saying no. I wish John had done the same."

After being paired with Cindy Williams, Marshall hit the big time in TV's "Laverne and Shirley" (1976-1983). In a "lost episode" from 1981 titled "I Do, I Do,"  the girls go to a party where Mary Jane is being smoked. Laverne wants to try it, but Shirley talks her into eating brownies instead, not knowing they were of the Alice B. Toklas variety. 

Marshall became one of the most successful female film directors ever, starting with directing Whoopi Goldberg (pictured) in Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), followed by Big with Tom Hanks, and Oliver Sacks's Awakenings with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. I thought it was brilliant that for Big she had the actor who played Hanks's younger self act out all the scenes so that Hanks could see what a boy looked like in them; it was also interesting to learn that DeNiro almost played his role.

I particularly enjoyed her description of directing A League of Their Own, the first women's baseball movie. She tells how she cast and re-cast the film, getting Madonna to try out on the baseball field, and standing her ground to keep the ending with the "old women" of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, for whom she says she made the movie. League was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2012. The film celebrated its 25th anniversary on July 1 (with a new Blu-ray edition).

After surviving lung cancer that metastasized to her brain, Marshall gained weight and turned to her friend Carrie Fisher, then a spokeswoman for Jenny Craig. "Thirty years earlier we had dropped acid," she writes. "Now we were microwaving our Jenny meals. What had we become?"

Up next from Marshall: Between the Pipes, the story of Manon Rhéaume, the only woman to play for the NHL, and the story of Dennis Rodman, due out in 2018.

UPDATE 10/10/17: Kathy Bates, promoting her Netflix series "Disjointed" on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, described smoking some of Bill Maher's too-strong pot at a birthday party for Marshall. No word on whether or not Marshall smoked it too. 

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Hugh Hefner: Drug War Foe

Gloria Steinem in her Playboy Bunny costume, 1963
I must say I'm conflicted over whether or not to mourn Hugh Hefner's death.

As a feminist, I can't say he was a hero of mine. I read Gloria Steinem's undercover description of what it was like to be a Playboy Bunny, and it wasn't pretty. On the other hand, he supported a woman's right to choose. 

Hefner stood up for the First Amendment in more ways than the obvious one: publishing an interview with Malcom X lead to his first obscenity trial. He also helped get NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) off the ground with a donation and editorial support, and later held fundraisers for the Marijuana Policy Project at the Playboy mansion (hostessed in 2009 by Adrianne Curry and Fairuza Balk).

It was also in Playboy where former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders commented about then-Health and Human Secretary Donna Shalala's indefensible stance against medical marijuana, saying, "She has a Ph.D. in political science. That's the kind of science she practices." Bill Gates outed himself as an LSD user in Playboy, and Rush Limbaugh told the magazine in 1993 he smoked pot only twice in his life and it made him nauseous. (Others dispute the claim.)

I recently viewed the Amazon biopic series on Hefner, produced by Playboy Enterprises. It surprised me by revealing that his first girlfriend cheated on him with another man, devastating him and causing him to question monogamy. (So he acted as Shahryar did?) Episode 6 addresses Playboy's commitment to civil liberties, heightened by the hiring of editor Arthur Kretchmer, who's interviewed recalling, "Some of us were smoking dope." (Meanwhile, Hef was downing prescription Dexedrine to keep up with his grueling schedule.)

Episode 8 details the unjust drug arrest of Hef's close friend and associate Bobbie Arnstein, who committed suicide after receiving a 15-year prison sentence. Hefner was in tears when he read a statement condemning the US Government for hounding Bobbie to death. But it's also thought that she was troubled over an inferiority complex heightened by constant comparison with the Bunny Brigade.

Of course Hefner owed his success to the women who willingly graced the pages of Playboy over the years. The Marilyn Monroe estate's Twitter feed reminded us that she helped launch Playboy, by appearing on its first cover. Inside was that classic, exuberant nude of her, taken years earlier and purchased by Hef from a calendar publisher for $800.

The early centerfolds were quite beautiful, I thought, but I can't look at them today: each one has the same, unnatural body (no hips and oversized boobs; worse, little or no pubic hair). The biopic also reveals how competition from other girlie magazines forced Playboy into rancher realms.

UPDATE 2/22: A new series on Playboy on A&E also covers the Bobbie Arnstein case and interviews NORML founder Keith Stroup. 

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

The Goop on Gwyneth: She's a Vaper

On the heels of the news that Olivia Newton-John uses medical marijuana, another blonde icon, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, vaped her way through a cover shoot for the premiere issue of her new magazine Goop, while chatting about the medicinal use of cannabis.

“What’s really interesting to see, with all the legalization of marijuana happening, is how there’s evidence that it can be helpful in a medicinal sense for people,” she said. “That it can really be an alternative pain management system, and, in some cases, helpful for depression.

After saying, “Oh, I’ve tried it, and yes, I inhaled!” she sang the praises of her hmbldt brand vape pen, which is “apparently very tailored in terms of its balance of THC and CBD. So, there’s one that’s for arousal, there’s one that’s for calm, there’s one that’s for pain relief, there’s one for sleep. And you don’t, like when you were a teenager, smoke pot and get blazed out of your mind.”

She also spoke about the “complete opioid epidemic. And then we are as a culture, very resistant to more natural options….So, we’re just at this very interesting, I think, paradigm shift, because, we can tell that culturally people are so fascinated, and they want to try ways to take control over their health and well-being. They want to be the steward of their own ship.”

Famous (and often ridiculed) for her ultraclean lifestyle, Paltrow is the daughter of the also-luminous Blythe Danner, who starred in 2015's I’ll See You in My Dreams, featuring a pot party followed by a munchie run with Rhea Perlman, Mary Kay Place and June Squibb (pictured).

In a career that has spanned Jane Austin to Austin Powers, Paltrow won a much-deserved Oscar for her role in Shakespeare in Love, in which she played a woman pretending to be a man in order to appear on stage, a nice twist. She has authored two cookbooks and just opened a Goop store.

Gwyneth admitting to marijuana use will no doubt spawn jokes along the lines of, “This explains why she named her daughter Apple.” With more and more revelations like hers, it won’t be long before marijuana is as American as Apple Pie.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Queen Caroline Murat and the Treason of Images

Caroline Bonaparte was born in 1782, some 13 years after her brother Napoleon. At the age of 17, she married Napoleon's General Joachim Murat, a dashing, charismatic soldier.

Murat had commanded the cavalry during the French Egyptian expedition of 1798 under Napoleon. It was during the French occupation of Egypt that many of the soldiers—including, I contend, Alexandre Dumas's father—discovered hashish and brought it back to France.

In 1808, the Murats were made King and Queen of Naples and in 1814, Joachim signed a treaty with Austria in an attempt to save their throne, an act Napoleon regarded as treason.

This is the same year that Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted his very interesting portrait of Caroline Murat (above). Unlike earlier portraits that depict her as a dewey, maternal creature, Ingres dresses her in a serious black dress and hat, the plume of which mimics the smoke emitting from an image of Mt. Vesuvius erupting in the background.* Her gaze is forceful, knowing. She stands at a table, almost an altar, on which a green tablecloth and Egyptian imagery sits.

Also in 1814, Ingres scandalized the art world with his painting La Grande Odalisque, which was commissioned by Caroline. Nearly every art historian writes about how the painting broke with Ingres's formal realism by elongating the body of the nude. No one else seems to have noticed the striking resemblance of the model to Caroline: the same knowing eyes; the pert, upturned mouth; the glowing skin for which she was reputed.

If the painting was thought to be modeled on the Queen of Naples, painted the same year that she and her husband betrayed her brother Napoleon, that would have been quite the scandal indeed. Adding to that are the hints in Caroline's portrait pointing to smoke and Egypt. Napoleon himself was an early prohibitionist about hashish; perhaps like the Vietnam war generals of late he discovered it made his men too peaceful.

Odalisques were harem girls, often depicted holding a hookah in the mid 1800s (e.g. Delacroix's Women of Algiers). Tucked away at the feet of the woman in Ingres's painting is a pipe holding what well may have been hashish, and what looks like an incense burner emitting smoke. She is holding a fan, the handle of which looks like the mouthpiece of a hookah. Indeed, her elongated body could be said to resemble a pipe, with emphasis on the bowl (buttocks).

It makes me wonder if Magritte's 1929 painting "La trahison des images" references Ingres's Odalisque when it declares, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Why, of all objects, did Magritte choose to paint a pipe? Of course, it works as a surrealistic statement ("This is not a pipe; it's a painting of a pipe"); but does the treason (trahison) in the image perhaps refer to Mme. Murat's treason? Une pipe is also slang for a prostitute; was Caroline being disparaged by either painting, or both? (Because as we know the surest and easiest way to disparage a woman is to call her a whore.) Or was the fact that Ingres painted a pipe at his model's feet scandalous?

Historically, French paintings often had political intent. I remember my high school French teacher impressing upon me what a sensation Jacques-Louis David's painting The Death of Marat caused in 1793. Ingres studied with David, and the model's pose in his Odialisque is similar to David's Portrait of Madame Récamier.

Caroline was related to Tokin' Woman Violette Murat; actor Rene Auberjonois (Father Mulcahy in M*A*S*H) is a direct descendant.

*"When Napoleon tried to arrest Joachim for treason, he exclaimed in rebuttal, 'Sire, we are not only close to volcanoes, but right on top of them,' with allusions to the political turmoil which caused them to take action against Napoleon. It is possible that he was referencing the alliances that his wife had made with other, more dominant powers like Austria." Source.

Saturday, September 16, 2017

Nevada To Launch Campaign Against Pre-Natal Marijuana Use

The state of Nevada has decided, based on the news that 4% of pregnant women now admit to using marijuana, to launch a public-relations campaign to "highlight the potential harm the drug can do to a fetus."

Oddly, the Sheldon Adelson-owned Las Vegas Review Journal article announcing the campaign cites as its rationale a 17-year-old study, which found that "6-year-olds born to a mother who had smoked one joint or more daily in the first trimester displayed less ability to comprehend concepts in reading and listening — and by age 10 they had lower reading, math and spelling scores than their peers. It also found that children exposed to marijuana’s major psychoactive element — tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — in the womb were more impulsive and less able to focus their attention than other 10-year-olds."

The study they cite looked at women "of low socioeconomic status. At the first interview, the median family income was $350 per month...At 10 years postpartum [from 1994 through 1997], the median family income was $1245 per month. Sixty-two percent of the women worked and/or studied outside of the home and, on average, they had 12.2 years of education."

Researchers found that "women who used one or more joints of marijuana per day during the first trimester were significantly more likely to be single, African-American, more hostile, drink more alcohol, and use more illicit drugs (other than marijuana) than were women who did not use marijuana during the first trimester....These same factors characterized moderate to heavy marijuana users at the third trimester of pregnancy. In addition, third trimester moderate to heavy users had significantly less education and smoked more cigarettes than abstainers."

The study concluded that, "The correlations between prenatal marijuana use and the covariates included in the analytical models were low to moderate. At 10 years, the variables with the highest correlations with prenatal marijuana use were work/school status, maternal custody of the child, and current use [not use while pregnant] of marijuana and cocaine. ...Other variables that significantly predicted more problems on the SNAP subscales included male gender, African-American race, more child hospitalizations over the past year, more siblings, poorer environment as assessed by the HOME-SF, more maternal hostility and depression, less maternal coping ability, and current maternal cigarette smoking. In addition, children who were not in maternal custody and children exposed to alcohol during the first trimester of pregnancy had more peer problems."

So it seems this is one of the many studies that were found not to properly adjust for confounding factors, as described in an October 2016 study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, "Maternal Marijuana Use and Adverse Neonatal Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis," which found that the moderate use of cannabis during pregnancy is not an independent risk factor for adverse neonatal outcomes such as low birth weight.  Read more.

From: Katrina Mark, Mishka Terplan, Cannabis and pregnancy:
Maternal child health implications during a period of 
drug policy liberalization, Preventive Medicine (2016)
The Nevada article also claims, "Research on the effects of marijuana use during pregnancy is scant."   However, a May 2017 review of the literature—"Cannabis and pregnancy: Maternal child health implications during a period of drug policy liberalization"—published in the journal Preventive Medicine concluded, "There is ample evidence concerning the health effects of cannabis during pregnancy," noting that over 800 human studies have been performed yearly on the topic since 2000. Read more.

To its credit, the Review-Journal does mention Melanie Dreher's 1994 study on Jamaican mothers which concluded that marijuana-using mothers gave birth to developmentally superior babies. The article adds: "Dreher’s study made little impression on the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Both advise against marijuana use during pregnancy because of the studies linking it to cognitive impairment and academic underachievement. Both organizations also recommend that mothers with THC in their systems do not breastfeed."

Absent in all of these analyses is the conclusion Dreher made that the relative acceptance of marijuana in Jamaican society had much to do with her results. One can only hope that acceptance of cannabis in the US will ultimately lead to similar results.

But meanwhile, NIDA refused to fund a follow-up study on Dreher's results and Nevada's powerful alcohol distributors are battling to control the marijuana market. So don't expect a public awareness campaign on the dangers of using alcohol, or tobacco, while pregnant anytime soon, even though studies suggest those substances have a much greater effect on fetal health than cannabis.

Also see: NORML's Fact Sheet on Maternal Marijuana Use