[420 Girl]

A group of drug researchers is urging diplomats at a United Nations meeting to drop their prohibition on cannabis and allow the psychoactive substance to be sold and taxed like tobacco.

"Our message to politicians is that 'you don't have to worry too much about the effects of cannabis and that the kids aren't listening to you in any case,' " Peter Room, a public health professor at the University of Melbourne, said today at a briefing. He helped chair a scientific committee that produced a report saying that marijuana isn't a public health menace and that half the U.S. population born after 1970 and at least 21 years old has tried the drug.

The United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs is meeting for a second day in the Austrian capital. More than 1,400 diplomats and policy makers from 130 countries are attending.

Proponents of legalization have gained some support. In California and Hawaii medicinal marijuana is legal. Brazil's former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has supported the Beckley Foundation's proposal to treat marijuana like tobacco. Billionaire investor George Soros has funded programs that look for alternatives to prohibition.

Antonia Maria Costa, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime director, yesterday called proposals to legalize drugs an "oversimplification" of a problem that has caused "very considerable damage in the last few years and decades."

Room and Peter Reuter, a public policy researcher at the University of Maryland, both said at today's briefing that governments aren't prepared to make changes to existing policy.

Around 11 percent of Americans and 7 percent of European Union citizens smoked marijuana in the last year, the UN's 2008 drug report says.

"Cannabis has become the most widely used illicit drug worldwide," the International Narcotics Control Board wrote Feb. 19 in a report. The latest UN statistics show around 41,000 metric tons of marijuana is grown in 172 countries.

Marijuana, produced from the cannabis plant, can be smoked or ingested and is used -- illegally in the U.S. and many other countries -- for recreation. Medically, the substance has been used to combat pain in cancer patients and others, and to treat neurological disorders and glaucoma.

The Beckley Foundation, a non-profit policy institute near Oxford University, published Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond the Stalemate for this week's UN meeting in Vienna. The international scientific team that wrote the 240-page report argued that marijuana should be treated similarly to tobacco.

Cardoso, ex-Colombian President Cesar Gaviria and former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo wrote Feb. 23 in the Wall Street Journal that policy based on eradication, interdiction and the criminalization of consumers hasn't been effective, and that the violence and organized crime linked to drug trafficking remain.

Soros has donated money to support ballot initiatives in Florida, Ohio and other states to allow the medicinal use of marijuana. He supported the Drug Policy Alliance Network, the Washington-based organization that says it's seeking "alternatives to the drug war that are grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights."

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