California Voters Reject Legalization of Recreational Marijuana

California voters rejected a ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana for personal use, blocking efforts to expand the industry beyond medical purposes in the most populous U.S. state. Proposition 19 failed 54 percent to 46 percent, according to California’s Secretary of State. Backers included billionaire investor George Soros, who contributed $1 million in support.

The proposition lost in Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino counties in northern California, identified in a Rand Corp. report this year as the center of the state’s pot production. “Legalization would be competition to the black market,” Steve Downing, a former deputy chief in the Los Angeles Police Department, said on a conference call today.

California was the first to legalize marijuana for medical use, in 1996; 13 states and the District of Columbia followed. Yesterday’s defeat allows the state to sidestep a fight with the federal government, which had threatened to prosecute marijuana use if the measure won. Federal law supersedes state law.

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Republicans to attack healthcare law funding

U.S. congressional Republicans will try to repeal President Barack Obama's healthcare law next year but their leader in the Senate acknowledged on Thursday they will likely have to settle for far more modest changes.

Two days after Republicans scored big victories in congressional elections, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took a hard line against Obama's landmark law and showed no sign of compromise when the new Congress opens for business in January. "We can and should propose and vote on straight repeal repeatedly" of the healthcare law, he said.

McConnell's remarks, in a speech delivered to the conservative Heritage Foundation, acknowledged that Obama would veto such legislation, which probably would be blocked by the president's fellow Democrats in the Senate anyway.

More realistically, McConnell said Republicans, who will hold a majority in next year's House of Representatives, should aim to hobble the healthcare law by "denying funds for implementation" of the measure. Annual spending bills for agencies, including ones that implement the healthcare law, are normally written first in the House.

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More drugs do not always mean better care: studies

Spending more on drugs does not always translate into healthier patients, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday. And in a second study, researchers found that when government insurers crack down on payments for certain drugs, doctors are less likely to prescribe them unnecessarily.

The two studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggest that government regulations and perhaps healthcare reform can be used to cut costs and improve care. In one study, Yuting Zhang of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health found big variations in how much doctors and hospitals spend on drugs to treat Medicare patients across the United States.

But there was no correlation between that spending and how well patients did. "That contradicts the idea that high spending leads to better prescription practices," Zhang said in a statement.

Her team used data from the records of 500,000 patients using Medicare, the federal health insurance plan for the elderly. In regions with higher overall per capita medical spending, they found that patients were also more likely to be given prescriptions for riskier drugs.

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