Pubdate: Thu, 02 Nov 2000
Source: London Review of Books (UK)
Website: http://www.lrb.co.uk/index.html
Address: 28 Little Russell Street, London WC1A 2HN, UK
Contact:  London Review of Books 2000
Fax: +44 (0)20 7209 1102
Author: Richard Davenport-Hines

SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE

In this exclusive essay from the London Review of Books, Richard
Davenport-Hines considers three books which explode some of the myths
surrounding marijuana

The Science of Marijuana by Leslie Iversen. Oxford, 278 pp., $18.99, 6
April, 0 19 513123 1

Drug Diplomacy in the 20th Century: An International History by William
McAllister. Routledge, 344 pp., $16.99, 9 September 1999, 0 415 17989 0

Drugs and the Law: Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Misuse of
Drugs Act 1971 Police Foundation, 148 pp., $20, 28 March, 0 947692 47 9

"Marijuana has no therapeutic value, and its use is therefore always an
abuse and a vice," trumpeted Harry Anslinger, the implacable Commissioner of
the US Bureau of Narcotics in 1953:

While opium can be a blessing or a curse, depending on its use, marijuana is
only and always a scourge which undermines its victims and degrades them
mentally, morally and physically . . . In the earliest stages of
intoxication, the will power is destroyed and inhibitions and restraints are
released; the moral barricades are broken down and often debauchery and
sexuality result. Where mental instability is inherent, the behaviour is
generally violent.

An egotist will enjoy delusions of grandeur, the timid individual will
suffer anxiety, and the aggressive one often will resort to acts of violence
and crime. Dormant tendencies are released . . . Constant use produces an
incapacity for work and a disorientation . . . often leading to insanity
after prolonged use.

Anslinger's claims have been endorsed by high officials ever since. "There
is not a shred of scientific evidence that shows that smoked marijuana is
useful or needed," declared the former US drugs czar General Barry McCaffrey
in 1996. "This is not a medicine.

This is a cruel hoax." Our own home secretary endorsed this line after his
son's arrest for a drug offence in 1997. Ann 'zero-tolerance' Widdecombe is
even more opposed to it (except, it seems, when used by shadow cabinet
colleagues and other supposedly 'educated, articulate people').

Anslinger was lying.

In The Science of Marijuana, Leslie Iversen has produced the most
authoritative and up-to-date scientific assessment of the medical uses of
cannabis now available.

He recalls that cannabis was recommended for the treatment of constipation,
gout, malaria, rheumatism and menstrual problems in a Chinese compendium of
herbal medicines published around 2800 BC. It was a medicament in many
subsequent cultures.

Difficulties in standardising cannabis preparations meant, however, that it
was not widely used in 19th-century western medicine.

Even so, in 1937, when its medical use was suppressed in the US, there were
28 different medicines in which it was an ingredient. In 1964 came
confirmation that virtually all the pharmacological activity in hashish
extracts is attributable to one compound, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol
(THC). Later, the existence of specific receptors for cannabinoids in the
brain and other tissues was established.

Early in the 1970s the US Drugs Enforcement Agency was petitioned to
reclassify marijuana as a Schedule II drug which could be prescribed by
physicians. Finally, in 1986, after prolonged legal tussles, the DEA agreed
to public hearings on the petition.

The hearings lasted for more than two years.

Despite the DEA's legal expert recommending the rescheduling, and his
conclusion that cannabis is "one of the safest therapeutically active
substances known to man", the DEA denied the petition.

Iversen refers to a 1990 finding that 44 per cent of US oncologists had
suggested that a patient smoke marijuana for relief of the nausea induced by
chemotherapy. If the drug were really unsafe for use even under medical
supervision, as its Schedule I status affirms, this recommendation would
have been unthinkable.

Despite the DEA's obstruction, the discovery of the cannabinoid control
system in the body has revitalised scientific research.

Two synthetic cannabinoids have become available on prescription to patients
in Europe and the US. The annual sales of dronabil (soldunder the trade name
of Marinol) in the US are estimated to be worth about $20 million: some 80
per cent of prescriptions are as an appetite stimulant for people with Aids
or HIV, 10 per cent to counteract the nausea associated with chemotherapy
and 10 per cent for other purposes.

The Eli Lilly Company has developed nabilone: under the trade name of
Cesamet it, too, is used to treat nausea in patients undergoing
chemotherapy, although it also gave promising results in clinical trials in
the treatment of anxiety.

In addition, many patients with multiple sclerosis have reported benefiting
from smoking cannabis.

The possibility of its use in the treatment of glaucoma and epilepsy is
being looked into.

During 1997, the American Medical Association recommended controlled
clinical trials on the medical uses of smoked marijuana, and the BMA
recommended trials of synthetic cannabinoids The House of Lords Science and
Technology Committeereported in 1998 that more clinical research was needed,
but recommended the drug's rescheduling to permit its medical use. A year
later, the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine urged that
its therapeutic use in pain relief, control of nausea and appetite
stimulation be further investigated. New clinical trials will probably soon
be underway in Europe and the US, and I don't doubt from the evidence laid
out by Iversen that they will yield positive data. It will then be hard for
governments to refuse approval for the medical use of cannabis or
cannabinoids.

"The argument that approval of the medical use of cannabis would be
tantamount to encouraging the legalisation of the drug for all purposes is
clearly specious," Iversen concludes, "and is no justification for
withholding an effective medicine from patients who need it." Such ideas
were anathema to the egregious McCaffrey. "There could be no worse message
to young people," he insisted. "Just when the nation is trying its hardest
to educate teenagers not to use psychoactive drugs . . . they are being told
that marijuana is a medicine."

Many other psychoactive drugs have a recognised place in European medicine
notwithstanding the dangers of misuse.

Heroin is the foremost example.  Despite Congressman Stephen Porter's
disastrous Act of 1924 prohibiting its medical use in the US, European
countries resisted postwar American pressure (directed through the United
Nations) to impose this ban globally.

An attempt under the Eden Government in 1955 to prohibit its medical use in
Britain was defeated by a House of Lords rebellion led by the former Lord
Chancellor, Lord Jowitt, supported by a number of medical peers.

One of the virtues of William McAllister's meticulously researched history
of 20th-century drugs diplomacy is to highlight the source of most national
drug regulatory systems in the series of international conferences on the
subject held since 1912. Summaries of diplomatic proceedings, or of the
Conventions they produce, can make dry reading, but McAllister brings a wry
humour to his subject. The book is indispensable to world in 2000; among
many rich details, it gives disturbing insights into the influence of
pharmaceutical companies on global policy.

At the crucial Conference on Psychotropic Substances held in Vienna in 1971,
several key delegations, including the US delegation, were infiltrated by
company executives defending their freedom to sell amphetamines and
barbiturates with minimal regulation. The mystery as to why the spokesman
for six Latin American countries opposing tight regulations spoke only
broken Spanish was solved when he was discovered to be a Swiss employee of
Hoffman-LaRoche.

McAllister's is an international history, drawing on diplomatic archives: he
does not go into detail on the home office's troubled relations with
cannabis. The home office first took notice of what was then known as Indian
hemp in 1922, when it was sent a substance found in the coalshed of an
Egyptian coffee-house keeper in South Shields. The home office confirmed to
the chief constable that on analysis the substance proved to be 'hasheesh',
which was not covered by the Dangerous Drugs Act (DDA) of 1920. Next,
in1923, ten tons of cannabis resin en route from Bombay to Djibouti were
detained: the shipper was Henri de Monfreid, whose memoir La Croisiere du
Hachich (1935) - in English translation, Hashish: A Traveller's Tale
(1994) - is a splendid introduction to the subject of trafficking and drugs
regulations. The home office was consulted before Monfreid's shipment was
allowed to proceed.

Shortly afterwards, two waiters, one Italian and the other Sudanese, were
arrested in Old Compton Street and accused of offering to supply raw opium.

In fact, the brown substance in their possession was hashish, which it was
then legal to possess, and the case was abandoned.

But it provided the excuse for an alarmist series of cheap newspaper
articles in the silly season - including a supposed interview in the Daily
Mail with a home office official - in the relevant file in the Public Record
Office the official in question has written the word 'Liar!' in the margin.

On the strength of the hoo-ha metropolitan police recommended the
incorporation of cannabis in the Dangerous Drugs Act, one CID officer
advising that cannabis "has practically the same effect as cocaine and
morphine upon its victims".

Even the Met was not optimistic about the success of prohibition: the "only
result" of prohibiting the drug in Egypt had been "an increase of price to
its consumers". The home office did not want to legislate, but foresaw that
"the prevalence of the vice in Egypt" - despite prohibition there - might
result in 'international regulation of the drug'. This was prescient.

A month later, the Egyptian ministry of the interior concluded that as it
was "practically impossible to keep hashish out of Egypt . . . the League of
Nations should consider hashish as an international affair and should try to
persuade its members to make dealing in or consuming the drug a crime
punishable by severe penalties."

Consequently, at the Geneva Conference on Opium of1924-25, Egypt's delegate
proposed bringing hashish within the Hague Convention of 1912. His
memorandum, circulated to support this proposal, represented it as "a
dangerous narcotic . . . more harmful than opium", and stated that "about 70
per cent of insane people in lunatic asylums in Egypt are haschiche eaters
or smokers." Congressman Porter, the monomaniacal leader of the US
delegation, was keen on this initiative. "We are asking them to help us to
destroy the vice of opium, coca leaves and their derivatives," he declared
of the Egyptians. "This is a good time to practise a little reciprocity.
They have their troubles and we have ours."

The contracting powers at the Geneva Conference accordingly agreed in 1925
to prohibit the import and export of Indian hemp except for certified
medical or scientific purposes.

In Britain, cannabis was immediately rescheduled as a poison, with effect
from April 1925. A few months later, a new DDA brought Britain into line for
the ratification of the Geneva Convention. The House of Commons debate on
the Bill lasted less than five minutes: Indian hemp, or cannabis, was not
mentioned once. The House of Lords debate was slightly longer. Peers
followed the advice of Lord Haldane that, as it was "impossible to form any
judgment on the details of the Bill", it should "be taken by the House to a
large extent on trust". It was on this slipshod basis that cannabis was
criminalised.

This might not have mattered much had it not been for the enduring effects
of Prohibition in the US.  Cannabis was listed in the US Pharmacopoeia as a
recognised medicine from 1850 until 1942. It was sold cheaply by drugstores
in the form of fluid extracts, and was smoked in cigarette form by
asthmatics. Between1900 and 1920 it began to be used on a limited scale as a
recreational drug by immigrant labourers from Mexico and the Caribbean. Its
consumption was enormously increased after the 18th Amendment - prohibiting
alcohol - came into force in 1920. Alcohol became more difficult to obtain,
more expensive and often of poor quality.

In urban centres 'tea pads' operating like speakeasies provided cheap
marijuana.

In 1944, Mayor La Guardia's Committee on Marijuana estimated that there had
been five hundred 'tea pads' in New York City by the 1930s.

The mass marketing of marijuana for recreational use was the result of bad
law-making. Congressman Porter's response to the Egyptians at Geneva showed
that cannabis was not then regarded as a problem by anti-drugs propagandists
in the US. It first received public attention in a series of sensationalised
and false reports in the New Orleans press in 1926 involving drug-crazed
black marijuana users and corrupted schoolchildren. By 1931, all but two
stateswest of the Mississippi and several others in the East had made a
criminal offence of the possession or use of cannabis.

By 1937, every state had outlawed the drug under legislation allowing no
distinction between physiologically addictive narcotics such as heroin,
habit-forming stimulants like cocaine, and hallucinogens. Anslinger felt
that his agents at the Bureau of Narcotics were overstretched coping with
opiates without having to suppress a drug that could be easily grown in many
states of the Union. He accepted then that "the marijuana addict" did not
"graduate into a heroin, an opium or a cocaine user".

Once he'd decided that he would have to submit to political pressure for a
Federal law to be passed against marijuana, he did so in a manner
calculated, not untypically, to strengthen his own position and that of the
Bureau. He strenuously supported the Marijuana Tax Bill. "How many murders,
suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, hold-ups, burglaries and deeds of
maniacal insanity it causes each year, especially among the young, can only
be conjectured," he said, assuring the House of Representatives that under
the influence of the drug, "people will fly into a delirious rage and many
will commit violent crimes." His corrupt rhetoric was contaminating. It
produced such an atmosphere than when the official representative of the
American Medical Association came to testify against the Bill, he was
bullied and insulted. (An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical
Association of 1 May 1937 advised that "the proposed Federal venture into
the interstate control of cannabis hardly seems to be justified by
experience . . After more than twenty years of Federal effort and the
expenditure of millions of dollars, the opium and cocaine habits are still
widespread.")

Like Lord Haldane 12 years earlier in the House of Lords, Congressman Sam
Rayburn assured Congress that "this Bill has a unanimous report from the
committee and there is no controversy about it."

When asked what the Bill was about, he added, vaguely: "it has something to
do with something that is called marijuana.

I believe it is a narcotic of some kind." The Bill passed after less than
half an hour's debate.

If a good law is one that reduces misconduct, while a bad law results in
increased infractions, then the Marijuana Tax Act was calamitous. It raises
the question that is too seldom addressed when considering policy on drugs:
does social deviance lead to social controls, or do such controls result in
deviance?

In the five years after 1937, about sixty thousand tons of marijuana were
destroyed in the US and about a thousand people arrested annually for
violating the law. The number of arrests in California rose from 1156 in
1954 to 50,327 in 1968. By 1998, there were 695,000 arrests annually in the
US: 86,086 was the comparable figure for Britain in 1997. The policing of
cannabis accounted for nearly 80 per cent of police time spent on drug
offences in both countries.

The DEA has grown into a second international intelligence agency, with a
global network of agents rivalling that of the CIA. The total spent on the
War on Drugs rose from $537m in 1980 to $1.2bn in 1984. By 1991, the
Government was spending $7.7bn on action against illegal intoxicants.
Despite the deployment of all these repressive instruments, the US has
failed to disrupt the dynamics of prohibition and illegal supply.  As the
late Jan-Willem Gerritsen writes in his perceptive study of prohibition
policies, "the high 'business risks' keep prices high and guarantee good
profit margins for successful entrepreneurs, so that the market continues to
exercise tremendous magnetic appeal." Although "increasingly stiff sentences
imposed under the criminal law aggravate the risks on the supply side, they
also boost the market position of those able to evade prosecution. The
harsher the repressive measures, the greater the reward for successful
entrepreneurs, who have every reason to expand their market and increase the
volume of their supply."

Such reasonable observations are anathema to the prohibitionists. Anslinger
moved ruthlessly and mendaciously to discredit the authoritative medical and
scientific report commissioned by La Guardia.  His agents would have been
equally hostile to Iversen, who in his temperate and understated book
regrets that cannabis "has rarely been regarded simply as a substance with
effects and side effects". Instead, it "has been equated with morality and
the debate about its use portrayed as one of good versus evil.  Marijuana
has been linked with the pursuit of pleasure and with idleness rather than
the work ethic." Most scientists believe that the grave short-term risks
attributed to cannabis "were grossly exaggerated", but neither scientists
nor anyone else can prove the effect of a substance to be non-existent; it
is therefore impossible to prove that any substance is harmless.  Most
mental effects of cannabis are potential rather than inherent; the potential
physical effects cannot be assessed without much more data on long-term
consumption. While it is less habit-forming than heroin, nicotine and
cocaine, Iversen postulates that "as many as 10% of regular users will
become dependent on the drug." Current recreational use of cannabis has less
adverse effect on public health than either tobacco or alcohol, but it is
likely "that an increased use of cannabis would bring an increased public
health impact".

The profits from trafficking in illegal intoxicants are always 'black': they
fall outside the supervision and authority of governments. As Gerritsen
argues, 'since a country's sovereignty stands or falls with its monopoly on
taxation and the obligation of its citizens to pay taxes, the illegal drugs
trade forms a fundamental threat to the system of national states.' Since
1985, under the insistent leadership of the US, there has been a concerted
campaign to control the international laundering of black-market money
derived from drugs.

This aspect of the war on drugs, he writes, is leading 'to something that
was never intended: a uniform global regulatory regime, which will be
applicable to all types of financial service'.

Gerritsen's sociological history charts the way 20th-century controls on
drugs were used to defend social norms.

Men like Anslinger, who was obsessed with Red China, and Richard Nixon, who
revived the widespread use of cocaine by his maladroit War on Drugs,
regarded their sale and use as a collective threat from outsiders. The
'silent majority' (a phrase Nixon borrowed from Homer, who was referring to
thedead) refused to acknowledge that prohibitionist legislation and its
enforcement are indispensable preconditions for the growth of illicit
supply. "In a repressive climate of this kind, more informal modes of
regulation - which certainly exist among users - are by definition confined
to a twilight subculture that is a natural breeding ground for crime and
other expressions of counter-culture," Gerritsen writes.

This is one of the quandaries addressed by the Police Foundation inquiry
into the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.  The members of this committee (chaired
by Lady Runciman) are essentially pragmatic:

It has become inescapably clear to us that the eradication of drug use is
not achievable and it is not therefore either a realistic or a sensible goal
of public policy.

The main aim of the law must be to control and limit the demand for and the
supply of illicit drugs in order to minimise the serious individual and
social harms caused by their use.

Rather than react to the bullying of journalists, drugs laws should reflect
the latest scientific understanding; they should also "be accepted by the
public as fair, consistent, enforceable, consistent and just". As to social
attitudes, the Mori survey commissioned by Runciman showed that tobacco and
alcohol were considered more harmful than cannabis by every age group.

Illegal drug use remained a minority pursuit well after the 1960s. But by
the late 1990s, the majority of people aged between 16 and 29 admitted to
having tried illegal drugs; the estimate is that up to one third of this
group may have used cannabis or other drugs within the last year. Cannabis
accounted for between 70 and 85 per cent of all offences under the MDA, of
which there were more than 110,000 in 1997.

The best chance of formulating a workable policy lies in viewing drugs as
commodities within a hugely lucrative, dynamic and expanding illicit
economy. Forty years ago, before the reform of gambling laws, bookies'
runners presented a major challenge to a bad law: they convinced the
authorities that they would not go away, could not be suppressed and had
better be regulated.

The cannabis users of 2000 are in the same position as the off-course
gamblers of 1960.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Don Beck