Pubdate: Mon, 20 Aug 2001
Source: National Review (US)
Copyright: 2001 National Review
Contact:  http://www.nationalreview.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/287
Author: Rich Lowry, NR Editor
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

WEED WHACKERS

The Anti-marijuana Forces, And Why They're Wrong

Rarely do trial balloons burst so quickly. During the recent British 
campaign, Tory shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe had no sooner proposed 
tougher penalties for marijuana possession than a third of her fellow Tory 
shadow-cabinet ministers admitted to past marijuana use. Widdecome 
immediately had to back off. The controversy reflected a split in the 
party, with the confessors attempting to embarrass Widdecombe politically. 
But something deeper was at work as well: a nascent attempt to reckon 
honestly with a drug that has been widely used by baby boomers and their 
generational successors, a tentative step toward a squaring by the 
political class of its personal experience with the drastic government 
rhetoric and policies regarding marijuana.

The American debate hasn't yet reached such a juncture, even though last 
year's presidential campaign featured one candidate who pointedly refused 
to answer questions about his past drug use and another who -- according to 
Gore biographer Bill Turque -- spent much of his young adulthood smoking 
dope and skipping through fields of clover (and still managed to become one 
of the most notoriously uptight and ambitious politicians in the country). 
In recent years, the debate over marijuana policy has centered on the 
question of whether the drug should be available for medicinal purposes 
(Richard Brookhiser has written eloquently in NR on the topic). Drug 
warriors call medical marijuana the camel's nose under the tent for 
legalization, and so -- for many of its advocates -- it is. Both sides in 
the medical-marijuana controversy have ulterior motives, which suggests it 
may be time to stop debating the nose and move on to the full camel.

Already, there has been some action. About a dozen states have passed 
medical-marijuana laws in recent years, and California voters, last 
November, approved Proposition 36, mandating treatment instead of criminal 
penalties for all first- and second-time nonviolent drug offenders. 
Proponents of the initiative plan to export it to Ohio, Michigan, and 
Florida next year. Most such liberalization measures fare well at the polls 
- -- California's passed with 61 percent of the vote -- as long as they 
aren't perceived as going too far. Loosen, but don't legalize, seems to be 
the general public attitude, even as almost every politician still fears 
departing from Bill Bennett orthodoxy on the issue. But listen carefully to 
the drug warriors, and you can hear some of them quietly reading marijuana 
out of the drug war. James Q. Wilson, for instance, perhaps the nation's 
most convincing advocate for drug prohibition, is careful to set marijuana 
aside from his arguments about the potentially ruinous effects of 
legalizing drugs.

There is good reason for this, since it makes little sense to send people 
to jail for using a drug that, in terms of its harmfulness, should be 
categorized somewhere between alcohol and tobacco on one hand and caffeine 
on the other. According to common estimates, alcohol and tobacco kill 
hundreds of thousands of people a year. In contrast, there is as a 
practical matter no such thing as a lethal overdose of marijuana. Yet 
federal law makes possessing a single joint punishable by up to a year in 
prison, and many states have similar penalties. There are about 700,000 
marijuana arrests in the United States every year, roughly 80 percent for 
possession. Drug warriors have a strange relationship with these laws: They 
dispute the idea that anyone ever actually goes to prison for mere 
possession, but at the same time resist any suggestion that laws providing 
for exactly that should be struck from the books. So, in the end, one of 
the drug warriors' strongest arguments is that the laws they favor aren't 
enforced -- we're all liberalizers now.

Gateway To Nowhere

There has, of course, been a barrage of government- sponsored 
anti-marijuana propaganda over the last two decades, but the essential 
facts are clear: Marijuana is widely used, and for the vast majority of its 
users is nearly harmless and represents a temporary experiment or 
enthusiasm. A 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine -- a highly credible 
outfit that is part of the National Academy of Sciences -- found that "in 
1996, 68.6 million people -- 32% of the U.S. population over 12 years old 
- -- had tried marijuana or hashish at least once in their lifetime, but only 
5% were current users." The academic literature talks of "maturing out" of 
marijuana use the same way college kids grow out of backpacks and 
Nietzsche. Most marijuana users are between the ages of 18 and 25, and use 
plummets after age 34, by which time children and mortgages have blunted 
the appeal of rolling paper and bongs. Authors Robert J. MacCoun and Peter 
Reuter -- drug-war skeptics, but cautious ones -- point out in their new 
book Drug War Heresies that "among 26 to 34 year olds who had used the drug 
daily sometime in their life in 1994, only 22 percent reported that they 
had used it in the past year."

Marijuana prohibitionists have for a long time had trouble maintaining that 
marijuana itself is dangerous, so they instead have relied on a bank 
shot--marijuana's danger is that it leads to the use of drugs that are 
actually dangerous. This is a way to shovel all the effects of heroin and 
cocaine onto marijuana, a kind of drug-war McCarthyism. It is called the 
"gateway theory," and has been so thoroughly discredited that it is still 
dusted off only by the most tendentious of drug warriors. The theory's 
difficulty begins with a simple fact: Most people who use marijuana, even 
those who use it with moderate frequency, don't go on to use any other 
illegal drug. According the Institute of Medicine report, "Of 34 to 35 year 
old men who had used marijuana 10-99 times by the age 24-25, 75% never used 
any other illicit drug." As Lynn Zimmer and John Morgan point out in their 
exhaustive book Marijuana Myths/Marijuana Facts, the rates of use of hard 
drugs have more to do with their fashionability than their connection to 
marijuana. In 1986, near the peak of the cocaine epidemic, 33 percent of 
high-school seniors who had used marijuana also had tried cocaine, but by 
1994 only 14 percent of marijuana users had gone on to use cocaine.

Then, there is the basic faulty reasoning behind the gateway theory. Since 
marijuana is the most widely available and least dangerous illegal drug, it 
makes sense that people inclined to use other harder-to-find drugs will 
start with it first -- but this tells us little or nothing about marijuana 
itself or about most of its users. It confuses temporality with causality. 
Because a cocaine addict used marijuana first doesn't mean he is on cocaine 
because he smoked marijuana (again, as a factual matter this hypothetical 
is extremely rare -- about one in 100 marijuana users becomes a regular 
user of cocaine). Drug warriors recently have tried to argue that research 
showing that marijuana acts on the brain in a way vaguely similar to 
cocaine and heroin -- plugging into the same receptors -- proves that it 
somehow "primes" the brain for harder drugs. But alcohol has roughly the 
same action, and no one argues that Budweiser creates heroin addicts. 
"There is no evidence," says the Institute of Medicine study, "that 
marijuana serves as a stepping stone on the basis of its particular 
physiological effect."

The relationship between drugs and troubled teens appears to be the 
opposite of that posited by drug warriors -- the trouble comes first, then 
the drugs (or, in other words, it's the kid, not the substance, who is the 
problem). The Institute of Medicine reports that "it is more likely that 
conduct disorders generally lead to substance abuse than the reverse." The 
British medical journal Lancet -- in a long, careful consideration of the 
marijuana literature -- explains that heavy marijuana use is associated 
with leaving high school and having trouble getting a job, but that this 
association wanes "when statistical adjustments are made for the fact that, 
compared with their peers, heavy cannabis users have poor high-school 
performance before using cannabis." (And, remember, this is heavy use: 
"adolescents who casually experiment with cannabis," according to MacCoun 
and Reuter, "appear to function quite well with respect to schooling and 
mental health.") In the same way problem kids are attracted to illegal 
drugs, they are drawn to alcohol and tobacco. One study found that teenage 
boys who smoke cigarettes daily are about ten times likelier to be 
diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder than non-smoking teenage boys. By the 
drug warrior's logic, this means that tobacco causes mental illness.

Another arrow in the drug warriors' quiver is the number of people being 
treated for marijuana: If the drug is so innocuous, why do they seek, or 
need, treatment. Drug warriors cite figures that say that roughly 100,000 
people enter drug-treatment programs every year primarily for marijuana 
use. But often, the punishment for getting busted for marijuana possession 
is treatment. According to one government study, in 1998 54 percent of 
people in state-run treatment programs for marijuana were sent there by the 
criminal-justice system. So, there is a circularity here: The drug war 
mandates marijuana treatment, then its advocates point to the fact of that 
treatment to justify the drug war. Also, people who test positive in 
employment urine tests often have to get treatment to keep their jobs, and 
panicked parents will often deliver their marijuana-smoking sons and 
daughters to treatment programs. This is not to deny that there is such a 
thing as marijuana dependence. According to The Lancet, "About one in ten 
of those who ever use cannabis become dependent on it at some time during 
their 4 or 5 years of heaviest use."

But it is important to realize that dependence on marijuana -- apparently a 
relatively mild psychological phenomenon -- is entirely different from 
dependence on cocaine and heroin. Marijuana isn't particularly addictive. 
One key indicator of the addictiveness of other drugs is that lab rats will 
self-administer them. Rats simply won't self-administer THC, the active 
ingredient in marijuana. Two researchers in 1991 studied the addictiveness 
of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. Both ranked 
caffeine and marijuana as the least addictive. One gave the two drugs 
identical scores and another ranked marijuana as slightly less addicting 
than caffeine. A 1991 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report 
to Congress states: "Given the large population of marijuana users and the 
infrequent reports of medical problems from stopping use, tolerance and 
dependence are not major issues at present." Indeed, no one is quite sure 
what marijuana treatment exactly is. As MacCoun and Reuter write, "Severity 
of addiction is modest enough that there is scarcely any research on 
treatment of marijuana dependence."

None of this is to say that marijuana is totally harmless. There is at 
least a little truth to the stereotype of the Cheech & Chong "stoner." 
Long-term heavy marijuana use doesn't, in the words of The Lancet, "produce 
the severe or grossly debilitating impairment of memory, attention, and 
cognitive function that is found with chronic heavy alcohol use," but it 
can impair cognitive functioning nonetheless: "These impairments are 
subtle, so it remains unclear how important they are for everyday 
functioning, and whether they are reversed after an extended period of 
abstinence." This, then, is the bottom-line harm of marijuana to its users: 
A small minority of people who smoke it may -- by choice, as much as any 
addictive compulsion -- eventually smoke enough of it for a long enough 
period of time to suffer impairments so subtle that they may not affect 
everyday functioning or be permanent. Arresting, let alone jailing, people 
for using such a drug seems outrageously disproportionate, which is why 
drug warriors are always so eager to deny that anyone ever goes to prison 
for it.

Fighting The Brezhnev Doctrine

In this contention, the drug warriors are largely right. The fact is that 
the current regime is really only a half-step away from decriminalization. 
And despite all the heated rhetoric of the drug war, on marijuana there is 
a quasi-consensus: Legalizers think that marijuana laws shouldn't be on the 
books; prohibitionists think, in effect, that they shouldn't be enforced. A 
reasonable compromise would be a version of the Dutch model of 
decriminalization, removing criminal penalties for personal use of 
marijuana, but keeping the prohibition on street-trafficking and mass 
cultivation. Under such a scenario, laws for tobacco -- an unhealthy drug 
that is quite addictive -- and for marijuana would be heading toward a sort 
of middle ground, a regulatory regime that controls and discourages use but 
doesn't enlist law enforcement in that cause. MacCoun and Reuter have 
concluded from the experience of decriminalizing the possession of small 
amounts of marijuana in the Netherlands, twelve American states in the 
1970s, and parts of Australia that "the available evidence suggests that 
simply removing the prohibition against possession does not increase 
cannabis use."

Drug warriors, of course, will have none of it. They support a drug-war 
Brezhnev doctrine under which no drug-war excess can ever be turned back -- 
once a harsh law is on the books for marijuana possession, there it must 
remain lest the wrong "signal" be sent. "Drug use," as Bill Bennett has 
said, "is dangerous and immoral." But for the overwhelming majority of its 
users marijuana is not the least bit dangerous. (Marijuana's chief 
potential danger to others -- its users driving while high -- should, 
needless to say, continue to be treated as harshly as drunk driving.) As 
for the immorality of marijuana's use, it generally is immoral to break the 
law. But this is just another drug-war circularity: The marijuana laws 
create the occasion for this particular immorality. If it is on the basis 
of its effect -- namely, intoxication -- that Bennett considers marijuana 
immoral, then he has to explain why it's different from drunkenness, and 
why this particular sense of well-being should be banned in an America that 
is now the great mood-altering nation, with millions of people on Prozac 
and other drugs meant primarily to make them feel good.

In the end, marijuana prohibition basically relies on cultural prejudice. 
This is no small thing. Cultural prejudices are important. Alcohol and 
tobacco are woven into the very fabric of America. Marijuana doesn't have 
the equivalent of, say, the "brewer-patriot" Samuel Adams (its enthusiasts 
try to enlist George Washington, but he grew hemp instead of smoking it). 
Marijuana is an Eastern drug, and importantly for conservatives, many of 
its advocates over the years have looked and thought like Allen Ginsberg. 
But that isn't much of an argument for keeping it illegal, and if marijuana 
started out culturally alien, it certainly isn't anymore. No wonder drug 
warriors have to strain for medical and scientific reasons to justify its 
prohibition. But once all the misrepresentations and exaggerations are 
stripped away, the main pharmacological effect of marijuana is that it gets 
people high. Or as The Lancet puts it, "When used in a social setting, it 
may produce infectious laughter and talkativeness." 
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