Pubdate: Sun, 24 Jun 2012
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2012 The Denver Post Corp
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Vincent Carroll

DEA CHIEF STONEWALLS ON MARIJUANA

You know federal drug policy is bankrupt when the chief of the Drug 
Enforcement Administration is reluctant to acknowledge even a simple 
fact that any eighth-grader could confirm.

"Opiates are far more addictive than marijuana," Congressman Jared 
Polis said last week. "That is a fact."

Yet this particular fact is one that the Democrat was able to extract 
from DEA administrator Michele Leonhart only after a stunning 
interrogation in which she acted as if he were demanding she choose 
between Hitler and Stalin on a scale of evil.

The relevant exchange began at a congressional hearing on the DEA's 
priorities when Polis asked Leonhart if crack cocaine (not an opiate, 
obviously) were more dangerous for a user than marijuana.

Leonhart: "I believe all illegal drugs are bad."

Polis: "Is methamphetamine worse for somebody's health than marijuana?"

Leonhart: "I don't think any illegal drug ..."

Polis: "Is heroin worse for someone's health than marijuana?"

Leonhart: "Again, all the ... ."

Polis: "Yes, no, or I don't know. I mean, if you don't know, you can 
look this up. ... I am asking you a very straightforward question."

Leonhart: "All illegal drugs are bad."

Polis: "Does that mean you don't know?"

Leonhart: "Heroin causes an addiction. ... It causes many problems. 
It's very hard to kick."

Polis: "So does that mean that the health impact of heroin is worse 
than marijuana ... ?"

Leonhart: "I think you're asking a subjective question ... ."

Polis: "I'm just asking you as an expert in the subject area ... ."

Leonhart: "And I'm answering as a police officer and as a DEA agent 
that these drugs are illegal because they are dangerous, because they 
are addictive, because they do hurt a person's health."

Polis: "So is heroin more addictive than marijuana?"

Leonhart: "Generally, the properties of heroin, yes, are more addictive."

At last.

"We have an agency that can't even acknowledge basic scientific 
facts," Polis told me later. Indeed, its officials seem to believe 
that drawing distinctions between marijuana and other outlawed drugs 
is tantamount to encouraging pot's use - as if intellectual honesty 
would thrust the agency into the drug legalization camp.

Yet you can, of course, make a perfectly good argument against 
legalizing marijuana and at the same time admit that you'd be far 
more alarmed if you found your 17-year-old experimenting with heroin, 
cocaine or meth than with pot - however much you deplore all teenage drug use.

According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, "Heroin is 
particularly addictive because it enters the brain so rapidly. ... 
Cardiac function slows. Breathing is also severely slowed, sometimes 
to the point of death."

Surely our blunderbuss DEA should be able to admit that whatever the 
downsides of marijuana, overdose deaths are not among them.

True, pot's proponents have a pronounced tendency to dismiss its 
perils, particularly for the young. But the DEA easily outdoes them 
for un-nuanced answers, such as Leonhart's empty mantra that "all 
illegal drugs are bad."

Maybe this explains why the last two DEA agents in charge of the 
Denver office have taken such clumsy public stances against 
Colorado's medical marijuana law, with the current chief agent saying 
she'd refuse to live in a city with dispensaries.

Does that mean she'll have to leave the state if voters approve a 
measure on this fall's ballot decriminalizing the drug?

The DEA is an important federal agency. It would be helpful if it 
weren't staffed by propagandists. 
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom