Pubdate: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 Source: Columbus Dispatch (OH) Copyright: 2014 The Columbus Dispatch Contact: http://www.dispatch.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/93 Note: - Bloomberg View Page: A16 Other View Points MARIJUANA IS NOT A HARMLESS DRUG Marijuana has now been legalized or decriminalized in 17 states and the District of Columbia, with Maryland joining the list just last week. Ballot measures to loosen rules on marijuana use could come to a vote this year in at least five states. Twenty-one states already allow marijuana for medical use. What's unhealthy about this trend is that it coincides with a declining awareness of marijuana's dangers - especially among young people. Less than 40 percent of high school seniors think marijuana use poses a great risk, down from 55 percent in 2003. Cigarettes are dangerous, more and more adolescents have come to realize, but they don't believe marijuana is. (In fact, they're both unhealthy.) That they could be so wrong about a drug that more than a third have used makes it clear: In their drive to roll back laws against marijuana, and for the revenue that undoing prohibition would raise, states are inadvertently stoking a serious public-health problem. Marijuana poses the greatest threat to the still-developing brains of teenagers. Steady use can bring lasting impairments in memory, intellectual functioning and emotion control. Marijuana use has been linked to depression, anxiety, even psychosis. Smoking pot once a week or more appears to actually change the size and shape of certain brain regions in young people. Dependence is a special problem, not limited to adolescents but more prevalent among them: 1 in 6 teenagers become addicted to marijuana, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse ( the comparable figure for adults is 1 in 11). With dependence comes every sort of social trouble: isolation, failure at school and work, often profound unhappiness. There are other effects, equally disturbing. Smoking pot is bad for the lungs. It slows reaction time ( fatal car accidents involving drivers testing positive for marijuana tripled in the U. S. from 1999 to 2010). Pot use during pregnancy can harm the fetal brain, and there remain unanswered questions about how marijuana affects adult and geriatric brains. Both Colorado and Washington, the two states that have legalized marijuana for adults, have rules to keep minors away from it. Such restrictions are essential, but they do nothing to educate kids or their parents about the risks marijuana poses to still-growing brains, or to inform adult users about the dangers of overuse. States should direct tax revenue from marijuana sales toward public education campaigns, as Gov. John Hickenlooper wants to do in Colorado. Colorado collected $2 million in January alone. As with all sin taxes, states will have to balance the competing goals of raising revenue and affecting behavior. It is not hypocritical to use money from taxing a product to discourage its use; states do it now with cigarettes and alcohol, for example. People argue marijuana is no worse than alcohol, which has been legal for decades, and that it has medical uses in treating pain and nausea. But those facts do nothing to lessen marijuana's risks; they only boost the misimpression that the drug is nothing for anyone to worry about. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom