Pubdate: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 Source: Gainesville Sun, The (FL) Copyright: 2014 The Gainesville Sun Contact: http://www.gainesville.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/163 Author: Christopher Curry LAW SCHOOL PANELISTS DIFFER ON LEGALIZATION OF POT Florida voters will decide on Amendment 2 in less than two weeks, but it's safe to say that the disagreement over medical marijuana and, more broadly, marijuana legalization will carry on well after Nov. 4. That was one takeaway from a panel discussion on marijuana legalization that the University of Florida Levin College of Law student law review hosted Friday at the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. "This debate is going to continue," said panel member David Blake, the deputy attorney general for the state of Colorado. "It's been going on 20 years, and it will go on 20 more." In Colorado, Blake saw first legal medical marijuana and then voter-approved recreational marijuana. He said he personally opposed both but is now charged with crafting and updating the regulations for the state's legal marijuana system Blake said he expected medical marijuana to lead to loopholes that people will exploit. When Colorado first had medical marijuana, he said "people blew out of proportion the ailments they were suffering from" to qualify. Like Blake, Dr. Scott Teitelbaum, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida College of Medicine and director of the Florida Recovery Center, feels medical marijuana is a "Trojan horse" and that the real intent of Amendment 2 is the outright legalization of marijuana. Teitelbaum said the debate should then move to issues like decriminalization instead of the purported medical benefits that he felt lacked evidence to back them up. Robert Mikos, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, said there is a lot of room for policy in the middle ground between outright prohibition and legalization. Decriminalization is one option, he said, noting that other potentially harmful substances like alcohol and tobacco are legal. The most significant points of disagreement were between Bertha Madras, a professor of psychobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and former deputy director of demand reduction for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and Carl Hart, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University. Madras said those who support medical marijuana lack scientific findings to back up their assertions and ignore studies about marijuana's negative effects. These supporters also seek to circumvent the regulatory process for bringing a medicine to market through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Madras said safe dosage levels for marijuana are not clear. She said pot impairs cognitive skill, including learning ability and memory. Madras also said that, under the clinical definition of what intoxication means in terms of the effect on the brain and behavior, marijuana is an intoxicant and Oxycontin is not. "I'm thinking I'm back in 1937 all over again by some of the comments made," Hart said at one point, referring to the year the federal government passed the law essentially making marijuana illegal. Hart said he has administered thousands of doses of marijuana to people during the course of research and, while some have had negative cognitive effects, it was by no means across the board. He said marijuana should not be considered "innocuous," as it is a psychoactive drug, but that drugs like Oxycontin or Adderall have been approved by the FDA and bring a slew of potential harmful side effects, including addiction. Over the years, Hart said, research on marijuana has largely been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and has been "skewed" toward abuse. "Science has exaggerated the harms associated with marijuana," Hart said. Beau Kilmer, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center, said each side in the debate could make a legitimate claim that science is on its side. "Both sides can bring up five peer-reviewed studies that say the exact opposite thing," Kilmer said. He said the ongoing national debate on marijuana should spark a new generation of research and more definitive answers. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard