Source: Herald, The (WA) Contact: Website: http://www.heraldnet.com/ Copyright: 1998 The Daily Herald Co. Pubdate: Friday, 27 November, 1998 Author: David Firestone, The New York Times Note: Our newshawk writes to tell us we messed up. As posted and at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v98.n1088.a04.html it reads: - ----- Editor's Note: First paragraph worded differently from that in http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v98.n1084.a08.html SOCIOLOGIST'S BOOK A FLASHPOINT OF MARIJUANA DEBATE After skipping frenzy of the '60s, author now drug advocate LYNN ZIMMER wasn't even in the same room as a marijuana cigarette until 1980, when she was 33 years old. - ----- But the first sentence is actually just a second headline in The Herald. The actual articles are identical. Thus it actually reads: - ----- SOCIOLOGIST'S BOOK A FLASHPOINT OF MARIJUANA DEBATE After Skipping Frenzy Of The '60s, Author Now Drug Advocate LYNN ZIMMER wasn't even in the same room as a marijuana cigarette until 1980, when she was 33 years old. By then she already had two children and was working on her Ph.D. in sociology. Somehow, as the child of working-class parents in upstate Binghamton, she had sidestepped the turbulence of her generation, and its sweetly pungent perfume. "When I graduated from high school in 1965, I had never even heard of marijuana," she said. "By 1967 I had a child and was taking care of my family and going to school at night, and working in a day-care center mornings. So I had no interest in the 60's. I guess I saw it on television." But for all the frenzied experimentation and generational struggle that took place outside her window back then, the debate over marijuana has only grown in intensity in the ensuing decades. And suddenly, Ms. Zimmer finds herself in its dead center. Now teaching sociology at Queens College, she has become at once an academic authority on the drug and a passionate advocate of its decriminalization. Ms. Zimmer's arguments about marijuana's essential harmlessness, collected in a recent book co-written with a City University colleague, Dr. John P. Morgan, have become a flashpoint in the battle over legalization, which gained steam earlier this month when five Western states voted to permit the medical use of marijuana. Groups that favor liberalizing the nation's drug laws have been promoting the book, which bears the somewhat presumptuous title of "Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts," as a kind of bible on the subject, saying it effectively shoots down the accepted wisdom that the drug is a physically harmful gateway to crack and the abyss. Academic experts have been far less kind, calling it a well-researched compilation of opinion that occasionally leaves out information that might cast marijuana in a negative light. Opponents of drug use have condemned it as an invitation to surrender in the war against drugs. "There's no doubt marijuana leads to trouble and I can show you 10 books that prove that for every one like the one you just showed me," Police Commissioner Howard Safir, a former drug enforcement agent, told MSNBC earlier this year. "The fact that these two professors are teachers leads me to wonder if they are fit to be leading a classroom." Under Safir and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, marijuana arrests in New York have soared to record levels this year, 30 years after the drug became the token of the counterculture, and the arrests are likely to reach 40,000 by the end of the year, eight times the number six years ago. Most of those arrested are charged with possession of the drug. To Ms. Zimmer, all this effort is a waste of taxpayer money, a misguided extension of the quality-of-life campaign that runs counter to a growing public perception, cherished by many baby boomers, that marijuana holds little intrinsic danger. "We now are getting into the adult population many more people who have had experience with marijuana," she said, at the dining room table of her apartment in Chelsea. "Many have children and are concerned about their children, so they're a little ambivalent, but I think they are questioning some of the exaggerated claims about marijuana's dangers and certainly questioning the utility of putting people in jail for engaging in a behavior that 70 million people have engaged in." Some of that perception has been fostered by several large foundations that are promoting the relaxation of drug laws, and Ms. Zimmer, 51, has been the beneficiary of some of their largesse. Her book was published by the Lindesmith Center, a group funded by the financier George Soros, who has made a worldwide campaign of finding a less punitive response to drug use than the current laws. She served for a time on the board of directors of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, known as Norml, and her book is dedicated to Dr. Lester Grinspoon, the Harvard professor who serves as chairman of the Norml Foundation's board. Ms. Zimmer said she first became interested in the subject after conducting a study in 1986 of Operation Pressure Point, an attempt by the Police Department to rid the Lower East Side of drugs, an effort that she and others judged ineffective. She later became more interested in the various claims being made about the dangers of marijuana, most of which she determined were exaggerated, and which she attempts to debunk in her book. But in the polarized world of the drug debate, the book inevitably came to be considered a partisan argument, particularly because it rarely acknowledges any downside to marijuana. "The book puts forward as many myths as it debunks," said Mark A.R. Kleiman, a drug policy expert at the University of California at Los Angeles, who himself favors decriminalizing possession. "If you didn't know anything and read the book and you're not too critical about methodology, you'd be impressed. Otherwise you sort of say, come on." But Ms. Zimmer, straightforward and almost prim in her love of research and statistics, remains confident that any thorough review of the scientific literature will produce the same conclusions. And no, she said, although she did smoke the occasional joint, she never seriously indulged. "I was way too busy for that," she said. - --- Checked-by: Richard Lake