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."