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."