MARIJUANA FIGURES EXTREMELY MISLEADING

I would like to respond to Judy Kreamer's letter of May 26, "Campos
overlooks marijuana's dangers." Using the 1999 Drug Abuse Warning Network
data, she states, "14,790 marijuana/hashish patients were treated for
unexpected reactions, 9,072 were treated for overdoses, and 7,737 for
detox." These statistics are extremely misleading.

The DAWN data she uses simply records the fact that marijuana was present
in a person's bloodstream at the time of admission to an emergency room for
a drug-related incident. From the DAWN report available at www.samhsa.gov/oas/dawn.htm ". . . not every reported substance is, by
itself, necessarily a cause of the medical emergency." Indeed, the person
could have used marijuana a week or more before incident. In this case,
marijuana very probably had nothing to do with the reason the person was in
the ER.

Also, there has never been a single confirmed case of marijuana/hashish
overdose, much less 9,072 in a single year. Finally, we are led to believe
that 7,737 patients visited the ER for detox from marijuana. Withdrawal
symptoms from marijuana are either not present or very mild. They are
certainly less severe than the symptoms present when someone tries to quit
smoking. The interested reader is referred to www.druglibrary.org for more
information.

It's time to look beyond Kreamer's "reefer madness" view of marijuana.

David Dreisigmeyer

Fort Collins