IRRATIONALITY FUELS NATIONAL POT PARANOIA

For sheer dishonesty, it would be difficult to top the federal government's
campaign against the medical use of marijuana. Several studies have
confirmed that smoking marijuana helps relieve nausea in patients taking
cancer and AIDS drugs. It has also been shown to benefit people suffering
from glaucoma, severe arthritis and other painful conditions.

Some of these studies indicate that synthetic substitutes that attempt to
produce the same pain-relieving effects are not as effective, and a great
deal of anecdotal evidence suggests this is the case, as well.

Smoking marijuana is not without risk, but the risks are minimal compared
with those associated with many prescription drugs. No one has ever died of
an overdose of marijuana. An ordinary bottle of sleeping pills (or for that
matter of whiskey) is far more dangerous.

Why then does the federal government continue its campaign to overturn the
will of the people in the various states (including Colorado) who have
approved the medical use of the drug? The answer has much to do with the
monumental irrationality that dominates this particular battlefield in the
war on drugs.

As Michael Massing relates in his fascinating book The Fix, facets of the
federal government's current marijuana policy can actually be traced to a
summer evening in Atlanta in the 1980s, when a suburban couple came home
and discovered their 13-year-old daughter smoking marijuana in their backyard.

This couple started a grass-roots political campaign that eventually
stretched far beyond Atlanta -- a campaign whose central premise could be
described as "Marijuana is turning America's teenagers into depressed
sociopaths who hate their parents."

That teenagers seem to exhibit such characteristics with about equal
frequency whether or not they happen to smoke marijuana is the kind of
detail that anti-drug crusaders tend to ignore.

Anyway, Massing describes how the relatively sane attitude toward marijuana
use that prevailed in much of the federal government during the Nixon
administration and the years immediately following gave way to the
hysterics of the past couple of decades, when all the old myths about
marijuana have been trotted out once again.

Myth 1: Marijuana is a "gateway" drug. There is no evidence for this claim.
Some marijuana users go on to use more dangerous illegal (and legal -- like
alcohol and tobacco) substances. Some collectors of baseball cards do as
well. In neither case has a causal link been shown to exist between the
former and the latter activities.

Myth 2: Marijuana destroys the motivation of those who use it. Again, this
has never been demonstrated. Seventy million of this nation's citizens have
used marijuana. At least 10 million do so regularly. With such a large
sample, you would think it would be easy to demonstrate that those who
smoke marijuana are less motivated than those who don't.

Myth 3: The government doesn't prosecute ordinary marijuana users -- only
large-scale sellers and distributors. In fact, nearly 700,000 Americans
were arrested last year on marijuana charges. Eighty-five percent of these
arrests were for simple possession, not sale or distribution.

What explains the tenacity of such myths? Here is one possibility: The
suburban anti-drug warriors who provide much of the political impetus for
the drug war are people who inhabit a culture that, in many ways, is bad
for children. Divorce is terrible for children, yet the divorce rate among
this cohort is more than 50 percent. A family life centered around empty
materialism is bad for children, yet many of these people maintain
two-career workaholic lifestyles, and assuage their guilt by showering
their children with toys instead of attention.

One day, such people wake up and discover their children have serious
emotional problems. Blaming "drugs" is easier than looking in the mirror.