TRUTH BECOMES THE FIRST CASUALTY IN MARIJUANA WAR

Terry O'Neill's letter, "Effective illegal-drug policy must include
prevention,'' (Times Union April 2) contains misleading statistics
regarding the increase in teenage marijuana use.

According to the 1997 Monitoring The Future Study, considered the best
early warning system for drug use among youth, marijuana use among eighth-,
10th- and 12th-graders is down 41 percent from its peak in 1978.

Mr. O'Neill's mistake was relying upon information taken from the Drug
Enforcement Administration Web page. The DEA has its own agenda -- and it
doesn't include providing accurate information regarding marijuana. For
example, the DEA claims, "There are over 10,000 scientific studies that
prove marijuana is a harmful addictive drug.''

According to Beverly Urbanek, research associate of the University of
Mississippi Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, the "10,000
studies'' claim is simply not true.

The institute maintains a 12,000-citation bibliography on the marijuana
literature. Ms. Urbanek explained, "Many of the studies cited in the
bibliography are clinical, but the total number also includes papers on the
chemistry and botany of the cannabis plant, cultivation, epidemiological
surveys, legal aspects, eradication studies, detection, storage, economic
aspects and a whole spectrum of others that do not mention positive or
negative effects.''

"However, we have never broken down that figure into positive/negative
papers, and I would not even venture a guess as to what that number would
be. You cannot provide a list of 10,000 negative studies,'' she said.

When the government declared war on marijuana, truth was the first casualty.

WALTER F. WOUK
President
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
Howes Cave