MARIJUANA SPECIAL REPORT: CLAIM TWO:

"More than 120 000 people in the US seek treatment each year for their
marijuana addiction . . ."

After years of decline, marijuana use among teenagers is now climbing
rapidly in almost every industrialised nation. Will this create a
generation of cannabis addicts?

The middle classes who enjoy a smoke once or twice a week may laugh at the
idea. But doctors who treat the minority of users who have lost control
take it more seriously. The pragmatic question is how big is this minority
and would it expand if the drug was decriminalised or even legalised? The
experience of the Netherlands (see Vraag een Politeagent) suggests the
answer to the second question is "no". The first question is tougher.

At the very least, NIDA's figure of 120 000 cannot be taken seriously. It
includes people who are arrested for cannabis offences and then given the
chance of going into treatment as an alternative to prosecution, as well as
workers who test positive for cannabis in random urine tests and opt for
rehabilitation rather than being fired. The figures don't tell us how many
people really get hooked.

At Columbia University in New York, addiction epidemiologist Denise Kandel
has been taking a different tack. She has been analysing data collected
every year in the US National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. And she
concludes that subtle symptoms of dependence are more widespread among
teenage users than previously thought.

Shocking statistic

About 15 per cent of teenagers who smoke marijuana report three or more
"symptoms" of dependence from a list of six possible symptoms. They range
from "feeling dependent" or being unable to cut down on consumption to
using ever larger amounts of cannabis to get the same effect. Applying
these same measures to alcohol, it turns out that marijuana is just as
addictive as alcohol for adults and even more so for teenagers (see below).
That shocks most marijuana users, but not Kandel, who believes kids may be
unusually "sensitive" to marijuana for biological as well as social
reasons. The way she sees it, the reason we have so many alcoholics is
simply that there are so many people drinking.

(image) Days of depence: marijuana's addictive powers wane with age

The problem with this kind of research is that it all depends on what is
meant by addiction. A drug addict is usually seen as a person liable to
both withdrawal symptoms and long-term damage to their health. But Kandel's
self-report criteria are based on a broader definition. If we applied them
to coffee, vast numbers of us would qualify as addicts. Similarly, many
people might describe themselves as "addicted" to shopping or television or
chocolate. Kandel's analysis suggests young marijuana smokers are more
likely to show symptoms of dependence than their beer-swilling
contemporaries, but it doesn't tell us which substance is the more
dangerously addictive.

What is clear is that as users enter their 20s, they report this dependence
far less frequently. And of the people who are still smoking the drug in
their 50s, fewer than one in 30 qualify in her analysis as being dependent.
Addiction rates for nicotine follow the opposite trend.

This leads to what is perhaps the most telling statistic about the
addictive powers of cannabis: more than 90 per cent of people who have ever
used the drug have long since quit. While most people continue drinking and
cigarette smoking long after the first flush of youth, people drop the weed
in droves after the age of 30.