BARBARA KAY VS. MARY JANE

In yesterday's National Post, our columnist Barbara Kay unexpectedly
revived an editorial that appeared in our pages in July of last year,
when the UN Office of Drugs and Crime declared Canadians the world's
leading consumers of marijuana. We noted at the time that having a
proportion of pot smokers four times the world average doesn't seem
to be doing us much quantifiable harm, as it obviously would if we
had a similarly strong propensity for alcohol or tobacco.

Ms. Kay has assembled a file of evidence -- of varying quality -- on
some dangers that cannabis may legitimately pose. Having presented
it, she thus "respectfully ask[s] the Post to reconsider its
editorial stance on the legalization of pot." Our stance was, and is,
that as terrible as you can possibly make marijuana sound by the use
of anecdote and by cherry-picking the scientific literature, you
cannot make a credible argument that its public health and other
social effects are as bad as those of alcohol and tobacco.

So why treat them differently? And if we're not going to treat them
differently, are we going to prohibit them all? As libertarian-minded
editors, we hope not.

We tried prohibiting alcohol: This policy had the effect of enriching
organized crime, encouraging the sale of harder beverages that could
be smuggled more easily, increasing addiction, and creating a
constant danger from adulteration. If the underground marijuana
market of today suffers from some of these ills, isn't it remotely
possible that legalization would actually be beneficial?

"In March 2007, The Lancet, Britain's leading medical journal,
declared cannabis to be more dangerous and addictive than LSD and
Ecstasy," Ms. Kay writes. She is, of course, quite correct, and her
point will seem overwhelming to readers who don't stop to consider
that LSD and ecstasy (MDMA) are ridiculous examples of toxic or
addictive drugs. MDMA is difficult to overdose on, and LSD nearly
impossible; both were rated relatively safe by doctors in David
Nutt's aforementioned 2007 study. Ecstasy, in fact, was considered
the safest of all drugs of abuse. In other words, Mrs. Kay is
exploiting societal misconceptions about other drugs to impeach marijuana.

And where did pot actually end up on the Lancet scale? In the middle,
well behind -- you guessed it -- tobacco and alcohol.

Challenging our "intellectual sobriety," our columnist puts forth two
other main arguments: that the marijuana of today is stronger than
that of the past, and that the drug has now been "linked" to mental
illness by scholars. Both are true, though both are vastly overstated
in her column. Samples of government-seized marijuana collected by
the Potency Monitoring Project at the University of Mississippi
contain about twice as much THC nowadays, on average, as they did
when the project began keeping records in 1983. Since this means a
user has to inhale less tar to get a buzz, this could be, on net,
good health news. Either way, it is certainly not fair to denounce
legalization while fretting over the effects of criminalization,
which forces contraband shippers to favour a lower-volume product.

Under alcohol Prohibition, people routinely drank 150-proof
moonshine. Give them a choice, and it turns out they generally favour
wine and beer for their other pleasant qualities. The same is almost
certainly true of marijuana, as any coffeehouse pot vendor in the
Netherlands can attest. (And, sorry, we don't assign any credibility
to an addiction counsellor's anecdotal claim, cited by Ms. Kay, that
to-day's users are throwing out marijuana leaves and smoking only
pure cannabis bud: That would be exactly like discarding $5 bills
just because you happen to have some twenties in your wallet.)

As for the "link" between marijuana and mental illness, it is still
being debated, and the consensus is that marijuana may play a role in
precipitating it amongst those who are predisposed to it. Few
scientists consider the drug itself a cause of psychotic behaviour,
but adolescents and those with a family history or early signs of
schizophrenia are increasing their risk by consuming it. Heavy
long-term abuse may play some role in depression, though it is
difficult to factor out the other lifestyle variables that might make
a hardcore pot smoker miserable.

None of these effects, obviously, have been strong enough to skew
public health statistics very much in pot-friendly Canada; compared
with the accepted impact of tobacco and alcohol, they are puerile
trivialities. So may we expect Ms. Kay to don her bonnet, pick up her
hatchet and take up the battle against the legal poisons that openly
kill thousands of Canadians every year -- as opposed to an illicit
one that millions enjoy, and that rarely, if ever, takes a life?