THE REAL DOPE ON MARIJUANA

By peddling alarmist nonsense about marijuana, the United Nations'
drug-control office has undermined its own credibility, which is bad
both for the UN and for health officials seeking to draw attention to
the truly bad drugs.

In a written statement accompanying the UN's World Drug Report for
2006, the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime let
loose: "Today, the harmful characteristics of cannabis are no longer
that different from those of other plant-based drugs such as cocaine
and heroin," wrote Antonio Maria Costa.

Well, they are a little different. Cannabis can't kill you with an
overdose and doesn't provoke physical addiction, and the price is
generally so low that few users resort to crime to feed their habits.
That's all admitted, grudgingly, in the study from Mr. Costa's office.

The rest of an extended section on cannabis tries to whip up fear,
uncertainty and doubt about the drug. It cites empty statistics about
the number of times someone goes to an emergency room in the United
States and marijuana gets "mentioned" on his or her chart. The number
went way up between 1995 and 2003, but it doesn't really mean
anything: if a fraternity brother drinks 10 beers and shares a joint
and then falls off a porch, marijuana will be "mentioned" by the
doctors treating him, though it really says nothing about the dangers
of marijuana use. The UN itself admits that "in 72 per cent of the
cases when cannabis was mentioned, other drugs were also mentioned."
So maybe the real scourge is the other drugs, or the mixing of drugs,
not marijuana itself.

Smoking marijuana isn't good for you, but the UN can't show that it's
worse than smoking tobacco. The UN notes that amid all the evidence,
only a single study shows a link between smoking marijuana and
getting cancer. Along the way, another inconsistency: The UN says
that cannabis smokers "who smoked an average of only a few joints per
day showed the same degree of airway injury as that detected in
tobacco smokers who smoked 20 to 30 cigarettes per day." Here, "only
a few joints per day" is considered damaging; a few pages before,
five joints per week is defined as heavy use.

Fudging and dishonesty permeate the report's section on marijuana,
casting serious doubt on the usefulness of the other information the
UN provides, particularly about opium and heroin emanating from
Afghanistan and cocaine in Europe.

This same overreaching has destroyed the U.S.'s credibility in its
war on drugs: when some mild drugs (alcohol, nicotine) are legal but
others (marijuana certainly, perhaps ecstasy) are discussed in the
same apocalyptic tones as heroin and crystal meth, there's no way to
tell what's true and what's not. Ordinary people of all demographics
have enough first-hand experience with marijuana, either because
they've tried it or know someone who has, to recognize that all the
rhetoric and policing and arrests and life sentences are not
connected to any rational goal and deserve scorn, not respect.

The United Nations should be above such deceit. Instead, its
credibility is taking yet another self-administered hit.