POT CAN MAKE TEENS MENTALLY ILL, U.S. TO SUGGEST

But One Critic Says A Family History Of Psychosis Is A Bigger Risk Factor.

WASHINGTON - Smoking marijuana can make teenagers mentally ill, even
suicidal - at least that's the message behind a nationwide campaign
announced Tuesday by the Bush administration. "Marijuana can be dangerous
for our children's mental health," White House drug czar John Walters told
reporters at a news conference.

Neil McKeganey, a Scotland-based researcher joining the administration for
the announcement, said that while it was long assumed teens with
psychological problems gravitated to marijuana to self-medicate, growing
evidence indicates "the marijuana use itself is on some level causing the
problems."

But some researchers and advocates of legalizing marijuana say the latest
international findings suggest only that this may be true for a fraction of
teens, who have a history of psychotic disorders in their families. They
say the administration seems more interested in sending a broad-based
political message - as Congress and a growing number of states consider
medicinal marijuana and decriminalization policies that could affect
millions of users - than in targeting the far smaller subset of teens most
at risk.

"Our position is, absolutely, young kids should not be smoking marijuana,"
said Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project.

However, Mirken said, "there are real doubts about how definitive some of
this information is, whether the evidence for causality is as strong as
they're making it out to be."

In a related development, an analysis of federal crime statistics released
Tuesday showed the focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted
significantly over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now
accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide.

The study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing
Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted
from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10
years later. During the same period, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent
of the total to 45 percent.

Coming in the wake of the focus on crack cocaine in the late 1980s, the
increasing emphasis on marijuana enforcement was accompanied by a dramatic
rise in overall drug arrests, from fewer than 1.1 million in 1990 to more
than 1.5 million a decade later. Eighty percent of that increase came from
marijuana arrests, the study found.

Marijuana remains by far the most widely used illegal drug. In California,
about 443,000 youths ages 12-17 used marijuana in 2003, the most recent
year for which estimates are available, with 241,000 having smoked the drug
in any given month, according to estimates by the Department of Health and
Human Services.

The campaign by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, including ads
slated to run next week in newspapers across the country, tells parents
that youths are twice as likely to develop depression later in life if they
smoke marijuana on a weekly basis and that marijuana users ages 12-17 are
more than three times as likely as nonusers to have suicidal thoughts. The
American Psychiatric Association and a variety of other medical, behavioral
and school groups have signed on.

Critics say parents who discover their teens abusing marijuana should look
into counseling and perhaps treatment for depression, but that addressing
the marijuana use and leaving it at that is not the answer.

"Just because pot comes first doesn't mean pot is the cause - depressed
teens have a whole lot of things going on," said Mitch Earleywine, an
associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern California
and decriminalization advocate who wrote the 2002 book, "Understanding
Marijuana."

The campaign also cites an increased risk of schizophrenia among teen
marijuana users.

A well-regarded study out this year does show such a link, but Earleywine
said the same study also suggests that only a small proportion of teens may
be susceptible.

First, he said, they must inherit a certain gene from both parents; that
rules out about three of every four people. Second, they are chronic
marijuana users. Of them, about 15 percent develop psychotic symptoms,
apparently linked to the brain's reaction to marijuana.

"If a subset of folks have psychotics (schizophrenics or those with other
personality disorders) in their family, like a brother or a parent, you
should steer clear of marijuana," Earleywine said.

"And that's what they should say, not, 'Oh my God, you're going to go
psychotic if you smoke pot.' Because what happens is, if they say, 'If you
smoke pot you're going to go crazy,' and kids know people who smoke pot who
aren't crazy, then when the drug czar says something that's true, like
'Methamphetamine is dangerous,' the kids don't believe that, either."