SHOULD MARIJUANA BE LEGALIZED?

Thirty-somethings Tom, Dick and Harry are at a party. Tom's pounding down
beers, Dick's chain-smoking Marlboros, and Harry takes a few drags from a
funny pipe shaped like Disney's dog Pluto.

Which of them could face a criminal record?

It doesn't take a legal expert to figure out that the only one breaking the
law is Harry. But why is Harry's drug of choice any worse in the eyes of
the law than Tom's and Dick's?

It may just be an image problem, says one local college professor, though a
Fond du Lac County health nurse contends that there are good reasons why
marijuana is illegal.

"If you look at history of most drugs, most drugs really are not as
dramatic as publicity indicates," said Dr. Jonathan Nicoud, professor of
psychology at Marian College. "A lot of the history of drug regulation is
based more on PR (public relations) work than any kind of scientific research."

In the first quarter of the 20th century, marijuana was not illegal, and
opium and its derivatives were available by prescription from doctors.

In 1919, the government enacted Prohibition, with a staff of 170 agents to
enforce it, according to the textbook, "Drugs, Society and Human Behavior,"
used in Nicoud's classes. A year later, when Prohibition ended, the
bureaucrats faced unemployment.

"Once it's born, any bureaucracy wants to continue to exist and you had a
number of bureaucrats whose existence wasn't justified by the job they had.
So they looked for a new menace," Nicoud said.

That menace became marijuana.

"Marijuana itself is not without risk, but in terms of it being a menace,
it doesn't seem at all close to that," Nicoud said. "Other drugs are more
dangerous, but they picked marijuana because it wasn't used a lot in the
mainstream. It was used by farm people and minority people, so if they
picked on that one, there were no people who could vote against it."

The textbook suggests that the government had some influence in newspapers'
printing of stories about blacks and Mexicans smoking pot and becoming unruly.

"A lot of what was offered as 'evidence' against the drug was stories of
blacks and Hispanics going crazy and raping women and killing people,"
Nicoud said.

The textbook also cites an unfounded connection between marijuana use and
insanity as one of the main arguments for outlawing the drug in the 1930s.

"The notion still remains that marijuana can cause a type of psychosis.
There have been reports of psychotic breakdowns occurring with rare
frequency after marijuana has been smoked, but the causal relationship is
in question. The psychotic episodes are generally self-limiting and seem to
occur in individuals with a history of psychiatric problems." (Page 420).

"The history of any law is not always based on reason. The history of the
legal age for drinking has gone up and down over the years and has been
based on little evidence," Nicoud said.

Nicoud said studies have shown nicotine and alcohol to be bigger killers
than all kinds of illegal drugs combined, yet the war on drugs is waged
primarily upon drugs classified as illegal.

"It is a strange thing that we have concerns about certain drugs that
aren't very well based in fact, and drugs we are not concerned about are
drugs we should be concerned about, such as alcohol and tobacco," Nicoud said.

"In terms of killers, they (alcohol and tobacco) are first and second, but
how many times do you see wars on alcohol or nicotine? It's ironic that we
worry most about drugs that are problematic but are not the biggest
problems," Nicoud said.

Nicoud said the heavy constituency of cigarette smokers keeps the
government from rendering it illegal.

"There are so many people who smoke cigarettes that no one wants to outlaw
it. We allow it because there is a big political constituency that supports
it," he said. "

With marijuana, there wasn't a big political constituency, so it was easier
to outlaw, he said.

"As the constituency in favor of it gets larger, then there is more
pressure to decriminalize it."

But a local nurse says there's plenty to be concerned about with marijuana.

The problem with pot is that it's stored in the fat, said Fond du Lac
County Public Health Nurse Darlene Hanke. That's why it takes so long to
get out of the system.

"The brain is 99 percent fat," she said. Thus, the active ingredient in
marijuana, THC, hangs around in the brain and damages brain cells, she said.

Alcohol, on the other hand, is water-soluble and is usually out of the
system by the next day.

Hanke said a videotape of a test involving airline pilots who had smoked
marijuana convinced her that pot is worse for the body than alcohol. The
video showed that, the day after smoking pot, the pilots' coordination and
sense of direction were impaired, she said.

Hanke also maintains that contrary to popular belief that it's not
addictive, it is.

"Years ago people thought it wasn't physically addictive, but you do get
withdrawal symptoms if you've been smoking or eating it in brownies," Hanke
said.

She listed some side effects of withdrawal: "cravings, insomnia or sleep
difficulty, aggression, restlessness, irritability, strange dreams and
vivid color, highly emotional dreams or nightmares, decreased appetite,
weight loss and stomach aches."

She said using marijuana could suppress the immune system, so users may be
ill more often than they normally would be. For this reason, she doesn't
approve of medicinal uses of marijuana for AIDS patients and other people
with terminal conditions.