A Late Bloomer Joins the Marijuana Debate

LYNN ZIMMER wasn't even in the same room as a marijuana cigarette until
1980, when she was 33 years old.

By then she already had two children and was working on her Ph.D. in
sociology. Somehow, as the child of working-class parents in upstate
Binghamton, she had sidestepped the turbulence of her generation, and its
sweetly pungent perfume.

"When I graduated from high school in 1965, I had never even heard of
marijuana," she said. "By 1967 I had a child and was taking care of my
family and going to school at night, and working in a day-care center
mornings. So I had no interest in the 60's. I guess I saw it on television."

But for all the frenzied experimentation and generational struggle that
took place outside her window back then, the debate over marijuana has only
grown in intensity in the ensuing decades. And suddenly, Ms. Zimmer finds
herself in its dead center. Now teaching sociology at Queens College, she
has become at once an academic authority on the drug and a passionate
advocate of its decriminalization.

Ms. Zimmer's arguments about marijuana's essential harmlessness, collected
in a recent book co-written with a City University colleague, Dr. John P.
Morgan, have become a flashpoint in the battle over legalization, which
gained steam earlier this month when five Western states voted to permit
the medical use of marijuana. Groups that favor liberalizing the nation's
drug laws have been promoting the book, which bears the somewhat
presumptuous title of "Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts," as a kind of
bible on the subject, saying it effectively shoots down the accepted wisdom
that the drug is a physically harmful gateway to crack and the abyss.

Academic experts have been far less kind, calling it a well-researched
compilation of opinion that occasionally leaves out information that might
cast marijuana in a negative light. Opponents of drug use have condemned it
as an invitation to surrender in the war against drugs.

"There's no doubt marijuana leads to trouble and I can show you 10 books
that prove that for every one like the one you just showed me," Police
Commissioner Howard Safir, a former drug enforcement agent, told MSNBC
earlier this year. "The fact that these two professors are teachers leads
me to wonder if they are fit to be leading a classroom."

Under Safir and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, marijuana arrests in New York
have soared to record levels this year, 30 years after the drug became the
token of the counterculture, and the arrests are likely to reach 40,000 by
the end of the year, eight times the number six years ago. Most of those
arrested are charged with possession of the drug.

To Ms. Zimmer, all this effort is a waste of taxpayer money, a misguided
extension of the quality-of-life campaign that runs counter to a growing
public perception, cherished by many baby boomers, that marijuana holds
little intrinsic danger.

"We now are getting into the adult population many more people who have had
experience with marijuana," she said, at the dining room table of her
apartment in Chelsea. "Many have children and are concerned about their
children, so they're a little ambivalent, but I think they are questioning
some of the exaggerated claims about marijuana's dangers and certainly
questioning the utility of putting people in jail for engaging in a
behavior that 70 million people have engaged in."

Some of that perception has been fostered by several large foundations that
are promoting the relaxation of drug laws, and Ms. Zimmer, 51, has been the
beneficiary of some of their largesse. Her book was published by the
Lindesmith Center, a group funded by the financier George Soros, who has
made a worldwide campaign of finding a less punitive response to drug use
than the current laws. She served for a time on the board of directors of
the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, known as Norml,
and her book is dedicated to Dr. Lester Grinspoon, the Harvard professor
who serves as chairman of the Norml Foundation's board.

Ms. Zimmer said she first became interested in the subject after conducting
a study in 1986 of Operation Pressure Point, an attempt by the Police
Department to rid the Lower East Side of drugs, an effort that she and
others judged ineffective. She later became more interested in the various
claims being made about the dangers of marijuana, most of which she
determined were exaggerated, and which she attempts to debunk in her book.
But in the polarized world of the drug debate, the book inevitably came to
be considered a partisan argument, particularly because it rarely
acknowledges any downside to marijuana.

"The book puts forward as many myths as it debunks," said Mark A.R.
Kleiman, a drug policy expert at the University of California at Los
Angeles, who himself favors decriminalizing possession. "If you didn't know
anything and read the book and you're not too critical about methodology,
you'd be impressed. Otherwise you sort of say, come on."

But Ms. Zimmer, straightforward and almost prim in her love of research and
statistics, remains confident that any thorough review of the scientific
literature will produce the same conclusions. And no, she said, although
she did smoke the occasional joint, she never seriously indulged.

"I was way too busy for that," she said.

Checked-by: Richard Lake