LEGALIZED POT BACKERS RAISE GOOD POINTS, BUT . . .

They've called me brain-washed, illogical, a government stooge, dumber than
dirt, squarer than Al Gore, and a fenderhead.

Twice I've wondered in print whether legalized marijuana would be a good
thing, twice concluded it wouldn't, and both times been stoned, so to
speak, by readers.

Charming people, these pot proponents.

They've raised some good points just the same. Such as:

Statistics indicating that marijuana leads to harder drugs are dubious. I
wrote that more than 90 percent of hard-drug users report that pot was
their first drug.

Robert H. Doherty ridiculed the logic:

"I would bet that at least 99 percent of all heroin users started out with
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. "Does that make them 'gateway'
sandwiches?"

I'll concede that the 90 percent figure proves nothing, but I don't think
the correlation is meaningless. Some connection can exist between hard and
soft drugs without a cause-effect relationship.

If marijuana is a gateway drug, it's largely because most users buy it from
drug pushers. The dealers have an economic incentive to sell their
customers harder, more addictive drugs. After one illegal drug is bought,
buying another is easier. If a gateway exists, it's created by
criminalizing marijuana, not its effects. Many opponents of legalization
agree.

Any link between pot and heroin has more to do with personality type than
with the drugs. A lot of people who use drugs have more sensation-seeking,
risk-taking personalities than non-users. It's predictable that many would
try more than one drug. But that doesn't mean that marijuana leads to
heroin, and the fact remains that the vast majority of pot-smokers don't go
on to hard drugs.

The costs of keeping pot illegal probably exceed the costs of legalization.
Take the expense of locking up pot-smokers, add the costs of lost jobs,
broken homes and turning productive citizens into criminals, and the price
of keeping cannabis against the law is enormous, wrote Rodney Smith of
Bullhead City.

Fair enough, but there are other costs to consider. If marijuana were
legalized, use by teenagers would likely increase. A study of high-school
seniors last year found that 5.8 percent were regular marijuana users,
compared with 3.9 percent who regularly consumed alcohol. Removing
penalties for smoking pot would probably push under-age usage higher.

Alcohol is a more addictive drug than marijuana and causes far more harm. I
agree. Alcohol is more widely abused and socially destructive than marijuana.

For better or worse, though, it's long been a part of American culture.
Prohibition from 1920 to 1933 was a failed experiment.

But the nation's acceptance of alcohol doesn't make the case for legalizing
more mind-altering drugs. Making marijuana legal would surely increase the
country's total drug use. Would the country be in better shape if more
drugs were consumed by adults and teens? I don't think so.

If legalizing pot is such a bad idea, why has it worked in the Netherlands?

Marijuana remains illegal there, but Dutch authorities have allowed limited
buying and selling since 1976. Fans of legalization say Dutch acceptance
shows that more good than harm comes of it.

That's debatable. Usage didn't change much in the early years before pot
was sold openly in coffee shops. Once that happened in the '80s, the
percentage of 18-year-olds who tried it climbed from 15 percent to near 50
percent.

The country subsequently reduced the number of coffee shops that could sell
it and the amount that can be purchased at one time. Not everyone likes the
easy access. A 1996 poll found that 75 percent of the Dutch considered
their drug policies too lax.

I agree with my critics that U.S. law comes down too hard on pot. They
haven't pulled me across the legalization line, though. Marijuana use by
teenagers has doubled in the past few years, and easier availability would
feed the trend.

Call me a fenderhead, but I'll prefer peanut butter and jelly to a joint
any day.

Checked-by: Richard Lake