MARIJUANA: THE REAL DOPE

Even as marijuana use among teenagers rises again and pressure for
decriminalisation continues, fears are growing among parents that the dope
smoked today is considerably more powerful than they were used to.

Richard Guilliatt reports:

John Anderson is up at the podium of the Eastern Sydney Rugby Union Club,
scaring the pants off a crowd of parents who sit hunched forward on their
chairs, brows knotted. He has already told them how marijuana has 50-60
times more carcinogens in it than tobacco, how it has been linked with
asthma, angina, lowered testosterone levels, lowered IQ, irregular
menstrual cycles and genetic damage. Now he is peering over his spectacles,
giving them his penetrating psychologists's stare and putting a mocking
tone into his voice.

"This is a soft drug ... a recreational drug," he says before a slide of a
human brain flashes up on a screen behind him. Then Anderson is off again,
talking about the depersonalisation, amotivational syndrome and increased
depression of pot smokers, about the links between marijuana and
schizophrenia, and the fact that a third of the young patients he is
treating for attention deficit disorder (ADD) are smoking 15-20 cones a
day. For good measure, he throws in a suggestion that marijuana has
probably contributed to the 30per cent youth unemployment rate. "Is it
worth it?" he asks, with a closing flourish. "That's for you to decide.
Thank you."

And then he's off, vacating the stage to make way for a local drug
education worker who warns that the "marijuana epidemic" is creating a
population of adolescent semi-zombies with irreversible brain damage.

This is just another night in the anti-marijuana crusade that John Anderson
started five years ago when he was working as a psycho-physiologist at
Westmead Hospital and began noticing how many kids with ADD and
schizophrenia had sizable marijuana habits. Now in private practice in
Sydney's western suburbs, Anderson goes out night after night - sometimes
three times a week - to deliver this same speech, in which all the scariest
research on pot smoking is packaged into one 60-minute blitzkrieg of bad
vibes. "I don't give a brass razoo whether people smoke pot or not,"
Anderson insists. "I'm not some sort of wowser." Notwithstanding that, he
argues that marijuana may one day be shown to be more dangerous than speed,
heroin, alcohol and tobacco because of its unique chemical properties.

Anderson is far from alone in this alarmist view because - as even the
doziest dopehead must have noticed by now - marijuana has been suffering
awfully bad publicity lately.

Earlier this year, Allen and Unwin published The Great Brain Robbery by an
Australian drug counsellor, Trevor Grice, a mass-market book aimed at
parents which argues that pot is a hard drug. Several prominent
psychiatrists, including Professor Graham Burrows, chairman of the Mental
Health Foundation of Australia, have been pushing much the same argument in
the media, and two studies published in Science last year suggested that
marijuana is a "gateway" drug that could lead to heroin and cocaine abuse.

Meanwhile, the Clinton Administration has been pursuing a strenuous
anti-pot campaign, even threatening sanctions against doctors who prescribe
it for pain relief. What's going on here? Is this just a return of the
Reefer Madness scare tactics of the 1950s, when movies depicted teenagers
turning into drooling psychopaths after just one puff of the evil weed? Or
is recent research indicating that marijuana is really not the benign
substance all those High Times editorials told us about?

The answer to that question might be: a bit of both. Professor Wayne Hall,
executive director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre
(NDARC), notes that marijuana research tends to come in "feast or famine"
waves, depending on how popular the drug is and how hotly people are
debating decriminalisation.

Current events seem to support his thesis: marijuana use among teenagers is
rising for the first time since the early 1980s, just as evidence of the
drug's harmful effects has become more solid.

The result is deep parental anxiety at a time when, paradoxically,
government leaders such as Bob Carr and Jeff Kennett are pushing for less
punitive marijuana laws. "A lot of adults of my generation who went to
university in the 1970s had a fair amount of exposure to marijuana and it
would have been fairly benign, fairly low-potency stuff," Professor Hall
says. "The contrast between that experience and what we were told about the
perils of dope-smoking made people very sceptical."

That scepticism may have cre ated an unrealistically benign view of pot,
Hall says: today many parents see a glaring contradiction between the
problems their teenage children are experiencing and the reassuring
platitudes of some drug-law reformers.

Pot's resurgent popularity among teenagers is certainly evident in pop
culture, from the fashion for hemp clothing to the woozy, slowed-down beats
of trip-hop and other electronic music. Superficially, one might have
expected baby-boomer parents to be fairly sanguine about this - after all,
their generation championed dope as a safer drug than alcohol or tobacco.
But it appears that many boomers have changed their views on pot now that
they have kids of their own, a phenomenon best exemplified by US President
Bill Clinton, the world's most famous non-inhaler.

Baby boomers may also be losing their tolerance for pot in another way.
Colleen Murphy, a Melbourne psychologist who runs a self-help program for
people trying to stop smoking pot, says most of her clients came of age in
the 1960s counterculture but found that marijuana became a problem in
middle-age - they were worried about its health effects but found they had
developed a strong psychological dependence on the drug. "They're surprised
that they are having problems," Murphy says, "and it focuses their
attention on the youth who are the major users of marijuana." NDARC noticed
a similar phenomenon two years ago when it advertised a program to help
marijuana-dependent adults kick their habit - there were more than 700
applications for only 240 places. Dr Vaughan Rees, a psychologist on the
NDARC team, says: "It's not such a surprise to see these people, but
neverthless it is remarkable that there's such a large group out there who
have a problem with marijuana and are attempting to seek help.

"There's been a perception among the public and some reseachers that
marijuana is not a drug of dependence but the evidence has been increasing
over the past few years that it is."

Fuelling this parental reappraisal of marijuana are growing concerns about
the habits of 1990s teenagers, who are smoking much stronger pot and
smoking it earlier than their parents did. Jem Masters, a clinical nurse at
Sydney Children's Hospital who has 12 years' experience in adolescent
counselling, says he is seeing an increasing number of teenagers who have
been smoking dope since the age of eight or nine. But what concerns him
even more is the growing number of short-term users who have become
psychotic after smoking high-potency "hydroponic" pot, which can be five
times stronger than the home-grown their parents may have smoked in the
'60s. "This is the thing that's quite scary for mental health professionals
- - people with a one-off use presenting with hallucinations, paranoia and
delusions," Masters says. "These kids are very, very scared because they
have lost touch with reality - I'm talking days and sometimes weeks of this
condition continuing." Masters' concerns are shared by many people who work
in adolescent psychiatry, who say pot-related psychosis has increased
markedly over the past five to eight years.

One mental health professional - who campaigned for pot decriminalisation
as a student in the 1960s - said he had completely changed his attitude
after seeing the number of teenagers entering his hospital with psychotic
episodes after smoking the drug.

The research into links between marijuana and psychosis - like most of the
scientific evidence about marijuana - is somewhat confusing. Studies
indicate that cannabis users are twice as likely to experience psychotic
symptoms as non-users, but Wayne Hall points out that it is still
relatively rare for marijuana to trigger psychosis.

"In terms of capacity to produce psychotic symptoms, alcohol is far more
noxious," he says.

Similarly, Hall finds it impossible to say whether smoking actually causes
schizophrenia, which often follows a psycotic episode.

In a 23,000-word review of the literature on this subject, he concluded
that pot is likely to precipitate schizophrenia and worsen its symptoms,
but he also pointed out that reported cases of schizophrenia in the young
declined in the 1970s, a period when marijuana consumption was rising.

What about last year's widely publicised studies which purportedly
indicated that marijuna was a "gateway" drug whose addictive qualities were
similar to those of heroin and cocaine? Those findings were based on
experiments which showed that rats had the same brain responses to
marijuana as they did to heroin and cocaine.

But Dr Iain McGregor, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of
Sydney, points out that rats (unlike humans) dislike marijuana intensely.
Any comparison between the two species is therefore fraught with problems.

"One of these studies showed that dopamine levels in rats' brains increased
after they were given marijuana," McGregor says. "But to the best of my
knowledge, all that an increase in dopamine shows is that something
important has happened to the animal which makes it pay attention to its
immediate environment. It's quite erroneous to use that chemical change to
find that cannabis is a dangerous drug in the same way that heroin is. But
on the basis of that dubious finding you got this huge fanfare and
accompanying comment."

McGregor points out that one of the studies was funded by the National
Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the United States, an organisation that
steadfastly pursues the US Government's opposition to decriminalising
marijuana. According to the February 21 issue of New Scientist, NIDA
successfully lobbied the World Health Organisation last year not to release
a report which showed that marijuana is safer than alcohol and tobacco in
most respects. NIDA argued that the report would "play into the hands" of
groups lobbying for decriminilisation. In an accompanying nine-page report,
New Scientist debunked many of the claims circulated by NIDA about the
dangers of marijuana. It pointed out, for instance, that a 25-year study of
heavy cannabis users in Costa Rica had failed to show any significant
memory or learning impairment among them, even though some had been smoking
up to 10 joints a day for 30 years. And in the Netherlands, where marijuana
has been sold legally in cafes for more than 20 years, the number of hard
drug addicts has remained stable and there is no evidence of significant
effects on the mental health of the country's young.

Some of the anti-marijuana campaigning in Australia also has a political
flavour. When John Anderson lectured in Rose Bay, for instance, he was
accompanied by two Liberal Party politicians and by Angela Wood, mother of
Anna Wood, the NSW teenager who died after ingesting ecstacy two years ago.
Angela Wood is pursuing a crusade to have drug education in NSW schools -
which is based on the philosophy of "harm minimisation" - replaced with
"zero tolerance" teaching. The two politicians obligingly gave speeches
promising just such a policy should they be elected.

"I don't have any problem with saying that heavy use of marijuana among
teenagers is a bad thing," Wayne Hall says. "But I think the concern has
got to be realistic.

"It can be counter-productive to make exaggerated statements that are
contrary to the experience of a lot of adolescents. I think the mistake the
Woods and other people make is in saying that these are risks that
everybody who takes the drug runs." John Anderson insists he doesn't have a
political axe to grind and leaves others to talk about policies and
government. It's not too surprising, though, to hear that he is vehemently
opposed to the present drug-education programs in schools and thinks the
calls for decriminalisation are nuts. "We know tobacco is dangerous to
kids, we know alcohol is dangerous to kids," he says. "Trying to mount an
argument that says, "OK, we might as well legalise because it's no more
dangerous than the other' is like saying, "Well, you might as well kill
yourself by throwing yourself under a truck as throwing yourself off a
building'.

"I reckon in 50 years' time we'll look back and say "How on earth did we
think about legalising it?'"