REEFER MADNESS

Reporters were apparently too stoned to question two hopelessly flawed
studies "proving" that marijuana is a gateway to heroin.

There's a new campaign to call marijuana a hard drug and once again, the
press is contributing to the hype.

At the heart of the campaign are two studies on the neurochemical effects
of THC, marijuana's effective ingredient, published recently in Science
magazine. The putative results: Marijuana is not only a "gateway" drug to
heroin, but addictive in its own right. Just like alcohol and cocaine,
marijuana is capable of "hijacking the brain's socalled reward system,"
Science reported, and priming it for future addiction.

These bold claims were publicized in a press release by the National
Institute on Drug Abuse and subsequently reported by newspapers across the
country. "Studies back gateway role of pot," said the Los Angeles Times,
while USA Today took the other tack: "Marijuana's active ingredient may
cause addiction."

Although Science cautioned that "More work will be needed to confirm these
ideas," the mainstream media parroted NIDA's spin on the story. Only
Newsday bothered to quote independent researchers who found the data less
than compelling. And despite disclaimers that they had no direct evidence,
two of the scientists involved were eager to simplify matters for the
press. "I would be satisfied," Gaetano di Chiara of the University of
Cagliari in Italy told a reporter, "if, following all this evidence, people
would no longer consider THC a soft drug." George Koob, from Scripps
Research Institute in California, chimed in, "We're blurring the line
between hard and soft drugs."

The marijuanaheroin link is an old saw. But this summer, when confronted
with studies using pharmaceutical analogs and fancy brain dialysis, the
reporters were either too lazy or too loathe to question the hype.
Moreover, the media failed to report that the new studies are being
promoted by the same government that is busy fighting California and
Arizona's successful grassroots campaigns to allow marijuana to be used
for medicinal purposes. Given the shaky status of U.S. drug policy, it's
quite possible that a Clinton operative asked NIDA to put the spin on two
inconclusive experiments and rush out a press release. After all, as
Nixon's National Commission on Marijuana noted in 1972, "Science has become
a weapon in a propaganda battle."

The policy of distorting the pharmacological effects of marijuana became
official in 1970, when Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act,
classifying marijuana as an illegal drug with no medical value. Safely out
of reach of the hoi polloi, cannabis was turned over to scientists. In
1973, NIDA began funding every type of cannabis research, with one
exception: Scientists wishing to prove that marijuana is a safe and
effective medicine need not apply.

The media rarely reports on a notably lucrative corner of the cannabis
business: the secret labs where technicians inject dogs, monkeys and mice
with massive doses of synthetic THC, in order to provoke harmful results.
For example, you may have heard the conclusion that marijuana impairs the
immune system, but you probably haven't read about the evidence that is
often used to support it: In the mid1980s, researchers injected female
guinea pigs with THC, and then smeared the herpes virus directly on their
genitalia.

The drug warriors' latest canard that marijuana is addictive is so
novel that it wasn't cited in 1992, when the Bush administration closed
down its experimental medical marijuana program. NIDA studies have failed
to prove addiction in people who smoke marijuana, because natural THC takes
so long to be excreted that it doesn't provoke withdrawal. Given that rats
don't sit around passing a joint, the latest studies inject them with pure
pharmaceuticals a surefire recipe for addiction, either in mice or men.

Rats and humans have one thing in common. Their brains produce the
neurotransmitters dopamine and corticotropin, which are now all the rage in
addiction studies. Dopamine is released in response to pleasurable
activities, which include hitting a home run, listening to Mozart and
frenchkissing as well as drinking vodka and snorting cocaine.
Corticotropin, which is linked to stress and pain, is released by animals
going through withdrawal. Thus, when the authors of the new studies set out
to prove that marijuana is addictive, they did so by getting rats high,
then measuring the dopamine and corticotropin in their brains. They used a
process called intracranial microdialysis, which means tying the rats down,
cutting through their skulls, and inserting probes into their gray matter.

In the dopamine study, scientists at the University of Cagliari managed to
give the rats enough THC to release dopamine in the pleasure circuits in
their brains. Earlier THC studies had failed to "induce that telltale
dopamine rush," as Science put it, but this one did, which made it a
breakthrough. The study followed this line of logic: A) Addictive drugs
trigger dopamine release. B) THC triggers dopamine release. C) Thus,
potsmoking may prime the brain for heroin addiction.

Now, any reporter worth her salt should be able to spot the faulty logic in
that equation. But more importantly, it would only take that reporter a few
minutes to call the press office of one of the many drug reform
organizations, say she's on deadline and get the number of an expert on
addiction studies. By doing so, she would learn that the NIDA press release
had conspicuously singled out marijuana as a stepping stone to heroin. As
Time magazine recently reported, most drugs, including alcohol, nicotine,
opiates and tranquilizers, send dopamine racing down the pleasure tracks in
the brain. If any dopamine trigger leads to heroin, then today's
RitalinandBudweiser kid may be tomorrow's junkie.

The corticotropin study, funded by NIDA and conducted at Scripps Research
Institute and Complutense University in Madrid, was designed to prove the
addiction theory once and for all. You wouldn't know it from reading the
clips, but they had a major hurdle to overcome: Rats hate pot. In repeated
studies, NIDA researchers have never been able to get rats to
selfadminister THC. So the Scripps guys took no chances. They hired a team
of rats, strapped them down and gave them daily injections of THC for two
weeks. When the party was over, they injected a blocker, which strips THC
out of the brain receptors, and sat back to watch. For over an hour, the
rats went through what looked like a classic kick (face scratching, pawing
at ground). At the same time, researchers found traces of corticotropin in
the rats' brains which, they admit, could have been caused by the stress
of immobilization.

OK, so the corticotropin study engineered a situation in which THC
withdrawal mirrored the effects of heroin withdrawal. But so what? Why
didn't the reporters quote the fine print in the report, where the
scientists admit they had no "direct evidence" to call marijuana a hard
drug? Why didn't they point out the long leap from lab rats going through
forced pharmaceutical withdrawal to people who smoke when they feel like
it? We've long known that everyone reacts to drugs differently and that the
risk of addiction is predicted by many factors, such as genetic hard wiring
and social status.

The more we learn about human brains, the more it seems we are all
extraordinarily receptive to psychoactive substances. Given the rampant
availability of drugs in America, there is no question that kids today run
a high risk of becoming addicts. What to do? Given the laziness of the
mainstream press, the best solution may be that offered by William
Burroughs: Americans must volunteer to have the drug receptors in their
brains removed, or else sacrifice all their civil liberties.

Cynthia Cotts, a New York writer, has written widely on drug policy and the
media.

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