What's so bad about marijuana? Not much, actually
COMMENTARY
By Stephen Chapman

If a major study revealed that people who use marijuana can expect to
die before their time, we would hear about it on the news. If people were
expiring in noticeable numbers from overdoses of pot, the discovery would
soon be common knowledge. If smoking dope were proven to cause lung
cancer, Clinton administration drug czar Barry McCaffrey would be
shouting from the rooftops.

But you rarely see anything reported about research into the health
effects of cannabis. That's not because there isn't any research going
on. It's because the findings are acutely embarrassing for supporters of
the war on drugs.

Much of that unending war consists of harassing and punishing people who
use, sell or cultivate pot. Nearly 600,000 people were arrested on
marijuana charges in 1995. Fifteen states provide life sentences for some
nonviolent marijuana crimes. Under federal law, anyone growing or
selling a large quantity of cannabis is eligible for one free lethal
injection.

This ferocious approach is supposedly necessary to protect us from the
hazards posed by pot use. When voters in California were preparing to
vote in November on a referendum allowing the medicinal use of marijuana,
critics acted as if someone wanted to put LSD in the Los Angeles water
supply. George Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford emerged from retirement
to portray the proposal as a threat to the health of "all Americans."

Likewise, a survey last year that found teenagers using more drugs, mainly
marijuana, evoked screams of panic. Bob Dole called it a "national
tragedy," and McCaffrey said the study showed that the nation needs to
begin delivering "antidrug" messages to kids starting in kindergarten.
(Why not in preschool? Why not in maternity wards?)

But as the rhetoric against marijuana gets more lurid and hysterical,
the facts grow less and less alarming. A growing pile of authoritative
research, almost entirely ignored by the mainstream news media, has
exonerated cannabis of almost all the charges against it.

Physicians in California's Kaiser Permanente managed care program recently
reported in the American Journal of Public Health that they had looked
at more than 65,000 patients over an entire decade and found that pot
smokers had no higher a death rate than abstainers. The investigators
also noted that "few adverse clinical health effects from the chronic use
of marijuana have been documented in humans." Imagine the news coverage
if similar findings emerged about tobacco or saturated fat.

Because it is usually set on fire and smoked, marijuana has long been
assumed to be no friend of the respiratory system. But a study by doctors
at the UCLA medical school, published in the American Journal of
Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, discovered that even heavy,
chronic smoking of pot doesn't damage lung function.

Australia's National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, in yet another
survey, found that career potheads are no more unhealthy than the rest of the
populationwith the exception of mild respiratory problems that could
be the result of tobacco use. "The exceptional thing is that the
respondents are unexceptional," the chief investigator told the Sydney
Morning Herald, in news you won't get from the Partnership for a
DrugFree America.

Among scientists who have examined the real consequences of pot use, these
discoveries came as no great surprise. Two years ago, the prestigious British
medical journal The Lancet concluded, with a remarkable lack of tact, "The
smoking of cannabis, even long term, is not harmful to health."

When pressed, drug warriors fall back on the claim that even if pot is
not so bad by itself, it serves as a "gateway" to hard drug use. But 80
million Americans have tried cannabis. Most of them have never tried any
other illicit substance, and few of the rest have become addicted to
cocaine or heroin. While the percentage of teenagers using pot has risen
in recent years, the number of those who go on to try cocaine
has fallen by more than half. The gateway looks more like the eye of a
needle.

None of this means that pot is good for kidsany more than alcohol,
tobacco or sex is good for kids. Marijuana use can retard their emotional
development and interfere with their academic achievement at a vital
stage of their lives. But teen pregnancy isn't grounds for locking up
anyone guilty of fornication. So why do we think that draconian criminal
law enforcement is the only possible way to deter adolescent drug use?

Supporters of the drug war prefer to suppress the reassuring evidence about
marijuana because it doesn't serve their cause. But the rest of us
should be ready to confront the truth, remembering that it shall make us
free. _____________________________________________