BID TO LEGALISE MARIJUANA ALL SMOKE AND MIRRORS

It's difficult to raise the topic of marijuana usage in America today
without somehow touching off intense debate over whether this
relatively mild, but still harmful drug should be decriminalized, even
fully legalized. That's how much the pro-pot crowd has hijacked the
national conversation over the nation's ongoing struggle with drug
use.

Exhibit A: an opinion piece posted in this space earlier this week by
a drug treatment psychologist bemoaning a national spike in teen pot
smoking and attributing it largely to society's growing tolerance of
marijuana use.

Folks, this is not an outrageous assertion. In fact, in figures
released Wednesday, the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future
- -- the largest survey on teen drug abuse polling more than 46,000 8th,
10th and 12th graders -- found that teens' exposure to anti-drug
messages has nosedived over the past seven years. This at a time when
teens also reported finding such messages actually work.

Perhaps it's not all that irrelevant then that, after a decade's
decline in pot-smoking, the same study also saw a spike in marijuana
usage among teens last year, with more high school seniors lighting up
joints than cigarettes.

The numbers, and the trend, are not in dispute. What is up for debate,
a heated one at that, is what to do about it.

And judging by the deluge of e-mails cluttering up my inbox, there's
an increasingly vocal force pushing mighty hard for the country to
give up all pretense that the "prohibition" on marijuana is either
effective or in the public's best interests. The only answer, these
ganja-loving crusaders say, is to quit the double-speak and finally
put cannabis where it belongs, in the same legal category as that
other socially accepted mood-altering drug, alcohol.

To which I say, they must be high.

It's a far-fetched notion to suggest Washington would ever have the
political will to take such a drastic step -- for good reason, because
it's irresponsible public policy.

Listen, I'm sympathetic to many of the legalization crowd's arguments.
To classify marijuana, for example, as a Schedule 1 drug next to
heroin is to exaggerate its potency and potential for abuse. I mean,
no one's ever died of a THC overdose. The same can't be said for
alcohol, which is far more addictive and destructive than pot ever
was. So I understand that it smacks as hypocritical to target
marijuana in the war on drugs, while scantily clad beauties and
Clydesdale horses peddle Budweiser during TV timeouts.

But to suggest that legalizing marijuana is somehow an answer to
society's drug problems -- that regulating its sale and distribution
would actually lead to a reduction in usage, especially among youth --
defies sober reasoning. Legalization proponents like to point out that
the Netherlands, with its liberal drug policy, has a lower drug rate
than America's, but they neglect to tell you the country's marijuana
usage among 18- to 20-year-olds nearly tripled after legalization -- at
a time when usage among adolescents in the United States decreased
steadily, according to the medical journal Pediatrics.

Putting pot up for sale in convenience stores next to cigarettes and
beer will only make it more accessible, and more acceptable, not to
mention more affordable, creating more consumers, not less. Youth will
be the most vulnerable, if Alaska's experiment with legalization in
the '70s is any example. The state's youth started smoking at twice
the rate of those nationally, convincing Alaska to recriminalize
marijuana in 1990, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

We've seen that with alcohol -- ironically, the example legalization
proponents keep going back to in pushing for reform. It's a bad
example. Suggesting that age limits will prove more effective than an
all-out ban in keeping pot out of teens' hands ignores the very real
problem that alcohol poses for young people today. According to the
Monitoring the Future study, alcohol is generally twice as popular
among teens as marijuana. Don't tell me being legal, and more widely
available, isn't instrumental in those statistics. This isn't a model
experiment in legalization we want to duplicate with another
recreational substance.

And saying pot isn't as bad as alcohol isn't by default the ringing
endorsement some want to make it. Anyone who says marijuana isn't
harmful is just being dishonest. Studies have shown that long-term
marijuana use may shrink parts of the brain and have lasting impacts
on mental health. And despite efforts to pooh-pooh its reputation as a
gateway drug, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration reports that the younger someone is when using
marijuana, the more likely he or she is to use other drugs in
adulthood. In fact, according to the Center on and Substance Abuse at
Columbia, children who use marijuana are 85 times more likely to use
cocaine and 17 times more likely to be regular cocaine abusers. The
numbers are equally troubling for heroin. (Think that's why Holland's
heroin addiction rate has tripled since it legalized marijuana?)

Do we really need more drug addicts in America? No. We don't need
another drug declared legal, either. Alcohol has posed enough of a
problem, thank you very much.

Sure, legalizing marijuana may mean a nice boost to the country's
revenue stream through regulation and taxation, but we don't need to
sell out our morals and public health for financial gain. We've done
enough of that already.