ANTIMARIJUANA CAMPAIGN REKINDLES DEBATE

Critics Say Harder Drugs Deserve More Attention

A new government antimarijuana campaign has reignited a
long-smoldering debate over how dangerous the most widely used illegal
drug in America really is and whether it should be the central focus
of the nation's war on drugs.

Headlined "Marijuana and your teen's mental health," an advertisement
appearing in newspapers and magazines nationwide cites scientific
studies in the last seven years that have found that regular use of
marijuana in the teenage years can put users at risk of depression,
suicidal impulses and schizophrenia later in life.

"Still think marijuana's no big deal?" the ad asks parents.

Yes, responds one leading advocate of decriminalizing marijuana.

"If you want to focus on problem drugs in the U.S., marijuana is the
last drug you would focus on," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive
director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors treating marijuana
like alcohol -- a legal product that is regulated, taxed and illegal
for minors to use.

"We have methamphetamine out there, we have heroin, we have OxyContin,
we have booze, we have cigarettes. To make statements that marijuana
in the hands of teenagers is this dangerous threat, it's ludicrous."

And last week, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and more
than 500 other economists endorsed a report that said state and
federal coffers could reap a net gain of $13.9 billion if marijuana
were legalized.

The study by Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron estimated that
law enforcement would save $7.7 billion, while taxes on the drug could
amount to $6.2 billion.

Miron's study was largely funded by the Marijuana Policy Project, a
Washington, D.C., lobbying group that supports liberalizing marijuana
laws.

An Ongoing Battle

The renewed war of words regarding a drug that has been prevalent in
U.S. society for some 40 years began in early May when John Walters,
the Bush administration's drug czar, launched the government's latest
print and broadcast ad campaign.

"A growing body of evidence now demonstrates that smoking marijuana
can increase the risk of serious mental health problems," said
Walters, whose official title is director of the Office of National
Drug Control Policy.

One recent report, by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, found that adults who had used marijuana before age 12
were twice as likely to have experienced a serious mental illness in
the past year as those who began smoking it after 18.

Among early users, 21% reported suffering a serious mental health
problem, compared with 10.5% among those who started smoking marijuana
later. The study was based on interviews with almost 90,000 adults.

Other studies cited by the drug control office, which plans to spend
$120 million on public-education advertising this year, have found
that teenagers who smoke marijuana weekly are three times more likely
than nonusers to have suicidal thoughts and that some teenage users
have a higher risk of developing schizophrenia as adults.

"We are very concerned about marijuana for a very good reason," said
David Murray, a policy analyst for the drug control office. "It's so
prevalent, so widespread in the population. There's a public-health
responsibility here. This is not an innocuous drug."

Declining Drug Users

A University of Michigan study found last year that 34.3% of high
school seniors and 11.8% of eighth-graders had smoked marijuana during
the previous 12 months. Drug use among teenagers has been falling
since 1996, the study noted.

Teenagers are the focus of the government antimarijuana campaign
because officials say they believe that use of marijuana early in life
can lead to harder drugs such as cocaine or heroin later. And
adolescents may feel they are fully grown, but they aren't.

"The evidence is now pretty significant that central nervous system
development is not complete in adolescents, and the use of this drug
may have effects on the maturation of their central nervous systems,"
said Dr. Richard Suchinsky, a psychiatrist who oversees the Department
of Veterans Affairs' addiction programs.

"It inhibits certain functions, such as cognition, judgment and the
ability to postpone gratification," Suchinsky said.

But critics of the government's war on drugs say the latest studies do
little to advance what is already known about marijuana and don't
prove that the drug is responsible for mental illness. Children and
teenagers who are predisposed to have mental health problems may be
more likely to try marijuana, they say.

"There's a question about whether there's a causality," said the Drug
Policy Alliance's Nadelmann. "What's interesting about marijuana, you
can't even find a presidential candidate now who will say he has never
used it. We all know people who have smoked marijuana for periods of
time, and they're all doing fine."

Spending Questioned

The war on drugs, whose law enforcement, public education and other
components cost an estimated $35 billion a year, has come under fire
lately not only from groups such as the Drug Policy Alliance, which
favors a heavier emphasis on treatment and prevention, but also from
some conservative organizations such as the American Enterprise
Institute, a Washington think tank.

In a March assessment of the war on drugs, the institute reported that
the number of drug offenders in jail has ballooned tenfold since 1980
with little evidence that the tactic has led to markedly less drug use
in the general population.

"Despite this massive investment of tax dollars and government
authority, the United States still has the worst drug problem among
Western nations," the study concludes.

The study also questioned the efficacy of pursuing marijuana users, a
pursuit that has grown dramatically as a proportion of the war on
drugs in the last decade.

From 1990 to 2002, the number of drug arrests rose from about 1.1
million to more than 1.5 million, with 80% of that increase coming
from marijuana arrests, according to a recent report by the Sentencing
Project, which examined FBI data to draw its conclusion that the war
on drugs has increasingly turned into a campaign against just one drug
- -- marijuana.

Murray, of the antidrug office, criticized the report for
"data-slicing" by choosing as its starting point a period when the
nation was battling an epidemic of crack cocaine and when cocaine
arrests were abnormally high.

"What appears to be a policy choice is in fact a natural response by
law enforcement to a change in use patterns," he said.

Concern About Minors

Despite long-standing concerns about the addictive power of heroin and
cocaine and growing worries about methamphetamine, which is often made
in household labs, a spokesman for the drug policy office said the
government's emphasis on marijuana is justified by its status as the
most widely used drug among minors.

"If you are trying to get useful information into parents' hands, this
is the more educative way to go," said spokesman Tom Riley.

But Mitch Earleywine, a psychology professor at the University of
Southern California, says the campaign overstates the dangers of
marijuana and runs the risk of backfiring among teenagers, who are
already skeptical of adults.

"My big worry is that if you tell a 14-year-old that if you smoke pot,
you're going to become psychotic, and then he tries it and nothing
happens, you lose credibility," said Earleywine, author of
"Understanding Marijuana."

"So when you tell him that using meth will make your brain smaller,
which it absolutely will, he'll think, 'You lied to me about the
marijuana, so I think I'm going to smoke this meth.' "