DRUG WAR IS A WAR AGAINST TRUTH

TORONTO - The University of Toronto has just played host to an important
conference, titled "The Politics of Obesity," at which scholars from
various academic disciplines examined the claim that North America is
facing a health crisis because of increasing weight. The consensus was that
we are not: a conclusion that will only surprise those who rely on diet
doctors, rather than on social scientists, for information on the topic.

America loves to export health hysteria, as illustrated by the comments of
U.S. drug czar John Walters, who is upset by signs that Canada is
implementing a rational policy in regard to marijuana. "The kind of
marijuana coming from Canada is the crack of marijuana," Walters says. "It
is dangerous. It is destructive."

Referring to recent Canadian legislation that has decriminalized possession
of small amounts of marijuana, our drug czar fumed that, "The political
leadership in Canada has been utterly unable to come to grips with this.
They're talking about legalization while Rome burns."

Rome is burning, according to Walters, because the marijuana being sold
today is vastly more potent than that of a generation ago - as much as 30
times more powerful. "This isn't your parents' marijuana" (i.e., the kind
smoked 20 years ago by a large proportion of the government officials who
now prosecute the drug war), Walters warns our ever-vulnerable children.

Even by the abysmally low standards of truthfulness employed by public
health officials in regard to drugs in general, and marijuana in
particular, these statements are remarkable for their dishonesty. The claim
that today's marijuana is 30 times more powerful than the schwag once
enjoyed by our current leaders is true only in the Clintonian sense that it
isn't 100 percent false.

This figure was produced by comparing the most powerful marijuana now
available - which, because it is both extremely rare and extremely
expensive, will only be smoked by a tiny handful of marijuana users - with
the lowest-grade pot seized by police agencies 30 years ago: weed far
weaker than that smoked by the average bell-bottomed Led Zeppelin fan.

The truth is that the average THC content of marijuana today (THC
determines the drug's strength) is about 4.5 percent, as compared to about
3 percent a generation ago. Thus the claim that today's marijuana is 30
times stronger than the product Bill Clinton claims not to have inhaled
exaggerates the situation by a considerably large percentage.

Even this understates the dishonesty of our drug warriors. There is no
evidence that stronger marijuana leads those who use the drug to ingest
more THC or that it increases the very modest health risks associated with
its use (indeed, the biggest health risk - smoke inhalation - is lessened
by stronger marijuana, because it requires less smoking to produce the same
effect).

Last week, the academic year got off to an all-too-familiar start when
Samantha Spady, a 19-year-old Colorado State sophomore, was found dead in
the lounge of a campus fraternity. She apparently drank herself to death -
something that almost anyone can do with a bottle of vodka and a fate that
will befall many other college students before the year is done.

By contrast, an "overdose" of the "crack of marijuana" - the extremely rare
and expensive stuff smoked by almost no one - will cause those who smoke it
to fall asleep, and wake up a few hours later with a headache.

Tens of thousands of Americans are in prison today because we treat a drug
that has never killed anyone as if it were far more dangerous than a drug
that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. Truth: the
anti-drug-war drug.