CAMPOS - DISHONESTY IN THE DRUG WAR

TORONTO - The University of Toronto has just played host to an
important conference, entitled "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 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 thirty 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 is about
4.5 percent, as compared to about 3 percent a generation ago (THC, or
tetrahydrocannabinol, is the hallucinatory chemical that is the
principal and most active ingredient in marijuana). 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
approximately 1,500 percent.

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.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado.