AS MARIJUANA BECOMES MORE POTENT, ENFORCEMENT MUST BECOME TOUGHER

The federal government recently announced that the growing potency of
America's most popular illegal drug, marijuana, and the number of kids
seeking help to get off the drug (one in five users) worried them so much
that they were soliciting new marijuana-research proposals and urging local
law enforcement to crack down on those who sell the drug.

The pro-marijuana lobby was furious and immediately charged the feds with
fear-mongering and clamoring to protect their (not so glamorous, actually)
jobs in Washington, D.C. Their cries rested on claims that more potent
marijuana is not tantamount to more dangerous marijuana, and that the rise
in the number of treatment beds for marijuana users is due to criminal
justice referrals, not the drug's harmfulness.

But the evidence shows the government indeed might have it right. The
pro-drug movement, fueled with the motivation to legalize harmful
substances and angry at the attack on its values of "drug use for all," is
putting kids at risk by playing down the known dangers of marijuana.

Although not as destructive as shooting heroin or smoking crack, marijuana
use is unquestionably damaging. Today's more powerful marijuana probably
leads to greater health consequences than the marijuana of the 1960s.
Astonishingly, pot admissions to emergency rooms now exceed those of
heroin. Visits to hospital emergency departments because of marijuana use
have risen steadily during the 1990s, from an estimated 16,251 in 1991 to
more than 119,472 in 2002. That has accompanied a rise in potency from 3.26
percent to 7.19 percent, according to the Potency Monitoring Project at the
University of Mississippi.

More potent marijuana is also seen as more lucrative on the market. Customs
reports claim that a dealer coming north with a pound of cocaine can make
an even trade with a dealer traveling south with a pound of high-potency
marijuana. It makes sense that people pay more for stronger pot because the
high is better.

A flurry of recent research studies -- concerning withdrawal, schizophrenia
and lung obstruction, for example -- have also shown marijuana's
unfortunate consequences. These conclusions were not being reached in the
'70s and '80s (legalizers often point to the Nixon-commissioned Shafer
report, which said nice things about the drug as evidence of marijuana's
harmlessness), because marijuana from that era was weaker and less
dangerous than today's drug.

The May 5 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association reported
that the number of marijuana users over the past 10 years stayed the same
while the number dependent on the drug rose 36 percent -- from 2.2 million
to 3 million.

And although a majority of kids in treatment for marijuana are referred
there by the criminal justice system, it still remains only a slight
majority -- about 54 percent. The rest are self-, school or doctor referrals.

To paint the picture that the reason marijuana dependence looks higher is
because of the criminal justice system is disingenuous, especially because
most people who use only marijuana never interact with law enforcement as a
result of that use.

Some people still argue that its wrong to arrest kids and force them into
treatment. It seems like the government can never win: If they arrest and
lock people up, legalizers kick and scream that we're not giving users
"alternatives to incarceration." If they arrest kids as a way to get them
help, and not as a punishment mechanism, all of a sudden the government is
giving into George Orwell.

It's too bad that pot apologists don't see what most parents do see:
Marijuana is a harmful drug with serious consequences, and mechanisms --
even a brush with the law to help a user realize that what he's doing is
harmful -- to help stop the progression of use should be seen as a good
thing. That's not government propaganda. That's common sense.

And it may save a few lives.

KEVIN A. SABET recently stepped down as senior speechwriter to America's
drug director, John P. Walters. He is writing a book on drug policy. He
wrote this commentary for the Hartford (Conn.) Courant. It was distributed
by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.