DEBUNKING MARIJUANA MYTHS

Kathleen Parker's column on July 7 in the Aspen Daily News was right
on target. Marijuana prohibition has done little other than burden
millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens with criminal records. The
University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future Study reports that
lifetime use of marijuana is higher in the U.S. than any European
country, yet America is one of the few Western countries that uses
its criminal justice system to punish citizens who prefer marijuana
to martinis. Unlike alcohol, marijuana has never been shown to cause
an overdose death, nor does it share the addictive properties of
tobacco. The short-term health effects of marijuana are
inconsequential compared to the long-term effects of criminal records.

Unfortunately, marijuana represents the counterculture to many
Americans. In subsidizing the prejudices of culture warriors,
government is subsidizing organized crime. The drug war's distortion
of immutable laws of supply and demand make an easily grown weed
literally worth its weight in gold. The only clear winners in the war
on marijuana are drug cartels and shameless tough-on-drugs
politicians who've built careers confusing drug prohibition's
collateral damage with a relatively harmless plant. The big losers in
this battle are the taxpayers who have been deluded into believing
big government is the appropriate response to nontraditional consensual vices.

The results of a comparative study of European and U.S. rates of drug
use can be found at: www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/espad_pr.pdf
and United Nations statistics at:
www.unodc.org/unodc/global_illicit_drug_trends.html.

Robert Sharpe,

policy analyst Common Sense for Drug Policy Washington, D.C.