MARIJUANA'S HARM ILLUSORY

Twenty-five years ago, Lester Grinspoon noted in his classic study,
Marihuana Reconsidered, that "the single greatest risk encountered by
the user of marihuana is that of being apprehended as a common
criminal, incarcerated and subjected to untold damage to his social
life and career." What was true then is even more true today: around
700,000 Americans are arrested annually for simply possessing
marijuana, and more than 10,000 Americans are currently in jails and
prisons because they have been convicted of marijuana possession, and
no other crime.

The government's propagandists are taking full advantage of these
statistics: A new anti-drug commercial depicts the potentially
devastating arrest of a teenage marijuana smoker (drug convictions bar
students from receiving federal educational loans), and concludes:
"Marijuana can get you busted. Harmless?" The commercial's
unintentionally surreal message - that marijuana is illegal because
it's harmful, and it's harmful because it's illegal - is one that
seems likely to fill any young person capable of independent thought
with contempt for both our marijuana laws and the dangerously
authoritarian logic that supports and enforces them.

Imagine if one were to extend this logic to, say, freedom of the
press: The government could produce commercials depicting the arrest
of young people caught reading "subversive" literature, in order to
drive home the point that, if you happen to live under a sufficiently
repressive regime, merely reading the wrong sort of book can be
hazardous to your health.

Anti-drug zealots will reply that books, unlike marijuana, are
harmless. This is of course preposterous: few things are more
dangerous than books. How many millions of deaths can be traced to the
publication of The Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf or, for that
matter, the Bible and the Quran? Yet this is hardly an argument for
the repeal of the First Amendment.

The idea that something ought to be criminalized because it isn't
"harmless" is a key feature of the authoritarian mindset. It's an idea
that allows for the criminalization of just about any imaginable
activity, since almost nothing in this world is harmless. Marijuana
isn't harmless, but it isn't nearly as harmful as, for example,
alcohol - a substance that causes thousands of fatal overdoses every
year (no one has ever died from an overdose of marijuana).

So why don't we make America an alcohol-free nation by criminalizing
alcohol? The superficial answer is that we tried that once and it was
total failure. (Attempting to eliminate marijuana use has also been a
total failure: almost half the current adult population - nearly 100
million Americans - has used marijuana, and several million Americans
continue to use it regularly). The more nuanced answer is that making
America an alcohol-free nation would actually be a bad thing, even if
it were possible.

This isn't merely because the costs of prohibition are so high. Most
people who drink alcohol have benefited from the experience more than
they've been harmed by it. What anti-drug zealots are incapable of
acknowledging is that the same holds true for marijuana users. Indeed
the evidence is overwhelming that, for the vast majority of marijuana
users, their use has had no significant harmful effects, and many good
ones.

Yet as Grinspoon pointed out a quarter-century ago, "reason has had
little influence in this matter." The criminal prohibition of
marijuana, he said, was due to "cultural factors that have nothing to
do with the effect of the drug itself." In the years since, little has
changed, as we waste billions of dollars, and give free rein to an
increasingly dangerous authoritarianism, in the futile attempt to
stamp out this largely benign practice.