Commentary

POT SHOTS

White House Drug Czar: Baby Boomers Still Think Of It As A 'Soft Drug' -
But Kids Today Need To Know That This Is 'Not Your Father's Marijuana'

Everybody agrees that the best way to stop the magnitude of the problems we
see with drugs, with cigarettes and with alcohol is to diminish the number
of young people who try these substances in their teenage years. We have
decades of research here. People who do not begin during their teenage
years are extremely unlikely to start later on. It's not zero, but it is
very, very low ...The estimate [of people who could benefit from drug
treatment] is roughly 6 million ... Of that 6 million, 23 percent are
teenagers. We have not, in the past, had estimates of that portion of the
population needing treatment that young. But it corresponds to what we have
known from other sources.

Kids are beginning to use drugs at younger ages, and some of the drugs they
are using are stronger in their effect and their potential dependency
production.

In addition, we have had the ability to look at the kinds of drugs that
people are dependent on: Of those 6 million people, over 60 percent are
dependent on marijuana.

I believe this is the single greatest area of ignorance in the country
today, despite more than a decade of research on drug addiction, large
parts of it paid for by the federal government.

Most people my age, the baby-boomer generation, do not believe you can be
dependent on marijuana. They have no idea the magnitude that marijuana
plays in the problems of treatment need in this country.

Of illegal drugs, marijuana is the single greatest source of the need for
treatment today of any of the illegal drugs. The next most significant drug
is cocaine. Most Americans my age believe that heroin and cocaine are
serious addictive drugs and marijuana isn't. It's a soft drug; it's a drug
a lot of people try. It is true a lot of people who have tried it don't
become dependent, but today 60 percent-plus of the treatment needed in the
United States is generated by marijuana.

We have more teenagers today seeking treatment nationally for marijuana
than all other illegal drugs combined. For the first time in the last
couple of years, we have more teenagers seeking treatment for marijuana
than for alcohol, which used to be the single greatest source of dependency
among teens because it was more widely available ...

We need to make more parents understand, especially parents my age who
watched "Reefer Madness" in college and who believe that most of the
problem with marijuana is that people are just too hysterical about it. In
fact, children of those baby-boomer parents are trying marijuana not when
they're 17 or 18 but when they're 14, 13, 12, 11, 10. And the marijuana
they're trying is not what it was in the 1970s and early '80s - 1 percent
THC content or less (the psychoactive ingredient). On the street, it ranges
from 7 to 14 percent THC content, and with specially cultivated varieties
can go to 20 or 30 percent THC content. It is not your father's marijuana.

As we know from research, the disease of addiction causes chemical changes
in the brain that we can image with advanced technology. The same changes
that we image for heroin and cocaine are witnessed with marijuana. There is
no question that it is a dependency-producing substance.

It does not have the same toxicity as cocaine and heroin, that is true. You
do not see people die from overdoses of marijuana. But of course, nicotine
does not have the toxicity of cocaine and heroin. You can have a
dependency-producing substance that is not equally toxic with other
dependency-producing substances. That doesn't change the fact that it
produces dependency. One of the reasons why we believe more young people
are using marijuana is that they believe this is not as dangerous as
they've been told other substances are.

We need to pay more attention, we need to send a consistent message, we
need parents to understand that it's not a rite of passage. For some kids
it's not just a gateway drug, it's a dead end and a dead end at a young age.