MIXED MESSAGE ON MARIJUANA

The nation's drug czar is annoyed again. This time it is with me.

Without mentioning me by name, John P. Walters, director of the Office of
National Drug Control Policy, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, held
up one of my columns as an example of how journalists can be "fed
misleading advocacy information that they swallow whole." The result is "a
lack of accurate information" that plagues the public debate over marijuana.

Walters recounts how a columnist described his claims of increased potency
in today's marijuana as wildly overstated "whoppers." I knew he was talking
about me. A database search turned up nobody else's essays that have used
the words drug czar and "whoppers" in the same column. I found this
amusing, since my efforts to get "accurate information" out of the drug
czar's office while writing the column back in May were unsuccessful.

I was writing, ironically enough, in response to an earlier Walters column
that opposed an effort to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes in the
District of Columbia. In that piece, printed in the Washington Post,
Walters tries to frighten us baby boomer parents by warning "today's
marijuana is different from that of a generation ago, with potency levels
10 to 20 times stronger than the marijuana with which they were familiar."
As a Woodstock-generation parent of a worldly wise 13-year-old boy, I took
great interest in that statement. Unfortunately, as I noted, Walters didn't
say where he got that "whopper" of a statistic.

I had cited a federally funded study, published in the January 2000 Journal
of Forensic Science, which found the average THC (that's the active
ingredient that makes people high) content in confiscated marijuana had
only doubled to 4.2 percent from about 2 percent from 1980 to 1997.

That brought a response from Walters claiming that I had not covered a long
enough period. THC content averaged less than 1 percent in 1974, he says,
but, "by 1999, potency averaged 7 percent."

"The THC of today's sinsemilla (a high grade of marijuana) averages 14
percent and ranges as high as 30 percent," he says. Wow, as my Deadhead
friends might say, that must be some killer weed, dude.

I tried once again and happily reached Walters this time. After
conversations with him and some of his advisers, we agreed to disagree on
the key question: What are the chances that your little Johnny or Jane will
latch onto some of that knockout grass?

That depends on how you interpret the available data. The latest quarterly
report by the University of Mississippi's Potency Monitoring Project (which
examined 46,000 samples of seized marijuana nationwide) found an average
potency of 6.68 percent. Actual potencies ranged as high as 33.12 percent
THC content to as low as 1 percent THC or no THC at all (somebody
apparently got burned) for grass confiscated elsewhere in the country.

But it is hard to estimate based on available data how common or rare the
high-octane dope is. Everyone seeks the potent "primo" stuff. Every dealer
promises it. Fewer actually deliver. Nor is it at all clear that the
marijuana commonly available in the 1960s and 1970s really was all that
weak. Potency studies at the time were plagued by such problems as small
samples and poor storage in police lockers.

Either way, the killer-weed scare tactic avoids the serious issue of the
medical marijuana debate. Higher potency actually is desirable for those
who are seeking relief from pain, nausea and other symptomatic misery
associated with HIV, glaucoma, chemotherapy, migraines and multiple
sclerosis, just to name a few conditions for which marijuana has been found
to be effective.

I did not use "whoppers" to mean lies, just exaggerations. Warnings that
exaggerate the dangers of marijuana undermine one's credibility. And that's
what the Bush administration risks with its multimillion-dollar effort to
link street marijuana to international terrorism.

Last week the Drug Enforcement Administration raided a legitimate medical
marijuana health co-operative that was treating more than 200 patients,
some of them terminally ill, in Santa Cruz, Calif., one of eight states
where voters or legislators have legalized medical marijuana.

Snatching medicine out of the hands of seriously ill patients sounds like
terrorism to me. In this case it was federally sponsored and
taxpayer-financed. Put that in your bong and smoke it.