THE MYTH OF `SUPERWEED'

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

Without mentioning me by name, a guest column by John P. Walters, director
of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in the Sept. 1 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. He 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
essay that has used the words "drug czar" and "whoppers" in the same
column. I found this amusing, since my own efforts to get "accurate
information" out of the drug czar's office while writing my column 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 and reprinted in other
newspapers, Walters tries to frighten us Baby-Boomer parents by warning us
that "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 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 didn't cover a long
enough period. THC content averaged less than 1 percent in 1974, he said.
But "by 1999, potency averaged 7 percent."

"The THC of today's sinsemilla (high-grade marijuana) averages 14 percent
and ranges as high as 30 percent," he said.

"Wow," as my "deadhead" friends might say. "That must be some killer weed,
dude."

I tried once again and actually reached Walters this time. After
conversations with him and some of his expert 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 for some extraordinarily potent sinsemilla confiscated by the
Oregon state police 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 how rare
the high-octane dope happens to be. Purchasing weed is an art in itself.
Everyone seeks the "preemo" 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.

In his book called "Understanding Marijuana," Mitchell Earleywine, a
University of Southern California associate professor of psychology,
observes that it "makes little sense" that marijuana with less than 1
percent THC would have enough potency to have increased in popularity as
dramatically as it did in the 1960s and 1970s.

Either way, the "killer-weed" scare tactic avoids the serious issue of the
medical marijuana debate. Higher potency actually is quite desirable for
those seeking relief from pain, nausea and other symptomatic miseries
associated with HIV, glaucoma, chemotherapy, migraines and multiple sclerosis.

I did not use the word "whoppers" to mean lies, just exaggerations.
Warnings that exaggerate the dangers of marijuana undermine one's
credibility in the way "Reefer Madness," the hyperventilating 1936 anti-pot
movie, found new audiences after the 1960s as a laugh-riot, cult-comedy hit.

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 cooperative 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.