A REAL POT-BOILER

Dear Editor, Kudos to Joe Schoenmann for an excellent column on the
relative harmlessness of marijuana compared to alcohol. Marijuana
prohibition is in desperate need of a cost-benefit analysis. Unfortunately,
a review of marijuana legislation would open up a Pandora's box most
politicians would just as soon avoid. America's marijuana laws are based on
culture and xenophobia, not science.

These days marijuana is confused with '60s counterculture, but that wasn't
always the case. The first marijuana laws were enacted in response to
Mexican migration during the early 1900s, despite opposition from the
American Medical Association. White Americans did not even begin to smoke
marijuana until a soon-to-be entrenched government bureaucracy began
funding reefer madness propaganda.

Dire warnings that marijuana inspires homicidal rages have been
counterproductive at best. An estimated 38 percent of Americans have now
smoked pot. The reefer madness myths have long been discredited, forcing
the drug war gravy train to spend millions of tax dollars on politicized
research, trying to find harm in a relatively harmless plant.

The direct experience of millions of Americans contradicts the
sensationalistic myths used to justify marijuana prohibition. Illegal drug
use is the only public health issue wherein key stakeholders are not only
ignored, but actively persecuted and incarcerated. In terms of medical
marijuana, those stakeholders happen to be cancer and AIDS patients.

Robert Sharpe

Program Officer, Drug Policy Alliance

Washington, D.C.