'HARMLESS' MARIJUANA? DON'T BET YOUR LIFE ON IT

In December, the University of Michigan released its annual survey,
"Monitoring the Future," which measures drug use among American youth. Very
little had changed from the previous year's report; most indicators were flat.

Yet what it brought to light was deeply disturbing. Drug use among our
nation's teens remains stable, but at near-record levels, with some 49
percent of high school seniors experimenting with marijuana at least once
prior to graduation - and 22 percent smoking marijuana at least once a month.

After years of giggling at quaintly outdated marijuana scare stories such
as the 1936 movie "Reefer Madness," we've become almost conditioned to
think that any warnings about the true dangers of marijuana are overblown.

But marijuana is far from "harmless." Today's marijuana is different from
that of a generation ago, with potency levels 10 to 20 times stronger.

Marijuana directly affects the brain. It impairs the ability of young
people to concentrate and retain information during their peak learning
years and when their brains are still developing. The THC in marijuana
attaches itself to receptors in the hippocampal region of the brain,
weakening short-term memory and interfering with the mechanisms that form
long-term memory.

Do our struggling schools really need another obstacle to student
achievement? Marijuana smoking can hurt more than just grades. According to
the Department of Health and Human Services, the number of
marijuana-related emergency room admissions is growing. Each year, for
example, marijuana use is linked to tens of thousands of serious traffic
accidents.

Research has now established that marijuana is, in fact, addictive. Of the
4.3 million Americans who meet the diagnostic criteria for needing drug
treatment (criteria developed by the American Psychiatric Association)
two-thirds are dependent on marijuana, according to Health and Human
Services. These are people with real problems directly traceable to their
use of marijuana, including significant health problems, emotional problems
and difficulty in cutting down on use. Sixty percent of teens in drug
treatment have a primary marijuana diagnosis.

Despite this and other strong scientific evidence of marijuana's
destructive effects, a cynical campaign is under way to proclaim the
virtues of "medical" marijuana. By now, most Americans realize that the
push to "normalize" marijuana for medical use is part of the drug
legalization agenda. Its chief funders, George Soros, John Sperling and
Peter Lewis, have spent millions of dollars to help pay for referendums and
ballot initiatives in states from Alaska to Maine.

The University of California's Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research is
currently conducting scientific studies to determine the efficacy of
marijuana in treating various ailments.Many questions remain unanswered,
but the science is clear on a few things.

Example: Marijuana contains hundreds of carcinogens.

Moreover, anti-smoking efforts aimed at youth have been remarkably
effective by building on a campaign to erode the social acceptability of
tobacco. Should we undermine those efforts by promoting smoked marijuana as
though it were a medicine? Although medical marijuana initiatives are based
on pseudo-science, their effects on the criminal justice system are
anything but imaginary. By opening up legal loopholes, existing medical
marijuana laws have caused police and prosecutors to stay away from
marijuana prosecutions.

Giving marijuana dealers a free pass is a terrible idea.