DISAGREE WITH WINN ABOUT REGULATION OF PERSONAL BEHAVIOR

Editor -- I always read Steven Winn's columns with some interest, and
find myself agreeing more often than not, but I was taken aback by
something he wrote: "But when the country turned against Prohibition,
a distaste for regulating all forms of personal behavior became part
of our national constitution."

With all due respect, Americans may like to imagine this is so, but
it's not. If we really had a national distaste for regulating
personal behavior, we would not have more people locked up in state
and federal prisons for drug offenses than the entire prison
populations (for all offenses of any sort) of England, Scotland,
Germany, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands combined.

And we would not arrest more people for marijuana possession -- not
sales, cultivation or trafficking, just possession -- than for all
violent crimes combined. And we would not spend tens of billions of
dollars a year on a "war on drugs" that has had no discernible effect
other than to enrich criminal gangs, fill our prisons and keep
hundreds of thousands of police, prison guards, attorneys and drug-
war bureaucrats employed.

Indeed, despite overwhelming evidence that marijuana relieves nausea,
vomiting, certain types of pain and other symptoms, federal law and
the laws of 39 states bar even people with life-threatening illnesses
from using marijuana with their doctor's recommendation to relieve a
bit of their misery. Bear in mind that in every measurable way,
marijuana is orders of magnitude less dangerous than either tobacco
or alcohol. The reasons for its prohibition could be argued to be
cultural or political or bureaucratic or historical -- or maybe
simply a desire to regulate "undesirable" behavior -- but they are
not scientific or medical.

One final note: Since your column was about tobacco, the issue of
marijuana obviously brings up some of the same concerns about
smoking. While smoking marijuana presents some of the same risks as
tobacco (e.g. cough, bronchitis), marijuana has never been shown to
increase one's risk of lung cancer or other tobacco-related cancers.
In a study out of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland that followed 65,000
people for 10 years, cigarette smokers had about an 11-fold increased
risk of lung cancer compared to nonsmokers. But marijuana smokers who
didn't smoke tobacco had no increased risk.

Bruce Mirken

Director of Communications

Marijuana Policy Project

Washington, D.C.