We reported in March on Iowa’s Senator Tom Harkin’s reefer madness, where he believes that using marijuana will harm “the small child whose parents are so addicted to illegal drugs that they sell everything including perhaps their own children to obtain a fix.”  Well, there must be some special hallucinogen in the water because Iowa’s other senator, Chuck Grassley, has a severe case of reefer madness, too, as evidenced by this letter received from Grassley by a fan of the Stash:

Thank you for taking the time to contact me with your thoughts on marijuana. I always enjoy hearing from people back home.

I must, however, disagree with your views on this topic. You see, marijuana is illegal because it is dangerous. When you smoke marijuana, or use any other drug, it changes your brain. It changes the way you think, your ability to learn, and how well you can remember. Making marijuana a legal drug will not change any of this.

Oh, so now we criminalize dangerous intoxicants that affect your brain?  When we ended alcohol prohibition, did that change how it makes you think, learn, and remember when you’re drunk?

What Grassley is alluding to is the notion that marijuana smoking permanently changes your brain, which isn’t true at all.  Marijuana doesn’t kill brain cells, affect your intelligence, or alter your long-term or short-term memory.  (Yes, you get short-term memory loss while you’re high, but once you’re sober again, your memory is fine.)

Some drug users believe that their drug use only affects themselves and that they pose no threat to society. This belief is misguided. People who use drugs do so to alter their perceptions of reality. When someone is high, they cannot be as alert to dangers that are always around us, dangers such as a boiling pot on the stove, a burning candle, or even something as simple as an open window.

Watch out!  Smoke that reefer and you’ll burn yourself and fall out a window!  Again, you have to wonder if Senator Grassley realizes that there are thousands of Iowans “altering their perceptions of reality” with a six-pack, getting drunk (high) and failing to notice boiling pots, burning candles, and open windows.

We know that drug-using workers are 3 to 4 times as likely to have on-the-job accidents, 4 to 6 time more likely to have off-the-job accidents, 2 to 3 times more likely to file medical claims, 5 times more likely to file workman’s compensation, and 25 percent to 35 percent less productive on the job. To claim that drug use affects only the user is to deny the reality that whatever we do effects those around us.

It’s always fun to debunk someone who throws out statistics with no citation.  My first thought is, “Hmm, wonder what those stats are for alcohol-using workers?”  My second thought is, “You wanna talk medical claims and productivity; let’s go talk to the tobacco smokers huddled outside for their fourth fifteen minute smoke break of the day.”  My third thought is, “Drug-using workers - including meth, coke, smack? - or just potheads?”  My fourth thought is, “Any stat you can find for lost productivity, accidents, workman’s comp, and medical claims are trumped in those categories by workers who drink, smoke, are too tired, are injured, or are on certain prescription medications.”

When someone throws out these workplace stats, they are playing fast and loose with the numbers.  For example, one of these studies often cited says that “marijuana users are 30% less productive”.  They get that number by taking the incomes of marijuana smokers and finding their incomes to be 28% less when  compared to the incomes of non-marijuana smokers (1982 NIDA survey of 3,700 households around the country analyzed by North Carolina’s Research Triangle Institute).

Can you see the problem with that kind of “analysis”?  Again, it’s the causality problem.  Does smoking pot make you poor… or do poorer people smoke more pot?  Or could it be that drug testing keeps pot smokers out of higher paying jobs?  Or could it be that non-smoking white collar workers are more likely to have a scotch after work, while the staff at the restaurant prefers smoking a joint after a fourteen-hour shift?  If we found FOX viewers to have 28% less income than PBS viewers, does that mean FOX hurts workplace productivity?

Society retains a right, and in many cases an obligation, to sustain programs that reduce–but may not be able to eliminate–the problems they are designed to resolve. Despite our wishes to the contrary, we do not live in a perfect world. This is true with respect to pollution, violent crime, child abuse, and countless other areas where there is no true hope of ultimate success in ending the abuse. In the case of drug control, absolute success isn’t necessary to justify prohibition, nor is an unpleasant side-effect necessarily sufficient cause to end it. We do not demand 100 percent success as a justification for other abuses that society attempts to place upon its fellow members. We only ask that we strive towards perfection, that we reach for ideals.

Yeah, but the problem is that even by your own metrics, your attempts to control drugs through prohibition have exacerbated the problems you’re claiming to solve.  After seven decades of prohibition, you now have more drugs, cheaper drugs, more powerful drugs, more drug users, more drug overdoses, more drug prisoners.

Using prohibition to control drugs is like using water to put out a grease fire.  You know water puts out other fires, just like harsh laws work against other crimes.  But prohibition is the abdication of the control over a market; supply and demand work regardless.

Illegal drug use causes social ills because of the illegal part, not so much because of the drugs part.  In 1900, all drugs were completely legal.  You could buy opium, cocaine, and cannabis and do with them what you please.  At that time, about 1.3% of the population were considered drug addicts.

Today, all drugs are tightly prohibited.  This has led to the “unpleasant side effects” of well-funded violent criminal gangs, law enforcement corruption, the US as the world’s biggest jailer, and the steady erosion of our civil liberties.  And at this time, about 1.3% of the population are considered drug addicts.

After several thousand years, civilized societies have failed to eliminate murder, rape, or child abuse. Nor have they eliminated organized crime, the manufacture of counterfeit money, or genocide. But no one seriously sees these failures as justification for surrender. Illegal drug use costs society at least as much as any of these social ills. Yet we do not hear any calls to legalize these abuses. Why then should we give up? Should we surrender to the criminals, and legalize marijuana? No. Instead, we should do whatever we can to prevent criminals from gaining the upper hand, do what needs to be done to give our families, our friends, and our neighbors a safe and secure place to live.

You’ve slipped into full-blown reefer madness (dementia sativa) when you can seriously compare genocide, murder, rape, and child abuse with smoking a doobie.

But if you don’t have the time for this much discussion, when the drug warrior uses this line of reasoning that we just “never surrender” even if we can’t achieve “100% success” in the war on drugs, ask them why we surrendered against alcohol, which causes far more social ills than cannabis?

(I know why two Iowa senators have a whole lot of reefer madness… Iowa has a big stake in corn ethanol production… can’t have that far better biomass crop competing with Iowa corn…)

Tags: Iowa, Senator Chuck Grassley

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 10:24 am and is filed under 4:20 NewsHour, Reefer Madness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a trackback from your own site.