When it comes to well-meaning prohibitionists, you can’t find any better representative than Canada’s National Post columnist Barbara Kay. In her latest piece, she investigates the latest studies about “marijuana-induced psychosis” and presents them as an argument for maintaining marijuana prohibition, as she did back in 2008.
Her colleagues razzed (as did I) and asked why marijuana should remain illegal while alcohol and tobacco, which she admits is more “noxious in its effects in the general public”, are legal. Two reasons: history and economics, she argues:
The use of alcohol stretches back over the millennia as an integral part of human civilization and remains, when used properly, a prime ingredient of civilized conviviality and positive social bonding. Alcohol in moderation is not only a social lubricant, it is good for one’s health.
It’s the old Art Linkletter / Richard Nixon argument:
The transcripts show Linkletter telling Nixon, “There’s a great difference between alcohol and marijuana.”
Nixon replies: “What is it?” The president wants to know!
“When people smoke marijuana,” Linkletter explains, “they smoke it to get high. In every case, when most people drink, they drink to be sociable.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” Nixon says. “A person does not drink to get drunk. . . . A person drinks to have fun.”
A year later, however, Linkletter changed his tune. According to the New York Times, “After much thought and study he had concluded that the drug was relatively harmless.”
Nixon and Kay are wrong, of course: plenty of people are drinking to get drunk, most particularly the young people she’s so concerned would suffer from “marijuana-induced psychosis”. According to SAMSHA, 8% of youth aged 12-17 engaged in binge drinking (five or more drinks in a row, or as I used to call it, Friday night) in the past thirty days. Twice as many (16%) teens report experiencing a blackout from alcohol use.
I’m not arguing that we prohibit responsible use of alcohol for adults in order to protect the children from irresponsible use, but that’s exactly what Kay is supporting for marijuana. Yet everything she praises about alcohol – thousands of years of human use, integral to civilization, social bonding, good for health – are praises tenfold for cannabis use.
It is rather kooky to criminally prohibit marijuana and then claim its lack of social integration is reason to keep it prohibited. It is ghoulish to support the legality of alcohol and tobacco with economic arguments, as Kay continues:
As for tobacco, if we knew hundreds of years ago what we know now about its effects – never good, only bad – I would have argued against legalizing it as well. But as with alcohol, it’s not so easy to disband an industry as huge and profitable as tobacco on the grounds that it is unhealthy. There is too much at stake economically. So we’re stuck with it.
So if a substance makes government a ton of money and creates a ton of jobs, it really doesn’t matter that it kills 400,000 North Americans a year, does it? See, if marijuana wanted Barbara Kay’s support, all the money it generates and jobs it creates would need to be legal and taxed, then she wouldn’t mind being “stuck with it”. But since marijuana’s effects are “usually good, rarely bad”, Kay sticks with her support of criminal prohibition of cannabis.
The latest studies confirm that the risk of marijuana-induced psychosis is real, and the most at-risk users are teenagers; regular teenage pot smokers seem to have double the risk of developing paranoia, hallucinations and psychotic breaks five years later.
These studies she links to are referenced in an article that features the story of Don Corbeil:
Corbeil had been smoking pot since he was 14, a habit that escalated to about 10 joints a day.
He started hearing voices and, at one point, Corbeil thought he was the Messiah. Police found him one day talking incoherently, and brought him to hospital, where he was eventually diagnosed with drug-induced psychosis.
Corbeil had dabbled in other drugs, such as acid and ecstasy. But marijuana was his mainstay.
Of course, the article does note that “who exactly is at risk remains hazy” and “the study, however, did not determine whether the drug prompted symptoms or was used to self-medicate.” It also noted “the vast majority of pot smokers will not go psychotic.” But the warnings that the small subset of young teenagers already susceptible to mental illness that smoke ten joints a day might have an increased risk of psychoses is enough for Kay to support locking adults in cages for smoking a joint at home.
According to CAMH, more than thirty percent of Onrtario’s Grade 10 students reported cannabis use in the past year. Add to that the worries about the vastly increased strength of today’s marijuana. Since the 1970s mainstream marijuana has seen a 25-fold increase in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabis’s psychoactive ingredient.
“Pot 2.0! It’s Not Your Father’s Woodstock Weed!” Look, I’ve seen the clothes, hairstyles, and listened to the music of the 1970s… there is no way our parents’ weed was 25 times weaker than what we’re smoking now. In fact, even the article from which Kay cribs the “Ontrario” high school sophomore data knows better:
And what they’re smoking is not their hippie dad’s doobie. Growers have bred more potent pot, more than doubling the amounts of Tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient, and decreasing the cannabidiol, a protective ingredient.
Eh, “doubling”, “25-fold increase”, it’s all the same to a prohibitionist.
Now if Kay were really worried about those kids and their access to pot, maybe she should explain how what we’re doing now is working when 3-in-10 Ontario sophomores have smoked it this year? According to the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse, the number of tobacco smokers aged 15-19 works out to aboot 3-in-20 (14%), eh? They also find that only aboot 1-in-20 (5.6%) 15-19-year-olds have an unhealthy dependence on alcohol.
It’s not that marijuana is harmless and that’s why we should legalize it. We’ve found that prohibition of a very harmful substance, alcohol, was a worse problem than the minority of people who use it irresponsibly or unhealthily. We’ve found that strict regulation of an addictive substance, tobacco, has had remarkable success in reducing its use. So why wouldn’t we try that solution with a substance that is far less harmful and addictive than those two?
Barbara Kay tries to straddle the fence, because even she knows the truth about cannabis, but is still reluctant to give up on prohibition:
Clearly the actual statistical negatives of pot are very small. But what seems to emerge is that for a very small subset of the population, the risk for psychosis is high. One of these days it may be possible to test for that susceptibility as we do for allergies. What we know is that the health facts on marijuana use are not all in, and until researchers are as familiar with the effects of marijuana as they are with those of alcohol and tobacco, there should be no rush to make pot available in local handy stores.
We are still learning plenty about alcohol and tobacco and their effects on health and behavior. It wasn’t that long ago that “Doctors Smoke Chesterfield” ads were on our TV sets and nobody had ever heard of “fetal alcohol syndrome”. Yet discovery of tobacco and alcohol’s previously unknown health dangers never prompted Barbara Kay to pull those products from local handy stores (is that Canadian for “convenience store”?) And day after day here at NORML we report study after study that shows heretofore unknown benefits of cannabis use, like this one that shows schizophrenics who use cannabis demonstrate better cognitive functioning… the same people whose susceptibility to cannabis Kay is using to frighten us into caging adults over cannabis.
As for allergies – there are people on this continent who are deathly allergic to peanuts. Some of them are even children. For the rest of us, peanuts are nice plant product we consume for nourishment, enjoyment, and occasionally while socializing. The fact that peanuts can kill a tiny subset of people with an allergy didn’t lead us to laws banning all peanut use for adults. Instead we did the sensible thing and required confectioners, bakers, and snack food manufacturers to label their products not only if they contain peanuts, but even if their non-peanut snacks are made with equipment that has touched peanuts.
So legalize it already and slap on a warning label: “This product contains cannabinoids. Discuss cannabinoid use with your doctor. Cannabinoids should not be used by pregnant women, children, and those susceptible to psychoses or with a family history of mental illness.”
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exactly… it is the governments job to warn us of the dangers and then let us make the educated decision….. not dictate what we can and cant put into our bodies without harm to others
Nixon was a social drinker–BS -he drank alone ’til on his knees praying to SETH/darkness,and if his policies had a D for Democratic Party— Laura Ingraham would call him a socialistic pacifist.
Legalization takes away forbidden fruit syndrome,which statistically means lower under 21 usage…What are these scientists looking at ?
ZOMG! Another unwashed hippie with facts! You may have your facts, sir, you may have them; but I have my HEARTFELT opinions, and no amount of facts will change the . . . umm . . . FELTINESS of the TRUTH of them, and . . . errrrrr—-
I can’t do it. I can’t wrap my head around how prohibitionists do their mental gymnastics without their heads exploding and purplish-green ichor oozing from the rotten stumps.
My response to Barbara Kay, that was initially accepted and then rejected for publication by the National Post.
The Science Is Clear: It’s Time To Regulate Marijuana
By Paul Armentano
National Post columnist Barbara Kay has repeatedly expressed concern that scientists do not yet know enough about marijuana and its consequences. “Until researchers are as familiar with the effects of marijuana as they are with those of alcohol and tobacco, there should be no rush to make pot available,” she writes.
At first glance, her caution appears justified. After all, who among us doesn’t want to better understand the interactions between the marijuana plant and the human body? Yet placed in proper context this sentiment appears to be misplaced. Here’s why.
Marijuana is already one of the most investigated therapeutically active substances known to man. To date, there are over 20,000 published studies or reviews in the scientific literature pertaining to marijuana and its active compounds. This total includes over 2,700 separate papers published on cannabis in 2009 and another 900 published just this year alone (according to a key word search on the search engine PubMed).
And what have we learned from these 20,000+ studies? Quite a lot. For starters, we know that marijuana and its active constituents, known as cannabinoids, are uniquely safe and effective as therapeutic compounds. Unlike most prescription or over-the-counter medications, cannabinoids are virtually non-toxic to health cells or organs, and they are incapable of causing the user to experience a fatal overdose. Unlike opiates, cannabinoids do not depress the central nervous system, and as a result they possess a virtually unparalleled safety profile. In fact, a 2008 meta-analysis published in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMAJ) reported that cannabis-based drugs were associated with virtually no elevated incidences of serious adverse side effects in over 30 years of investigative use.
We also know that the marijuana plant contains in excess of 60 active compounds that likely possess distinctive therapeutic properties. These include THC, THCV, CBD, THCA, CBC, and CBG, among others. In fact, a recent review by Israel’s Raphael Mechoulam of Hebrew University and colleagues identifies nearly 30 separate therapeutic effects — including anti-cancer properties, anti-diabetic properties, neuroprotection, and anti-stroke properties — influenced by cannabinoids other than THC. Most recently, a review by researchers in Germany reported that since 2005 there have been 37 controlled studies assessing the safety and efficacy of cannabinoids, involved a total of 2,563 subjects. By contrast, most legally approved drugs go through far fewer trials involving far fewer subjects.
Finally, we know that Western civilization has been using cannabis as a therapeutic agent or recreational intoxicant for thousands of years with relatively few adverse consequences — either to the individual user or to society. In fact, no less than the World Health Organization commissioned a team of experts to compare the health and societal consequences of marijuana use compared to other drugs, including alcohol, nicotine, and opiates. After quantifying the harms associated with both drugs, the researchers concluded: “Overall, most of these risks (associated with marijuana) are small to moderate in size. In aggregate they are unlikely to produce public health problems comparable in scale to those currently produced by alcohol and tobacco. On existing patterns of use, cannabis poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol and tobacco in Western societies.”
That, in a nutshell, is what we ‘know’ about cannabis. Is that meant to imply that consuming marijuana is without risk? Of course not. But as a society we don’t tax and regulate alcohol because it’s innocuous. We do so because we recognize that booze temporarily alters mood and behavior and thus should be regulated accordingly. There’s no reason why this same principle shouldn’t also apply to cannabis.
Could one argue that there is still more to learn about pot? Certainly. Yet even Barbara Kay admits, “Clearly the actual statistical negatives of pot are very small.” Isn’t that ample enough information to, at the very least, cease the practice arresting adults who consume it in the privacy of their own home?
Stop making sense, Russ! STOP IT ALREADY!