Barbara Kay on the new marijuana: Not your mother’s reefer

Looks like the UK reefer madness has now spread to Canada – this is an editorial from Canada’s National Post:

Barbara Kay on the new marijuana: Not your mother’s reefer – Full Comment
The words “intoxicate the brain” bring to mind the Post’s 2007 editorial on marijuana, enunciated in response to evidence that Canada’s marijuana consumption was the highest in the industrialized world: “What is really remarkable about Canada’s status as a cannabis capital is that if you were to set out looking for reasons to worry about it … you would have an awfully hard time finding them. Legalizing pot makes sense.”

What was the editorial board smoking when these words were written? In fact, one would not “have an awfully hard time” finding reasons to worry if one were actually open to finding them.

In 1997, the liberal U.K. newspaper The Independent launched a campaign to decriminalize marijuana. …Since then, “skunk,” as Britons call the hybrid form of cannabis in current usage, has offered users a 25-fold increase in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabis’s psychoactive ingredient. The mental and physical effects of this chemical change have been dramatic.

In March, 2007, The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, declared cannabis to be more dangerous and addictive than LSD and Ecstasy. About the same time, Professor Colin Blakemore, chief of the Medical Research Council (and in 1997, the moral authority behind The Independent’s liberalization campaign) unequivocally reversed his cannabis-friendliness: “The link between cannabis and psychosis is quite clear now; it wasn’t 10 years ago.”

As a result, The Independent last year offered its readership a fulsome apology: “If only we had known then what we can reveal today…”

Psychiatry professor Robin Murray of London’s Institute of Psychiatry estimates that cannabis usage is causally linked to a full 10% of the U. K.’s 250,000 bipolar patients.

Indeed, just this past February, the European Respiratory Journal reported on a New Zealand study indicating that long term cannabis use increases the annual risk of lung cancer in young adults by 8% for every year of use.

In 1970, pot contained 1% THC. Bud contains 20% THC. Imagine a glass of wine or beer with a similarly proportioned alcohol content and consider the “rush” it would provide.

Two weeks ago, the Home Office in the U.K. announced: “Cannabis will be reclassified as a Class B drug, sending a strong message that the drug is harmful.”

The verdict on the new marijuana is in, and it’s “guilty.” I would therefore respectfully ask the Post to reconsider its editorial stance on the legalization of “pot,” clearly a superannuated description of cannabis today, and in future commentary on this issue, so critical to our youth’s health, exercise a little more intellectual — ahem — sobriety.

Intellectual sobriety? How about instead, a few facts, please:

1) “Skunk” is 25x more powerful? Where can I find some? The 1% THC 1970s pot cited would be called unsmokable “industrial hemp” and give you more a headache than a high. I’d assume Canada’s pot potency is similar to what has been measured in the US, from an average of 3% THC in 1985 to 8% THC in 2005.

This “not your father’s pot” myth is created by comparing the pot tested years later from the hot, dry evidence lockers where it had been stored since the 70s and the THC has degraded to the hemp-level 1% THC, vs. the highest grade (and rare) hash and sensimillia that can range from 15%-30% THC. It’s a bit like saying alcohol is so much more dangerous today because Dad drank 3.2 beer in the 70s and today there is Bacardi 151 rum!

2) Cannabis more dangerous than LSD and ecstasy? LSD, the most potent psychedelic known to man and ecstasy, a stimulant that has led to numerous deaths, more dangerous than the herb that has killed zero people in history? Really?

3) The link between cannabis and psychosis is fabricated by UK scaremongers. Studies purporting this link have been extremely flawed, such as not controlling for poly-drug use and failing to prove a causal link between cannabis and psychosis (i.e., many people already have psychosis and use cannabis to self-medicate). The latest research, published in the journal Human Psychopharmacology, finds very minimal risk psychologically from cannabis use.

4) Cannabis and bipolarity (or schizophrenia, for that matter) is another one of these specious correlative-but-not-causal links. If, indeed, cannabis causes these massive harms, where are the bodies? As potency has risen, why has there been no associated rise in the incidence of schizophrenia, which seems to always hover at below 2% of the population? As cannabis use rates have risen and fallen, why haven’t rates of bipolar disorder risen and fallen?

5) Lung cancer (and head and neck cancers) is not a risk of even heavy cannabis smoking, as shown by Dr. Donald Tashkin at the UCLA Medical Center.

6) Imagining the rush from beer or wine is not comparable. Alcohol intake requires 30-45 minutes of digestion before one feels the effects. Thus, someone unknowingly consuming a more potent alcohol faces the risk of becoming drunker than intended.

But with inhaled cannabis, the effects are known within seconds. This means no matter how potent the marijuana, a person smokes it to get high, and upon reaching the high, the smoker usually stops. In this way, more potent marijuana may actually be healthier, as the user would inhale less harmful smoke.

It should also be mentioned that users can vaporize or eat cannabis, which removes all of the harmful effects of smoking.

Furthermore, when talking about how terrible more potent cannabis is, we should remember that Canada has approved for medical use Marinol and Sativex, both synthetic versions of THC that are 100% pure. (Strange that an easily-grown weed at 15% THC is “deadly skunk” but when the 100% THC is bar-coded for a profit, it’s a recognized medicine.)

7) “Long term cannabis use increases the annual risk of lung cancer in young adults by 8% for every year of use?”  So, then, after 12½ years of cannabis use, there’s a 100% chance of getting lung cancer?

The verdict on Ms. Kay’s “reporting” on cannabis is in, and it’s “guilty” of the same old reefer madness propaganda yellow journalists have foisted on an uninformed public since William Randolph Hearst in the 1930s:

“Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him….” — William Randolph Hearst, 1936.