Christian Science Monitor’s Reefer Madness

The Christian Science Monitor’s editorial board is weighing in on the increasingly popular issue of marijuana legalization with an editorial they call “Legalize marijuana? Not so fast.” and a veritable who’s-who parade of reefer mad prohibitionists:

A harmless drug? Supporters of legalization often claim that no one has died of a pot overdose, and that it has beneficial effects in alleviating suffering from certain diseases.

True, marijuana cannot directly kill its user in the way that alcohol or a drug like heroin can. And activists claim that it may ease symptoms for certain patients – though it has not been endorsed by the major medical associations representing those patients, and the Food and Drug Administration disputes its value.

The AMA is in the back pocket of Big Pharma; they’re not going to endorse a product that cuts by at least half the need for opioids, benzodiazepenes, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.  There are plenty of major medical associations that endorse medical marijuana, including the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Student Association, and the American Nurses Association.  Also, the FDA doesn’t dispute marijuana’s value; it merely has never approved marijuana, and the government, through FDA, DEA, and NIDA, have opposed all efforts to actually put marijuana through the approval process, which we all know it would sail through.

Rosalie Pacula, codirector of the Rand Drug Policy Research Center, poses this question: “If pot is relatively harmless, why are we seeing more than 100,000 hospitalizations a year” for marijuana use?

Emergency-room admissions where marijuana is the primary substance involved increased by 164 percent from 1995 to 2002 – faster than for other drugs, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network.

The way Rosalie puts it, you’d think 100,000 people were running into the ER and screaming, “Quick, doctor! I need help! I’ve taken marijuana and I think I’m going to die!” (in four years of doing this, I’ve only heard one such case…)

But the fact is that these DAWN statistics just survey the drugs people admit to using or what is detected in their body when they are admitted to the emergency room.  DAWN doesn’t measure the cause of why someone’s in the hospital. If you smoked a joint, went to a restaurant, sat down for dinner and had the server accidentally drop scalding hot coffee in your lap, and you went to the hospital for the burns, and when asked, admitted you had smoked a joint that day, cha-ching, that’s a “marijuana [as] the primary substance involved” in that admission.  You might as well say iPods are harmful, because the number of people admitted to hospitals that own an iPod has skyrocketed since 1995.

Research results over the past decade link frequent marijuana use to several serious mental health problems, with youth particularly at risk. And the British Lung Foundation finds that smoking three to four joints is the equivalent of 20 tobacco cigarettes.

Worldwide rates of schizophrenia have remained constant for decades, with little variation between countries with greater cannabis use or lesser cannabis use.  Many people with mental health issues are using cannabis to self-medicate; it is not the source of their mental illness.  And the British Lung Foundation hasn’t been following Dr. Donald Tashkin’s and others’ work showing marijuana use, even chronic, long-term use, doesn’t lead to increased incidence of head, neck, or lung cancers, or to emphysema or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (fair warning: we do get more wheezing and bronchitis – so buy a vaporizer!).

While marijuana is not addictive in the way that a drug like crack-cocaine is, heavy use can lead to dependence – defined by the same criteria as for other drugs. About half of those who use pot daily become dependent for some period of time, writes Kevin Sabet, in the 2006 book, “Pot Politics” – and 1 in 10 people in the US who have ever used marijuana become dependent at some time (about the same rate as alcohol). Dr. Sabet was a drug policy adviser in the past two presidential administrations.

You ever watch an alcoholic and speed addict try to kick those two drugs cold turkey?  I have; it was my father and I was twelve.  I’m still waiting to see the sweaty pale marijuana “addict” picking hallucinatory bugs off his skin, vomiting uncontrollably, wracked with pain, unable to sleep, screaming punctuated by sobbing, because he can’t smoke a bowl.  No reefer madness line personally angers me more than the trumped-up scaremongering about “marijuana dependence.”

Can marijuana users become “dependent”?  Sure, just like people can develop an unhealthy dependence on gambling, sex, shopping, hoarding, sugar, fat, and the internet.  However, that dependence rate is 9% (less than 1 in 10) for cannabis and 15% for alcohol (not “about the same rate”) and 32% for tobacco, and, according to the Institute of Medicine: “CONCLUSION: A distinctive marijuana withdrawal syndrome has been identified, but it is mild and short lived. The syndrome includes restlessness, irritability, mild agitation, insomnia, sleep disturbance, nausea, and cramping.”  Where Kevin gets the figure for half of us daily smokers being “dependent” I can’t say.

NORML likes to point out that marijuana accounts for the majority of illicit drug traffic from Mexico. End the illicit trafficking, and you end the violence. But that volume gives a false impression of marijuana’s role in crime and violence, says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a drug-policy adviser in the US and Australia.

It’s the dollars that count, and the big earners – cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin – play a much larger role in crime and violence. In recent years, Mexico has become a major cocaine route to the US. That’s what’s fanning the violence, according to Dr. Caulkins, so legalizing marijuana is unlikely to quiet Mexico’s drug war.

Jonathan wants you to think we’re measuring volume of drugs coming across the border and that the bulkiness of marijuana compared to coke, meth, and heroin is how we’re measuring how legalized marijuana would hurt the traffickers.  However, we know it’s the dollars that count, and that’s how we’ve measured marijuana’s economic impact to the cartels.  But we’re just reporting what former drug czar John “Unicorn” Walters told USA Today: “[marijuana] now earns cartels about $8.5 billion or about 61 percent of their annual estimated income of $13.8 billion. Cocaine sales earn the cartels about $3.9 billion, and methamphetamine about $1 billion.”

You don’t think cutting a business down to 40 cents on every dollar received is going to lead to a lot less of that business?  Yes, there will still be cocaine, meth, and heroin routes to fight over, but there will be fewer cartels fighting over them with less money to do so.

Neither are America’s prisons stuffed with users who happened to get caught with a few joints … Only 0.7 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons are in for marijuana possession (0.3 percent counting first-time offenders only, according to a 2002 US Justice Department survey). In federal prisons, the median amount of marijuana for those convicted of possession is 115 pounds – 156,000 marijuana cigarettes.

Well, since we do imprison about 2.1 million people, the most overall and per-capita in the world, you’re admitting that 0.7%, or about 15,000 people are in prison for possessing marijuana.  When we include jails, our estimates come up to about 40,000.

But this all supposes that the only harm from marijuana prohibition is incarceration.  What of the costs to society for:

• lost productivity due to workers’ time off to deal with marijuana charges involving a joint;
• underemployment due to skilled workers who smoke a joint avoiding urine screens and unemployment compensation for those who fail them;
• social services costs for probation officers, drug testing, child protective services, and other government costs to deal we wouldn’t incur for someone caught drinking a beer in their home;
• wasted potential of college students forced to drop out by losing their student aid for a joint;
• moving costs when a person smoking a joint is kicked out of housing;
• health care costs for treatments and pharmaceuticals that could be replaced by smoking a joint;
• police costs to enforce the prohibition and deal with the ancillary crime and violence issues brought about by prohibition?

The black market can easily undercut a $50 tax and shrink that expected revenue stream. Just look at the huge trade in illegal cigarettes in Canada to see how taxing can spur a black market (about 30 percent of tobacco bought in Canada is illegal).

A government could attempt to eliminate the black market altogether by making marijuana incredibly cheap (Dr. Pacula at the RAND Organization says today’s black market price is about four times what it would be if pot were completely legalized). But then use would skyrocket and teens (though barred) could buy it with their lunch money.

Currently an average price for an ounce of weed is $300.  Rosalie says that pot would be $75 an ounce if it were completely legal.  So if we add the tax to the price, we’re looking at a $125 ounce of legal weed.  To undercut that, the black market would have to sell pot at a 58% discount from its current price.  How many businesses can survive by cutting the price of their product by almost 60%?  Not only does the price drop hurt the dealers, but also most adult consumers will prefer buying legal, pure, potency-labeled cannabis vs. illegal cannabis of questionable quality if the prices are nearly the same.  So the dealers would have to severely undercut the legal price in order to make any sales to a much smaller customer base (only 1 in 8 monthly smokers are minors).

But let’s say they do and sell an ounce for $100.  Does your kid have $100 in “lunch money”?  Suppose the dealer breaks it down to smaller quantities; do you think he adds a bit for every cut, like dealers do now?  I’d bet the $100 ounce becomes two $60 halfs, then four $35 quarters, then eight $20 eightths.  Does your kid have $20 in lunch money?

As America has learned with alcohol, taxes don’t begin to cover the costs to society of destroyed families, lost productivity, and ruined lives – and regulators still have not succeeded in keeping alcohol from underage drinkers.

So why aren’t you calling for a return to alcohol prohibition?  Oh, right, because we realized the costs of making it illegal were far greater.

Why legalize a third substance that produces ill effects, when the US has such a poor record in dealing with the two big “licits” – alcohol and tobacco?

Actually, the US has a great record in dealing with tobacco.  Youth tobacco use has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded, and we didn’t have to arrest a single smoker to make it happen.  And that’s a drug that causes dependence in 32% of its users, causes more deaths than legal and illegal drugs, including alcohol, combined, and generally once addicted to becomes a lifelong habit.  Most marijuana smokers, even if they start as minors, cease smoking pot by age 30.

Do parents really want marijuana to become a normal part of society – and an expectation for their children?

Maybe parents thought they left peer pressure behind when they graduated from high school. But the push to legalize marijuana is like the peer pressure of the schoolyard. The arguments are perhaps timely, but they don’t stand up, and parents must now stand up to them.

Parents must make clear that marijuana is not a harmless drug – even if they personally may have emerged unscathed.

In other words, parents, ignore your own personal experience and the experience of your entire generation, ignore the facts and reason we’re presenting to you from peer-reviewed scientific literature, ignore the lessons of alcohol prohibition and recent tobacco prevention efforts, and regurgitate the Christian Science Monitor’s well-debunked reefer madness parroted from advisors paid by government agencies that would suffer severe funding cuts if marijuana were legal.