If you want to study marijuana, you’d better be looking to prove harms

This bit of reporting from the San Francisco Weekly confirms a fact about the marijuana health debate Paul Armentano and I have noted for years now:

(SF Weekly) The debate was pushed further into the limelight by yesterday’s Sacramento Bee article which attempts to give a balanced view of the conflicting studies on the issue. And while there undeniably are many studies on both sides of the marijuana divide, it’s important to not let an even-handed attempt at fairness obscure some very obvious conclusions which can be inferred from the results so far.

First of all, it is not true that “we don’t know much about marijuana.” Since the late 1960s, marijuana has been one of the most heavily studied substances in human history — and there is a distinct lack of any “silver bullet” finding which could conceivably justify the herb being illegal.

Ironic slideshow to appear next to an article discussing whether it would be safe to legalize marijuana for adults.

Political agendas abound, of course, in a polarizing issue like marijuana legalization. Studies funded by government agencies like the National Institutes on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) tend to look for deleterious effects to justify current policy, while studies funded by liberal think tanks and the marijuana lobby (and, to be honest, some independent studies, too) tend to conclude that marijuana’s dangers have been grossly overstated.

I’ve personally talked to scientists who have told me that government research grants are a hell of lot easier to obtain if, in the research proposal, you specifically say you are researching the harm done by cannabis, rather than saying you are researching whether cannabis does harm.

I’ve personally talked with a lot of scientists as well, maybe even some of the same ones, who explain the same thing.  We also see it in how the media amplifies any anti-pot study with numerous headlines (see: pot and testicular cancer) but buries any pro-pot study (see: pot and head, neck, and lung cancer, pot and COPD, pot and neuropathic pain, etc.)

But what I found intriguing wasn’t the story, but that it was nestled among ads and graphics and one of them was a link to a slideshow entitled “Bay to Breakers Drunken Dash 2009“.  I discovered these 30 pictures describing “An army of drunk, costumed people [who] teetered from San Francisco’s Embarcadero to the Great Highway Sunday for the annual Bay to Breakers race.”  Tens of thousands of people with open containers of alcohol, wearing costumes promoting alcohol, running down the public streets in broad daylight.

People who, with a straight face, will ask “What about the message we’re sending to the children?” if we legalize marijuana, won’t even bat an eye at the spectacle of thousands of drunks running down the streets in costume and the news media promoting it.  People who worry about us openly smoking a joint as we picnic in the park see no harm whatsoever in a public park being used for a weeklong “Oktoberfest” celebration of all things beer.  Particularly, if a newspaper showed a photo of a third-trimester pregnant woman with “Baby’s 1st Seattle Hempfest” written on her enlarged stomach, we’d hear no end to the complaints about children and pot from these people.

This may be the most frustrating thing about marijuana activism: living in a society so much more openly tolerant of a far more harmful substance.  I often think that a large part of opposition to marijuana legalization is a tribal issue: the drinker tribe vs. the stoner tribe.  The drinker tribe is dominant and society reflects its mores and values.  Any acceptance of the stoner tribe’s mores and values results in a weakening of the drinker tribe’s place in society.