Pennsylvania moves forward with medical marijuana, local officials repeat tired old reefer madness claims

(Beaver County Times) Benjamin Wilhelm, president of Western Pennsylvania NORML, a Baden-based advocacy group that tries to spread awareness and educate the public about marijuana, said he wholeheartedly supports the bill. He says he has been in contact with people who say medical marijuana would take the edge off and help ease their condition. He said many prescription medications that people take don’t cure patient conditions.

“The medication that they give you for those types of conditions can hold you back in a lot of the way you live your life,” Wilhelm said. “They’re often a lot more dangerous and destructive to your body and your system than marijuana would be.”

For example, Dilaudid — prescribed to patients such as those with multiple sclerosis — is a narcotic pain-relieving drug with adverse side effects that can include withdrawal symptoms, respiratory depression, seizure and cardiac arrest, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Benjamin does a good job with the Dilaudid example to counteract one of the common reefer madness complaints we hear when states take up the medical marijuana issue: “but there are other legal drugs people can use besides marijuana!”  The latest High Times magazine has a great table with a list of various conditions along the left side (nausea, pain, seizures, etc.), with columns for the recommended pharmaceutical solution and what side effects it creates, followed by columns for marijuana’s use for that condition and a tongue-in-cheek column describing marijuana’s side effects.

This is a very common misconception that average people with no cannabis experience maintain – the “take a pill” as the default reaction to illness or injury.  This weekend I received a reminder call for my Red Cross apheresis treatment (removal of my blood, separating out the platelets, put the red cells and plasma back in).  As always, they said, “remember, no aspirin for 48 hours prior to the appointment!”  I replied, “I don’t take aspirin ever, so no problem.”

I went in for the treatment on Sunday.  I told the intake nurse that just after I got that call, me and a friend played some pickup basketball and my 41-year-old fat white guy left knee didn’t appreciate my efforts.  It gets a bit stiff and swollen.  He replied, “you didn’t take any aspirin, did you?”  No, I told him, I don’t take pills except when extremely necessary.  He then said, “well, you can take an Advil if you like, just not aspirin.”  I said, no, that’s OK, I just put some ice on it and elevated it (and rubbed some hemp balm on it and smoked a big fat bowl, but I didn’t tell him that part).  He then replied, “Good, I’m glad you iced it.  You can take some Advil if it gets too painful.  I’ve got a couple now if you’d like.”  No thanks, I answered, wondering if two interns were going to come in and force some Advil down my throat.

Center Township Police Chief Barry Kramer, who is against decriminalization, said he believes legalizing marijuana for medical purposes will only introduce more users into society. He said alcohol use has increased since 1933, when prohibition was repealed, and is now the number one drug problem in the United States. Kramer said the same can happen with marijuana.

Do they not issue computers and “teh Google” to police in Pennsylvania?  The third link I got when Googling “American alcohol consumption” brought me “Secular Trends in Alcohol Consumption over 50 Years: The Framingham Study” published in The American Journal of Medicine, Volume 121, Issue 8 (August 2008), which found:

Americans are drinking significantly less beer and more wine, while hard liquor use has remained fairly constant. More people now report that they are non-drinkers. People born later in the 20th century drink more moderately than older people. As we age, our individual alcohol consumption goes down…. Subjects, both from the original cohort and from the children of the original cohort, have been interviewed every 4 years, from 1948 until 2003. Since each individual was followed directly, a set of histories of lifetime alcohol use could be captured.

Miron, Jeffrey. "Alcohol Prohibition". EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. September 24, 2001.

To be fair, Chief Kramer is right about alcohol use increasing following the repeal of Prohibition.  Jeffrey Miron looked at the per-capita consumption of alcohol and found that after Prohibition’s repeal, consumption skyrocketed in the 1930s.  (It was the Depression, though, so you might understand people wanting to drink.)  However, per-capita alcohol consumption declined in the 1950s and 1960s and didn’t outpace the pre-Prohibition levels of drinking until the until the 1970s.  Then, since the mid 1980s and as the Framingham study notes, alcohol consumption is on the decline.  According to the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol consumption in the 2000s looks to be lower than it was prior to Prohibition in the 1900s:

Apparent per capita ethanol consumption for the United States, 1850-2006. [Gallons of ethanol, based on population age 15 and older prior to 1970 and on population age 14 and older thereafter]

Year	Beer	Wine	Spirits	Total
2006	1.19	0.37	0.71	2.27
2005	1.18	0.36	0.70	2.23
2004	1.20	0.35	0.68	2.23
2003	1.21	0.34	0.67	2.22
2002	1.23	0.33	0.65	2.20
2001	1.23	0.31	0.64	2.18
2000	1.22	0.31	0.65	2.18
1916–1919	1.08	0.12	0.76	1.96
1911–1915	1.48	0.14	0.94	2.56
1906–1910	1.47	0.17	0.96	2.60
1901–1905	1.31	0.13	0.95	2.39

The main difference I’d note is that people drank more beer and hard liquor then and we drink more wine now, but overall, we’re drinking less than the Americans whose consumption inspired alcohol Prohibition.

Another Pennsylvania legislator dredges up some more classic reefer madness:

Rep. Jim Marshall, R-14, Big Beaver, said unless he hears some overwhelming support from the district, he would likely vote against the bill.

“My gut feeling would be that I would not support it. … I’ve heard that chemically, carcinogens in marijuana are the same that are in tobacco. Inhaling could cause lung cancer or other internal damage.”

Say it again with me, Stashers, loud enough for them to hear us in Pennsylvania:  marijuana smoking, even regular smoking of large amounts of marijuana, does not lead to increased incidence of head, neck, or lung cancers!