Why, it was just yesterday that I was telling you…

(DEA) Exposing the Myth of Smoked Medical Marijuana

Q. Does marijuana have any medical value?

…The American Medical Association recommends that marijuana remain a Schedule I controlled substance.

And now today when you go to that same link…

Q. Does marijuana have any medical value?

And the AMA reference is gone.  Congrats to the folks at LEAP who spearheaded the campaign to harass the DEA about it.  (Though if you want to believe it was the fast response of the loyal frontline battle grunts in the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs™ known as “Stashers” that provided the “bump” that put the DEA over the edge, well, I’m not going to disabuse you of that notion.  Whatever keeps you writing to your government is fine with me.)

But the rest of the document needs some serious fixing, too…

…The Institute of Medicine conducted a comprehensive study in 1999 to assess the potential health benefits of marijuana and its constituent cannabinoids. The study concluded that smoking marijuana is not recommended for the treatment of any disease condition. In addition, there are more effective medications currently available. For those reasons, the Institute of Medicine concluded that there is little future in smoked marijuana as a medically approved medication.

See?  The AMA in 2009 recognizes “smoked cannabis reduces neuropathic pain, improves appetite and caloric intake especially in patients with reduced muscle mass, and may relieve spasticity and pain in patients with multiple sclerosis.” So the DEA removes that current reference and replaces it with a contrary reference from a decade ago.  (I often win arguments this way, like my trivia contest where I guessed there were nine planets, the 49′ers had the most Super Bowl trophies, and Bill Clinton was the president.)

But it is nice to know that the DEA recognizes that decade-old reference from the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 Study: Marijuana and Medicine, Assessing the Science Base.  For it, too, recognizes the “Scientific data indicate the potential therapeutic value of cannabinoid drugs, primarily THC, for pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation”.  It also rebukes the DEA’s statement that “smoking marijuana is not recommended for the treatment of any disease condition” when the study concludes, “for certain patients, such as the terminally ill or those with debilitating symptoms, the long-term risks [of smoked marijuana] are not of great concern.”

It’s nice that the DEA cites the 1999 IOM study, especially when they claim:

Q. Is marijuana a gateway drug?

* Yes. Among marijuana’s most harmful consequences is its role in leading to the use of other illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine.

…while the IOM study says, “There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.”

…In other studies, smoked marijuana has been shown to cause a variety of health problems, including cancer, respiratory problems, increased heart rate, loss of motor skills, and increased heart rate.

And not only that, I also hear it can cause increased heart rate.  But not cancer; in fact, cannabis users show a reduced risk of head, neck, and lung cancers compared to non-using controls.  And not respiratory problems, at least not seriously debilitating problems like emphysema and COPD.  And not a loss of motor skills in any permanent or even long-lasting way.  Sure, you don’t smoke a blunt and then go see how well you’ll do on the driver’s test, but a couple of hours later and you’re no worse to drive than anybody else.  But I do hear that it can cause an increased heart rate… an increase about the same as walking up a flight of stairs.

…It’s also important to realize that the campaign to allow marijuana to be used as medicine is a tactical maneuver in an overall strategy to completely legalize all drugs. …. The New York Times interviewed Ethan Nadelman, [when asked] “Will it help lead toward marijuana legaization?” Mr. Nadelman said: “I hope so.”

I’m not sure what “legaization” is, but maybe there is a shortage of “L’s” at the DEA.  Anyway, let’s look at this tactical maneuver.  According to the DEA, Ethan Nadelmann and the rest of us “legaizers” are following this strategy:

1. Scenario: All (currently illicit) drugs are illegal.
2. Goal: Legalize all (currently illicit) drugs.
3. Tactic: Convince voters that they should make one (currently illicit) drug available to very sick or disabled people under very strict conditions.
4. Premise: Once voters are accustomed to sick people using one drug, they’ll decide that all people should be able to use all drugs.

How exactly does that work?  How is it that Joe Q. Public sees a cancer patient smoking a joint and decides, “You know, if they put up an initiative to put meth-flavored lollipops in the 7-Eleven, I’ll vote for it!”

The very notion that medical marijuana is a “Trojan horse” is both an insult to the public’s intelligence and an endorsement of the legalization we seek!  Are they really suggesting that the only way they can keep the public from rejecting prohibition as a policy is to make sure people in pain don’t smoke pot?  The fact that they think a public exposed to a non-punitive, regulatory solution to drug control will be inexorably drawn to more of those non-punitive regulatory solutions for more people and other drugs just shows you how bankrupt prohibitionist ideology is!  They can’t support it with reason, they can only support it through the barrel of a cop’s gun.

A new article on MedPage today claims that we still don’t fully understand the health risks of cannabis use:

Overall, “the public health burden of cannabis use is probably modest compared with that of alcohol, tobacco, and other illicit drugs,” Australian researchers reported in the Oct. 17 issue of The Lancet.

Wayne Hall, PhD, of the University of Queensland in Herston, Australia, and Louisa Degenhardt, PhD, of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, reviewed nearly 100 studies covering acute as well as chronic effects of marijuana, including reports of the prevalence of marijuana use around the world.

Globally, they wrote, about 3.9% of the world’s population used marijuana in 2006, according to United Nations statistics.

Well it opens nicely by noting that cannabis is safer and that almost 1 out of 25 people worldwide use cannabis. It gets a bit dicey from there:

They spent more time detailing the psychomotor impairments associated with the marijuana high. “Some experimental studies have shown diminished driving performance in response to emergency situations,” Hall and Degenhardt said, findings also corroborated in epidemiological studies.

For example, one study of car crash victims found that they were more likely to have tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive component of marijuana, in their blood compared with age- and sex-matched controls.

Another study determined that motorists killed in wrecks were 2.5 times as likely to have been responsible for the accident when they had THC in their blood.

These are meaningless points when you recognize that:

1. Marijuana is the third-most used drug after alcohol and tobacco, so it is not surprising you’d find it in car crash victims;
2. Marijuana is detectable in the blood long after most other drugs, including alcohol, are not; and
3. Recent studies show that people can test positive for THC in the blood up to a week after ceasing their use of cannabis.

Few somatic effects of chronic use have been documented, Hall and Degenhardt found, except for several case-control studies suggesting promotion of lung cancer. Also, THC increases heart rate in a dose-dependent way, perhaps increasing risks for people with preexisting cardiovascular disease.

Yet when we look at populations of chronic cannabis users, we don’t find any link to lung cancer or heart attacks. In fact, we’re finding that cannabis may be a key to preventing and curing cancer!

Cognitive effects while high are, of course, well recognized, but their persistence is less clear, Hall and Degenhardt said. Some studies say cognitive impairment remains in chronic heavy users even after they quit, but others indicate that recovery of function is the rule.

I’d say we just find some old dudes who’ve smoked pot for fifty or more years and put them in a Jeopardy tournament with old dudes who’ve been drinking for fifty or more years and let’s settle this once and for all!

Similar uncertainty clouds the research on whether marijuana fosters use of other, arguably more dangerous, drugs such as cocaine and heroin, the researchers said. People who use marijuana are more likely to use other illicit drugs as well, but causality has been difficult to prove.

How about “impossible to prove”? The Institute of Medicine in 1999 and every other study since has concluded that there is no “gateway effect”. The only gateway in marijuana is to the dealer of illegal drugs. You know why they don’t call tequila a gateway drug? Because you can’t buy cocaine, heroin, or meth on the shelf next to it.

Marijuana use has also been linked to increased risk of psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and, less consistently, depression.

Except that, worldwide and nationally, the rates of schizophrenia and psychosis remain virtually static even as cannabis use and potency rises and falls. A recent ten-year analysis of data from the UK found no increase in schizophrenia and psychosis even as rates of cannabis use exploded.

Overall, they concluded that marijuana is clearly associated with negative health and psychosocial consequences, but these are not as major as for some other drugs, and the causal relations remain unproven.

“The focus of epidemiological and clinical research should be on clarifying the causative role of cannabis for these adverse health effects,” the authors said.

Really? You looked and looked and found that lots of people use cannabis and you couldn’t prove that it did much harm to them, so the the focus going forward should be to prove that cannabis did harm them? How about accepting that as drugs go, cannabis is probably the safest one out there, the most beneficial to the most people and the least harmful to society?

They also cited a recent study estimating that marijuana accounted for about 0.2% of the total disease burden in Australia, a nation with one of the world’s highest rates of cannabis use. Its health impact was one-tenth that of alcohol and one-fortieth that of tobacco, the study found.

That makes for a nice sound bite: Cannabis – ten times less damaging to society than alcohol, forty times less damaging to society than tobacco, and yet still illegal.

By DUANE SCHRAG/Salina Journal

Allowing the use of marijuana (or cannabis), even for medicinal purposes, doesn’t appear to have much support among public officials in Kansas. Locally, Saline County Sheriff Glen Kochanowski said he believes relaxing the rules would be ill-advised. Saline County Attorney Ellen Mitchell, who was deep into preparing for the third murder trial of Cameron Nelson, expressed skepticism. Salina Police Chief Jim Hill didn’t return a call seeking comment.

And Kansas Attorney General Steven Six said he would oppose it if the Legislature ever brought it up.

“The use of marijuana can lead to the use of other harder, more serious, drugs,” he said in an e-mail, via a spokesperson.

Ah, the old Gateway Theory.  Somebody send Attorney General Six a copy of the 1999 Institute of Medicine report, please, which found concluded that marijuana was not a “gateway drug to the extent that it is a cause or even that it is the most significant predictor of serious drug abuse,” a finding which has been echoed by a 2001 American Journal of Public Health report, a 2002 study by RAND, a 2002 Canadian Senate study, and a 2006 University of Pittsburgh study.

Or just offer the common sense observation that while nearly every heroin and cocaine user first tried pot, nearly every pot user doesn’t try heroin or cocaine.  There are now 102 million Americans age 12 and older who have tried marijuana, yet there are only 2 million active cocaine users and 350,000 active heroin users.

Proponents of decriminalization sometimes point out that marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in the United States and question the actual harm of using marijuana. Some argued, for instance, that it really isn’t addictive. Medical researchers now know that it is.

“For many years, the scientific community had been reluctant to acknowledge the dependence potential of cannabis because certain types of experimental findings were lacking,” wrote Alan Budney and Brent Moore in a paper published in 2002 by the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. “In contrast, the past 10 to 15 years of clinical and basic research have produced strong evidence demonstrating that cannabis can and does produce strong dependence.”

The authors go on to note that marijuana’s addictive properties are not as intense as those of other commonly abused substances.

“Cannabis has a substantial, albeit lower, rate of conditional dependence (9 percent) than substances such as alcohol (15 percent), cocaine (17 percent), heroin (23 percent), or tobacco (32 percent),” they wrote.

This “strong dependence” of which they write includes such dramatic withdrawal symptoms as “irritability”, “anxiety”, “sleep disturbance”, and “depressed mood”.  You know, just like when you picture a heroin addict trying to quit cold turkey, or just like your average cigarette smoker trying to put down the cancer sticks.

It’s a “strong dependence” that they’ll admit is less intense than other drugs and occurs at the lowest rates of other drugs.  So I suppose heroin and cigarettes and alcohol produce “super-duper strong dependence”.

One of these studies desperately trying to convince you that the cannabis monkey on your back is a gorilla is out of Johns Hopkins where they took six men and six women who smoked both cannabis and tobacco and made them quit one for five days, then the other for five days, then both for five days, with periods of regular use in between.  They found that six of them thought it was harder to quit both at once, six found it harder to quit one at a time, and their scores for anger, irritability, etc. were similar whether they were quitting one or the other.  Based on that – a dozen people with wildly varying results – the headline reads “Marijuana withdrawal as bad as withdrawal from cigarettes”.

Now I’ve never been addicted to tobacco, but watching my friends who’ve tried to kick repeatedly fail, combined with my many instances where through choice or circumstance I’ve been unable to smoke pot for days, I’m convinced that going a few days without weed is far easier than going a few days without cigs.

When it is smoked, its effect on the respiratory system is similar to tobacco use but at much lower doses.

“Habitual marijuana use is as injurious to the epithelium of the large airways as regular tobacco smoking, despite a much smaller daily number of marijuana than tobacco cigarettes smoked,” wrote the authors of a paper on the respiratory consequences of marijuana smoking that was published in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

Yet habitual marijuana smoking does not seem to lead to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema, or head, neck, or lung cancers.  Yes, I will grant that inhaling the smoke of any burning vegetable matter is not a healthy choice, and it will increase your chance of bronchitis, but compared to tobacco smoke it is less harmful by a great degree.  And then there’s vaporization, which few ever seem to recognize, which eliminates nearly every harm of smoking.

Regardless, I still wonder why some people think it is logical to arrest and jail people to protect their lungs, and if so, why aren’t tobacco smokers in prison?

[State Sen. Pete Brungardt, R-Salina.] said the Legislature heard testimony on that subject.

“Most of the testimony we heard was that all those things that are desirable are duplicated by other medicines,” he said. “In fact, the other medications are superior.”

I guess they didn’t have any puking chemo patients testifying, who can’t swallow and keep down anti-nausea pills that don’t work as well as inhaled cannabis.  I guess they didn’t catch the studies showing cannabis therapy as a superior remedy for neuropathic pain.  I guess they’ve never read the side effects of these other medications.

[Saline County Sheriff Glen Kochanowski] doesn’t see the benefits outweighing the drawbacks.

“You’re going to have people playing the system (if medical use is allowed),” he said. And too often chemical abuse has disastrous effects.

“I have seen families broken, I have seen careers ruined because of a person’s desire to use any kind of drug,” he said.

He rejects the suggestion that legalizing it would free law enforcement up to pursue other criminals.

“I have a hard time looking at decriminalizing something just to make things easier for everyone,” he said. “What, do we decriminalize drunk driving? Do we decriminalize rape because it’s too hard to deal with?”

While I always enjoy law enforcement officials using their quality medical training at the police academy to opine on medical matters, I’m a bit troubled by a sheriff who can’t seem to understand the difference between drunk driving, rape, and some adult smoking a joint in their own home to relieve pain, nausea, spasticity, or to just relax after a long days’ work.  See, sheriff, if you allow adults to be adults in the privacy of their own home, maybe you’ve got more resources to go after those drunk drivers and rapists that are actually harming others!

Forty-one percent (41%) of likely U.S. voters think the United States should legalize and tax marijuana to help solve the nation’s fiscal problems.

However, nearly half (49%) oppose this idea, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

These results show little difference from a survey conducted in February that asked Americans about legalization only. At that time, 40% said marijuana should be legalized, but 46% disagreed.

Over half of Democrats (52%) support the idea of legalizing and taxing pot, but only 28% of Republicans agree. Most GOP voters (65%) are against the idea, as are 37% of Democrats. Unaffiliated voters are more evenly divided: 41% are in favor of the idea and 47% are opposed to it.

Adults between the ages of 18 and 40 are much more likely to support legalizing and taxing marijuana than those over 40.

The new survey also shows that nearly half of voters (46%) believe marijuana use leads to use of harder drugs. Thirty-seven percent (37%) do not see marijuana as a “gateway” drug.

That “gateway drug” argument sure is persistent, isn’t it?  I guess I could give it a positive spin: at least if you’re relying on the “gateway drug” argument to show how awful marijuana is, you’re tacitly admitting that the marijuana itself isn’t so harmful.

The only three effective tools left in the prohibitionist’s rhetorical arsenal are:

1. Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to use of harder drugs.
2. If we legalized marijuana, our streets would be filled with stoned drivers!
3. What about the children?  For God’s Sake, won’t somebody think of the children?

So it is up to us to educate our friends and family and elected representatives.  We need to have people who bring up “gateway drug” laughed out of the room like people who insist the moon landing was faked*.

We’ll deal with “stoned drivers” and “what about the children” another time.  For your peers that shoot you the “gateway drug” argument, you could tell them that the Institute of Medicine debunked this theory in 1999 and every study subsequent to it has agreed.  Or you could point out that the “gateway theory” is a logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning (that since this came before that, this caused that).  But if your peers were swayed by logic and reason, we wouldn’t have 46% of them believing the “gateway theory”.

The theory survives because it fits a pattern familiar to most people.  They understand that the falling-down drunk who’s loaded on scotch was once probably a guy who drank a beer or two.  They understand that the chain smoker was once probably a guy who had a cigarette now and then.  They understand that the right-wing talk radio host who was downing 30 illegal Oxycontin a day probably started on one or two a day.  They also realize — accurately, I’ll admit — that the crack addict and heroin junkie probably smoked a joint or two before they moved on to the hard stuff.

So the way you attack this is to flip the perspective.  They’re looking at all the hard drug addicts and noting that almost all of them used pot.  You need to make them see all the marijuana users and show how few actually use hard drugs.  Here are your three rhetorical attacks on the “gateway theory”:

1) 721-15-1.  This is the ratio of people who have ever smoked marijuana (95.9 million) to people who used cocaine last month (2 million) and people who used heroin last month (133,000).  “For every 721 people who’ve ever smoked pot, only 15 currently use cocaine and one uses heroin,” you might say, “how much of a gateway to addiction is it when only 2% of the people who ever try it use hard drugs?”  (Note: “Gateway to addiction”, not “gateway drug”.  The latter sets the prohibitionist’s frame of marijuana as a drug like heroin and coke.  The former frames the hard drugs as something you’ll get addicted to, but implicitly says if you’re using marijuana, you haven’t gotten to addiction yet.)

2) 721-49½.  This is the ratio of people who have ever drank alcohol (204 million) to people who become alcoholics (14 million).  “For every 721 people who try alcohol, 49½ of them become alcoholics – or alcohol addicts,” you continue.  “So how is it that beer isn’t considered a gateway to addiction when three times as many of its users become addicted?  6.8% of people who try alcohol become alcoholics, while only 2% of people who try pot become coke or heroin addicts!”  (With the combination of #1 & #2, we’re using their implicit understanding that marijuana is not such a big deal, because it is only its “gateway” to coke and heroin that scares them.)

3) 0.  This is the number of different hard, addictive illegal drugs available at your local liquor store.  “Even though almost 7% of the people who try alcohol become addicted, we learned from Prohibition that trying to stop people from drinking didn’t stop anyone and only created violent crime and moonshine that would blind you.  So we control alcohol at the liquor store, check IDs, and we make sure that people can’t buy cocaine and heroin there.  The only gateway with marijuana is to the illegal drug market, where everything is for sale.”

This isn’t going to instantly convince most of them, because at its core, marijuana prohibition is a moral issue – you smoke pot, you’re a “druggie”, no less morally repugnant than a cokehead or junkie; you drink beer, you’re “Joe Sixpack”.  But at least it defuses one of their junk-science justifications so we can get to the moral root of the issue.

*Seriously, you’re not one of those people who think the moon landing was faked, are you?

Aw, you write that like it is a bad thing…

WASHINGTON (BP)–The decision by the Obama administration to surrender to bad state policies on so-called medicinal marijuana will have disastrous effects.

Medicinal marijuana is the Trojan horse of the marijuana decriminalization movement. The movement sees it as the means to appeal to people’s compassion in order to change public opinion about marijuana and ease the way toward decriminalization of marijuana. The Obama administration’s decision to cave on enforcement of federal drug laws against marijuana distribution represents the dropping of the first shoe on decriminalization of marijuana and signals the next one is coming.

I love the idea that we “legalizers” are meeting at Dr. Evil’s island lair to figure out how to pull a fast one over on the American people. Like we’re sitting there saying, “How are we ever going to convince the public that this dangerous killer plant is actually OK so we can get high legally?” We don’t have to appeal to anything to change public opinion that marijuana is medicine, we only have to show them the truth. Medical marijuana is not a “Trojan horse”, it is Galileo’s telescope proving the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, not matter how much the religion of the day says it does.

With the federal government out of the way, we can expect to see a rapid rise in marijuana distributors and marijuana demand in states that have fallen victim to the medical marijuana scam. None of this escalation will prove especially helpful to the sick or to society. Those who use medicinal marijuana will pay the price first, and then everyone else will.

Yes, there will be more medical marijuana distributors, and as people realize they have a safe, legal, non-toxic alternative to the side-effect-laden killer pharmaceuticals shoved at them for pain and other conditions, there may be an increase in demand. But I’m still waiting for that medical marijuana patient to complain that we “legalizers” have taken advantage of them. I’m still waiting for those patients to protest the opening of another dispensary.

Marijuana is not a necessary or particularly effective pain-relieving aid. For years, the pain-relieving ingredient in marijuana has been available by prescription. So, one cannot make the argument that medicinal marijuana is a new addition to the pain-relief arsenal. In fact, it isn’t even that useful for pain relief. Most people who use marijuana to help them cope with severe pain take other stronger pain relief drugs in combination with marijuana because the pain relieving properties of marijuana are not that potent.

Sure, I can make that argument. Marijuana has been proven – not conjectured, proven – to be more effective in relieving neuropathic pain than conventional opioids. Also, pain patients who must use conventional opioids are able to reduce their intake when combined with cannabis, because the pain relieving properties of marijuana are synergistic. (If you’ve wondered why marijuana is still illegal, ask yourself if Big Pharma would like to see demand for opioid painkillers reduced by one-third to one-half.)

On the other hand, smoking marijuana threatens to make bad situations worse for many users. Marijuana introduces multiple toxic chemicals into the systems of people whose bodies are already weakened from their ailments. Not only might these toxic chemicals hinder people’s ability to fend off the cause of their pain by weakening their defenses, but users risk developing additional problems related to their use of marijuana, including respiratory ailments and addiction.

Yes, sure, doctors so often recommend marijuana for their HIV/AIDS patients because it will “weaken their defenses”.

The respiratory ailments related to heavy long-term marijuana smoking do not include lung cancer or emphysema, but rather persistent cough and in rare cases, bronchitis, and even these risks can be mitigated by vaporizing or eating cannabis.

Marijuana does have a possibility of clinical dependence. About 9% of its users may develop a problem. Compare that to 15% for alcohol and 32% for tobacco. Compare also that marijuana is not addictive in the sense of the physical withdrawals you’d get from cocaine, heroin, alcohol, or nicotine – most users battling this dependence suffer from irritability, sleep difficulties, and anxiety, much like you’d feel if trying to kick coffee.

In addition, the public’s acceptance of marijuana as a medicinal aid will weaken resistance to its recreational use. As it becomes more entrenched in our society, it will be perceived as less dangerous. This will likely lead to more experimentation with marijuana by our nation’s young people. Since marijuana is undoubtedly a gateway drug, we can expect to see even more of our nation’s youth lose their lives and their futures to drug addiction.

Yes, once people are exposed to people using marijuana medicinally, and those people don’t become raving drug-crazed lunatics desperate for a heroin fix while raping the white women, the public will perceive it as less dangerous and be more accepting of social use.

However, the gateway theory is so debunked now that it’s almost laughable you bring it up.  According to government stats, 100 million people have tried marijuana in their lifetime.  Those same stats tell us there are 2 million monthly cocaine users and 150,000 monthly heroin users.  So, even if we assume every cocaine and heroin user started down the road to ruin by smoking a joint, only 1/50th of the potheads become coke fiends and only 1/666th of the potheads become junkies.  Some gateway – that’s more like sixteen inch hole in a fence that only opens ten minutes a day.

The last shoe to drop will be the legalization of marijuana distribution for recreational purposes. As marijuana use becomes part of the culture, we can expect to see a movement toward decriminalization of all marijuana use and distribution. If marijuana is decriminalized, we will see the rise of every kind of drug related problem, from performance impairment to family disruption to addiction to crime to premature death. This is not the kind of change America needs. What we need is the enforcement of laws that protect the vulnerable and that help all Americans achieve their greatest potential. What we don’t need are more threats to that goal.

Because nobody is smoking any marijuana recreationally now, right?  Marijuana use is a part of the culture!  Have you seen any movies or TV shows lately?  The most harmful thing about marijuana is that a cop might shoot you over it!

Such decriminalization (which isn’t the same as legalization; it would be OK to hold small amounts of marijuana for personal use, but sale and distribution would still be illegal) might solve some problems but exacerbate others. It could, for example, encourage more young people to begin using drugs. And though marijuana doesn’t cause anywhere near the number of deaths of tobacco and alcohol, it is a gateway drug to more dangerous substances, and its decriminalization could worsen the impact of drugs on our communities.
via – The LA Times “A no-win ‘war on drugs’”

Yeah, I know, you’re thinking ’same old, same old’, why is he sharing this? It’s subtle; the article is in the Health section. There’s an Oatmeal Raisin cookie recipe posted in a sidebar next to it. Isn’t this where pot should be?

VIENNA (AFP) – A UN drugs agency warned Thursday against underestimating the dangers of cannabis.

“The international community may wish to review the issue of cannabis,” the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) wrote in its annual report.

“Over the years, cannabis has become more potent and is associated with an increasing number of emergency room admissions,” the report stated.

Ooh, a swing and a miss!  Cannabis has become more potent, but increasing potency does not mean increase in danger, as marijuana smoking is a self-titrating action.  If you have schwag, you smoke a lot and get high.  If you have kind, you smoke a little and get high.  As for emergency room admissions, this myth is taken from the DAWN statistics where they determine if someone has used cannabis prior to admittance, not whether cannabis caused the admittance.  Since cannabis is the most popular illicit drug, it is naturally going to be mentioned more often in the ER.

Cannabis was often the first illicit drug taken by young people and was frequently called a “gateway drug,” in that it could lead to later use of hard drugs.

Steeerike two!  In 1999, US Institute of Medicine shot down the “gateway theory” and many studies that followed found the same thing.  Nowadays no serious scientist even brings it up anymore… but that doesn’t stop cannabiphobic bureaucrats from saying it anyway.

Indeed, many countries allowed the “recreational” use of cannabis, and public perceptions of the so-called “medical” uses of the drug and its recreational use “are overlapping and confusing,” it said.

Hmm, I think that’s a foul tip.  There’s nothing “so-called” about the medical uses of cannabis and if its medical use is “overlapping and confusing” then why did teen marijuana use rates decline in the states that implemented medical marijuana?

It also urged governments to “stimulate” the controlled use of opiate-based painkillers to help “alleviate unnecessary suffering of millions of patients.”

“Although the access to controlled medicines, including morphine and codeine, is considered by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to be a human right, it is virtually non existent in over 150 countries,” the report said.

“The WHO estimates that at least 30 million patients and possibly as many as 86 million annually suffer from untreated moderate to severe pain.”

via The Raw Story | UN agency recommends world stop ‘trivializing’ marijuana dangers.

Yerrrr OUT!  In fact, not only are you out, but your whole team is out, disqualified, and banished from the league!  In the same set of recommendations where you demonize cannabis and its “so-called medical” uses you then remind us access to painkillers is a human right, millions are suffering with under-treated pain, and you recommend we “stimulate” more use of opiates?  Who writes your recommendations, the Opium Poppy Growers Union?

OK, when steel-mill town newspaper columnists like Tony Rhodin brazenly declare “Legalize marijuana, tax it, regulate and make money from it. The cocaine crazies won’t rule the streets.” you know this stupid prohibition is about to fall.  This is from the Lehigh Valley Express-Times, in the Allentown, Pennsylvania, area, and the columnist is talking to Democratic legislators Bob Freeman and Joe Brennan:

When quizzed on the state’s reliance on sin taxes — video poker is the latest targeted cash cow — the discussion turned to legalizing marijuana and prostitution, regulating it, taxing it and, for lack of a better word, benefiting from it.

When asked directly if we should legalize pot, Brennan began talking about separating violent from nonviolent offenders in prison and the other legislators seemed to like the direction that would take them — into talking about prison funding. That’s not what you were asked, I interrupted. Would you support the legalization of marijuana in order to pour more tax money into the state budget?

Freeman’s voice took on a suddenly high pitch and he went off on cocaine addicts running through the streets — I can only assume he meant if marijuana were legalized. Reefer madness, I guess. It sounded like something out of sixth-grade health class. Better to scare than make aware.

I know a bit about gateway drugs and how they become gateway drugs. You can consider this a true story. You’re buying dope from a friend who has been pretty reliable and you’re not shy about dumping some bucks on an ounce or two a month. You get to know the guy, you hang out some and he says at a party that hey, you want to try some coke? It’s a friendly exchange. No money switching hands. Sure, you say. Why not? So you do. And once you try coke, marijuana seems pretty boring. And it can go from there.

Anyway, the point is the gateway was the dealer, not the initial drug. You tried it because he made it available. You probably wouldn’t have gone looking for it. And for someone with an addictive personality, a drug such as coke can make you pretty crazy.

Consider the alternative. You go into a state store and you buy your ounce of premium pot. It costs a bit more, because it’s taxed and regulated, but it’s purity isn’t in question. And while the clerk may suggest a nice Merlot for the bong instead of water, he’s probably not going to suggest cocaine. It’s not on the menu and the guy likes his state job with all its perks.

When commentary like this from Kathleen Parker starts hitting the staid Washington Post, can real change we can believe in be far behind?

…Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps and Sheriff Leon Lott of South Carolina’s Richland County are being forced to treat seriously a crime that shouldn’t be one.

Our marijuana laws have been ludicrous for as long as we’ve been alive. Almost half of us (42 percent) have tried marijuana at least once, according to a report published last year inPLoS Medicine, a journal of the Public Library of Science.

There are good reasons for substance restrictions for children that need not apply to adults.

That’s the real drug message that should inform our children and our laws, rather than the nonsense that currently passes for drug information.

Today’s anti-drug campaigns are slightly wonkier than yesterday’s “Reefer Madness,” but equally likely to become party hits rather than drug deterrents. One recent ad produced by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy says: “Hey, not trying to be your mom, but there aren’t many jobs out there for potheads.”Whoa, dude, except maybe, like, president of the United States.

Once a kid realizes that pot doesn’t make him insane — or likely to become a burrito taster, as the ad further asserts — he might figure other drug information is equally false. That’s how marijuana becomes a gateway drug.

My post on the “Marijuana: A Gateway Drug to Meth” has now been picked up on Salon.com and in Portland’s Willamette Week newspaper:

WWire | Marijuana in Molalla: Return of the ‘Gateway Drug’
As featured on the Oregon NORML website, a member of the pro-pot group recently photographed this incredible billboard on Highway 99E.

And it appears that you paid for it.

As revealed by NORML’s research, the group named on the billboard — Molalla Coalition Against Drug Crime — receives federal money from the Office of National Drug Control Policy.