Until marijuana is decriminalized, production of the drug will continue to be a serious problem in this province, says a criminology professor at St. Thomas University.

“The war on drugs is over a century old now and we still haven’t won it despite all of the arrests that have been made over the years, the large seizures,” Michael Boudreau said. “As long as we outlaw marijuana, it is going to keep the costs high and the demand high.”

Boudreau’s comments follow news that the RCMP recently removed close to one million marijuana cigarettes from the illegal drug market in New Brunswick.

Ooh, what a scary and meaningless number!  A million joints!  Of course, they didn’t actually seize a million rolled joints from some dealer.  This report was about seizing 2,000 marijuana plants, which, in their estimate, equals 1,000,000 joints.  That’s 500 joints per plant!  Now if a joint is 0.4 grams that’s 200 grams or over 7 ounces per plant; if you roll ‘em fat like me at 0.75 grams, that’s 350 grams or over 13 ounces per plant.  You Canadians grow some pretty nice plants, eh?

But a “million joints”, that’s a good scare figure.  2,000 plants means nothing to the average Canadian.  It sounds like a garden and offers no comparison of harm – a plant, does that get one kid high? two? twenty?  But 1,000,000 marijuana cigarettes instantly means 1,000,000 drug doses and 1,000,000 kids in most people’s minds.

It’s meaningless, of course, just as a pizza sliced twelve times isn’t any more pizza than if it’s sliced eight times.  If an indoor plant averages a 4-6oz harvest (horticulture expert Chris Conrad, CA Superior Court testimony), then 2,000 plants equals 500-750lbs. of marijuana.  So if I roll 0.4-0.75 gram joints, that’s 566,990-302,395 joints, or if I roll Oregon NORML Qbit™ joints at 113 grams, that’s 2,007 joints.

[RCMP Staff Sgt. Gary] Hadley said RCMP have always considered marijuana to be a gateway to other drugs.

Hadley said his experience working with young and old people shows that marijuana leads to harder drugs.

“It seems that it always turns back to when you make that decision to take drugs. It always goes back, it seems, to marijuana as being the gateway drug to many (other) drugs.”

via dailygleaner.com – Marijuana laws keep demand, price high, STU professor says | By MICHAEL STAPLES – Breaking News, New Brunswick, Canada.

Argh, gateway theory again.  Marijuana is not a gateway to drugs, marijuana is a gateway to illegality.  The Institute of Medicine and every researcher since has said so, but let me address the thinking behind why so many people still buy into it.

Indeed, almost everyone you can find with a severe cocaine, heroin, or meth addiction, if you ask, will tell you the first illegal drug they ever did was marijuana.  In many people’s minds, smoking pot is crossing the Rubicon into “drug use”.  Many people will tell you, “I don’t do drugs,” even as they sip a beer, smoke a cigarette, eat refined sugar, chug a Red Bull, pop an NSAID for a headache or a Viagra for some sex.  In that frame, there are “good” drugs and “bad” drugs, and even if people will admit that marijuana is the least bad of the “bad” drugs and even better than some of the “good” drugs, marijuana’s still “bad”, mmmkay?

If you smoke pot, you “do drugs”.  So if you “do drugs”, it’s not surprising – expected even – for you to do other drugs.  That’s what drug users do.  Maybe not all of them, maybe not yet, but they figure the progression from pot to coke to meth to heroin is as natural as the progression from Coors Light to Guiness Stout to mixed drinks to shots; everybody likes variety and the old stuff gets boring after a while.

The key to undoing the gateway theory lies in the part where Hadley said, “It seems that it always turns back to when you make that decision to take drugs.”  It lies in erasing the distinction between “good” and “bad” and emphasizing that alcohol is a drug.  It lies in changing “take drugs” to “alter consciousness” or “alter the mind”.  Once we shift away from the substance (drugs) and to the effect (mind-altering), it becomes obvious that the first decision most people make is whether or not to alter their mind, and the first substance they use to achieve that effect is usually alcohol.  We can then use every gateway theory talking point they have against them in a farcical conversation about banning alcohol again.

Did I just hear a United States representative say, “They probably started off with milk and then went to beer, and then they went to bourbon, and then they might have gone to marijuana. The gateway theory doesn’t work. It’s a reality.”?

Holy crap, there is hope for reason in this debate!

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!

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?

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.

Just south of the Portland, Oregon, metro area is a town called Molalla. Like most rural areas in Oregon, it is politically much more intolerant of cannabis than the liberal confines of Multnomah County.

An Oregon NORML member snapped this pic while driving on US Hwy 99E.  In case it’s unreadable (click pic for larger version) the message on this billboard from the Molalla Coalition Against Drug Crime says:

MARIJUANA- A Gateway Drug to METH

This message is accompanied by a picture of a man smoking a joint on the left, and the now infamous Oregonian picture of the pock-marked female meth addict.  Then the message continues by asking people to call the county sheriff’s office anonymous tip line.

We’re not against community organizations who in good faith try to relieve their neighborhoods of crime.  It’s just sad that they’re trying to reduce the harm from hard drugs by lying about cannabis.  Marijuana is not a gateway to meth or any other drug, any moreso than coffee, nicotine, alcohol, sugar, or Flintstones Chewable Vitamins.  The gateway theory has been debunked by many independent organizations and even by our own drug-hating government:

University of Pittsburgh 2006:

Researchers found that adolescents who used marijuana prior to using other drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, were no more likely to develop a substance abuse disorder than other subjects in the study.

RAND Corp Study 2002: 

“While the gateway theory has enjoyed popular acceptance, scientists have always had their doubts,” said lead researcher Andrew Morral, associate director of RAND’s Public Safety and Justice unit.  “Our study shows that these doubts are justified.”

Institute of Medicine 1999: 

“There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.  

“Patterns in progression of drug use from adolescence to adulthood are strikingly regular. Because it is the most widely used illicit drug, marijuana is predictably the first illicit drug most people encounter. Not surprisingly, most users of other illicit drugs have used marijuana first. In fact, most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana — usually before they are of legal age.”

In fact, the American Medical Association claims that if there is such a “gateway” effect, it’s alcohol and tobacco that are the “gateway”.  From the Journal of the American Medical Association:

“…early regular use of tobacco and alcohol emerged as the 2 factors most consistently associated with later illicit drug use and abuse/dependence.”

I could keep link-farming all of the studies from Canada, Australia, Europe, and the World Health Organization that declare the marijuana gateway theory to be bullshit, but you can easily find that for yourself at DrugWarFacts.org.

My biggest problem with the billboard isn’t the lie.  It’s that you and I paid for it.

That’s right, that billboard on the outskirts of my hometown, like many probably displayed around your hometown, are funded by grants from the Office of National Drug Control Policy.  In 1997 the Drug Free Communities Act was signed by President Clinton.  Grants are given to local community anti-drug organizations, like the “Molalla Coalition Against Drug Crime”.  Last year, ONDCP gave out $74 million in grants to 736 of these orgs around the country.

I called the contact name for the Molalla grant (5 SP011449-04) to try to find out how much the billboard cost and the amount of the federal grant, but she wasn’t very interested in speaking to me once I told her I was a journalist doing a story on government anti-drug grants.  I hadn’t even gotten to the point of telling her I was from NORML before she was hanging up.  But if we just take a simple average, it’s about $100,000 per organization.

I also looked up one of the leading (read: expensive) rehab centers in Oregon, Serenity Lane, and found out that a 28-day intensive inpatient drug rehab service costs $11,900.  So, then, with that average grant of $100,000, the average “drug-free” community could pay for eight meth addicts to get drug rehab.  The entire $74 million would treat 6,218 meth addicts, or just over 1% of the entire monthly meth-using population of the US (about 529,000 meth addicts).

Or they could blow it all on a marijuana gateway drug lie on a billboard.  (Hey, if marijuana use is such a “gateway”, how come there are 14 million monthly stoners but only half a million monthly tweekers?  Looks like only 1 out of 28 stoners found their way through the gate!)