Trying pain pills is three times more likely to lead to regular hard drug use than trying marijuana.

One of the most frustrating arguments presented by supporters of prohibition is the “Marijuana is a Gateway Drug” trope. The idea here is when you ask a heroin, cocaine, or meth addict “what was the first drug you ever tried?”, they inevitably answer “marijuana”. Therefore, the gateway theory goes, sparking up that first joint will begin the long slippery slide into crippling drug addiction.

It does not matter that government researchers have already declared in 1999 that “There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs“. The “gateway” theory is one of those urban legends that is proving very difficult to kill.

However, an analysis of the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) shows that your first aspirin is more likely to be your gateway to hard drugs than your first joint.

We cross-referenced the NSDUH numbers based on whether someone had ever tried marijuana. We found that only 1.5% of people who have toked became monthly cocaine users. For ecstasy, crack, meth, heroin, LSD, and PCP, less than 1% of the people who’ve tried pot are using those drugs regularly. Meanwhile, 2.9% of the people who’ve ever tried an legal analgesic (pain reliever) are regular cocaine users. For ecstasy, crack, and meth, more than 1% of who tried analgesics are regular users. People who tried analgesics are more than twice as likely as people who tried pot to use heroin regularly and three times more likely to use LSD regularly.

We also find that binge drinkers – defined as 5 or more drinks at a sitting at least once a month – are more likely to be regular hard drug users than people who have tried marijuana. To be fair, alcohol supporters might point out that comparing regular beer use to one-time pot use is unfair, and when compared to regular marijuana users, beer users have 1/2 to 1/3 the hard drug regular use rates. In response, we’d say that regular beer drinkers don’t have to pick up a six pack from an illegal dealer who also sells other drugs.

But if opponents want to cling to the idea that we should do everything in our power to stop someone from smoking that first marijuana joint, lest they become illegal drug addicts, then it is time to prohibit Vicodin, Lortab, Lorcet, and Oxycontin, those powerful legal opioid pain killers. The first Vicodin/Lortab/Lorcet leads to almost three times the risk of becoming a non-pot illegal drug user than the first joint amd almost the same risk as smoking a joint every month. That first Oxycontin is more than five times the risk for drug abuse than the first joint.

One of our loyal readers turned us on to this desperate scaremongering video from opponents of California’s Prop 19:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The top video response is the perfect rejoinder:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Line by line debunking follows after the break…

The #1 ADDICTION for 60% of TEENS in Drug rehab.

This is a little like saying orange jumpsuits are the #1 fashion choice of 60% of inmates in prison.  Cannabis is the third most popular substance.  When teens are caught with it, they are sentenced to drug rehab.  This says nothing about whether teens are addicted or whether they need rehab, but it says a lot about prohibition’s failure to keep teens off pot.

A GATEWAY drug to Cocaine and Meth.

Despite every scientific look at the gateway theory proving it to be nonsense, prohibitionists still cling to it.  The only gateway connecting marijuana to meth is the one you walk through to get to the illegal drug market.  Nobody considers alcohol a gateway drug to meth, despite more meth addicts having tried alcohol before they ever touched pot, because you can’t get meth in the liquor store.

4 times more MIND-ALTERING than in the 1970′s

Well, at least this time they’re not saying today’s pot is 14x, 30x, or 400x stronger than the Woodstock Weed.  Look at the clothes and listen to the music; you don’t think 1970′s weed was mind-altering?  The facts are that the average potency of marijuana seizures has doubled.  However, that says nothing about what’s available on the streets.

Law enforcement since the 1970s has increasingly focused on indoor grows that produce stronger weed, so their averages went up.  That doesn’t mean the indoor grows and potent weed weren’t there before.  It would be like picking a baseball team of eight Little Leaguers and Roberto Clemente in 1972 and comparing that team to five Little Leaguers and four Pittsburgh Pirates today and claiming baseball teams are 4x more talented than the 1970s.

50%-70% MORE CANCER-CAUSING than Cigarettes

50% to 70%?  Why the wiggle room?  It should be an easy calculation: count the people who got cancer from cigarettes, count the people who got cancer from cannabis, divide the difference by the former and you’ve got an exact percentage.  Now let’s see, Cancer.gov tells us:

Cigarette smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke cause an estimated average of 438,000 premature deaths each year in the United States. Of these premature deaths, about 40 percent are from cancer, 35 percent are from heart disease and stroke, and 25 percent are from lung disease…

So, 40% of 438,000 is 175,200 cancer cases caused by cigarettes.  For cannabis to be 50%-70% more cancer causing than cigarettes, it must have caused 262,800 to 297,840 cancer cases.  Do you know a single person who smoked cannabis only who ever got cancer?  Where is the cannabis cancer ward, anyway?

What they’re doing here is conflating carcinogens with carcinogenic.  Yes, cannabis smoke has carcinogens, as does every burning vegetable matter from campfires to Camels.  But it also contains THC, which has been shown to have anti-tumoral properties.  Dr. Donald Tashkin at UCLA Medical Center found in 2006 that not only did cannabis-only smokers not have any greater risk for head, neck, and lung cancer, but they had lesser risk of those cancers than did non-smokers.  That cannabis smoke contains carcinogenic molecules is no more frightening than water containing explosive molecules (hydrogen and oxygen) – the question isn’t “does it have carcinogens?”, the question is “does it cause cancer?”

MARIJUANA – What’s Good About Legalizing It?

I know it’s rhetorical, but how about checking kids’ ID, reallocating scarce police and court resources, realizing tax revenues, separating hard and soft drug markets, crippling Mexican drug trafficking organizations, ending discriminatory employment practices, reducing prescription drug and alcohol and hard drug use, reviving our American hemp heritage, living up to our Constitution, and treating adults like adults?

NOTHING

Oh.  So I guess you’re also for criminalizing alcohol and tobacco, right?  They’re addictive, potent, cancer-causing, and popular with kids, too.

Passage of Prop. 19 would mean: Marijuana could be SOLD IN GROCERY STORES.

You mean like alcohol and tobacco, where we check kids for ID, unlike marijuana, which is sold in parks and high school hallways?

Prop 19 does mean pot could be sold in grocery stores… if the government of your city approves that.  I seriously doubt any city is going to go that direction.  The handful of cities that may allow cannabis sales (remember, they aren’t required to) will probably keep it in marijuana-only dispensaries that are adults-only establishments.

Skyrocketing usage among Teens and Young people.

28% of young people aged 18-25 smoke pot once a year.  11% smoke pot twice a week.  85% of high school seniors say pot is “easy” to get.  25% can get a hold of a bag of weed in an hour or less.  It doesn’t seem as if prohibition is really stopping them from using cannabis now.  I find it hard to imagine it will be easier to access for kids when we’re checking people’s ID’s for it.

But let’s suppose that cannabis usage does go up among young people.  If that usage replaces binge drinking or pharmaceutical use among young people, we will have done them and society a great service.

“DRUGGED DRIVING” on Streets and Freeways.

This would be terrifying if you didn’t realize that Californians are smoking pot now and some already irresponsibly use cannabis and drive.  Those people are being arrested now for driving under the influence and Prop 19 specifically does not alter any laws against so-called “drugged driving”.  The people not smoking pot now because it is illegal are the type who like to obey laws, so why would these new pot smokers suddenly want to violate DUID laws?

The fact is that study after study has failed to show any causation between automobile accident and one’s cannabis use.  One study showed even the most stoned driver was no worse than an alcohol-using driver at a 0.05 blood-alcohol level (i.e. below “legally drunk”) and another study showed marijuana-using drivers performed no worse on simulators than when they were sober.  Nobody here is suggesting that you should chief bong hits and see how well you do on the road; what we are saying is that the risk public harm from stoned drivers is less than what we tolerate for alcohol and prescription drugs (or eating fast food while driving, for that matter.)

Higher COSTS for Everyone as Addictions SOAR.

First you have to believe marijuana is a gateway drug and I addressed that above.  Then you’d have to ignore the fact that 3 million Californians are smoking pot now and whatever negligible cost that entails is being paid by society now, while we take in nothing in tax revenue and spend a billion dollars failing to stop pot smoking.  Assuming we make nothing in taxes, we’d still have to see a billion dollars worth of new addiction costs to just break even on the money we’d save not prosecuting marijuana use after Prop 19.

Marijuana Operatives could buy THOUSANDS of Acres of farmland.

“Operatives?”  What are we, a spy agency now?  Aren’t these the people that complain about illegal immigrants setting up illegal marijuana farms in public forests?  Now you’re complaining that California citizens could set up legal marijuana farms on proper farmland?

Considering the plight of the average California farmer these days, I think most would applaud finding a new profitable use for their farmland.

Prop. 19 Means:
Messed up minds.
Messed up lives.
Messed up families.
California out of Control.

Prohibition is the abdication of control of marijuana to criminals.  Nobody is controlling where it will be grown, where it will be sold, or who is allowed to buys and sell it.  Lives and families are messed up when someone is caught using or growing it.  Minds are messed up when forced to assent to lies about marijuana in coerced rehab.

We don’t regulate alcohol because it doesn’t mess up minds, lives, and families.  We regulate it because we want government, not criminals like Al Capone, to have control over it and we’ve found it is the best way to mitigate the harms associated with alcohol by the few who abuse it.  Only prohibition makes marijuana more harmful to the user and society than alcohol.

Our Executive Director has posted the latest salvo of propaganda from the Drug Enforcement Administration on the NORML Blog and provided a very thorough rebuttal to the notion that Alaskans “legalized” marijuana in the 1970s, freaked out over the carnage and, my god, the children!!, and in the 1990s made it illegal again.  This “failed experiment” with “drug legalization” is supposed to be a dire warning to those on the West Coast who are trying to regulate the third-most popular recreational substance somewhat like the first, but Allen St. Pierre tells you the history of Alaskan constitutional privacy rights the DEA would like you to forget.

Left there hanging on the vine, though, are the other nine “facts” the DEA are presenting, a la David Letterman (but not as funny), in something we’re calling the…

“These here, Paul, from our own government, from somewhere deep in Dick Cheney’s secret bunker, the Top Ten Facts About Legalization from the DEA…”

Fact 1: We have made significant progress in fighting drug use and drug trafficking in America. Now is not the time to abandon our efforts.

The Legalization Lobby claims that the fight against drugs cannot be won. However, overall drug use is down by more than a third in the last twenty years, while cocaine use has dropped by an astounding 70 percent. Ninety-five percent of Americans do not use drugs. This is success by any standards.

Actually, two out of three Americans use drugs if you include alcohol and one out of ten Americans use cannabis (National Survey on Drug Use & Health 2008) every year, so I’m not sure how you can say 95% of Americans do not use drugs.  If we were to include prescription and over-the-counter drug use, I’m sure something close to 95% of Americans actually use drugs.

But we weren’t talking about “legalizing drugs”, we’re talking about regulation of cannabis.  Whether cocaine or other drug use has risen or fallen is beside the point.  Fierce marijuana criminalization laws haven’t stopped the United States from leading the world in lifetime marijuana use and open tolerance of cannabis coffeehouses in The Netherlands haven’t moved the Dutch from having half the lifetime use rates and one-third the young teen (<=15) use rates of cannabis as Americans.  Portugal has decriminalized drugs to a large extent and the international community calls it “a resounding success”.  Singapore and Indonesia have some of the harshest anti-cannabis laws in the world, and yet they still have to keep executing the smugglers who won’t stop bringing it in to the country.  We can’t even keep drugs out of our SuperMax federal prisons; what makes the DEA think it can succeed in keeping drugs out of free adult hands?

Lifetime cannabis use = 31% in 1988 to 41% in 2008

Drug use rates have very little to do with drug laws.  And even the DEA’s claim that drug use is down a third in twenty years is suspect.  If we define “drug use” as the lifetime rates that have been tracked by the National Surveys on Drug Use and Health over the past twenty years (1988-2008), then cannabis use has risen dramatically in the past twenty years, from 31% to 41% of the population aged 12 and older who have tried cannabis.

Lifetime crack use = more than double; heroin use = almost double; hallucinogen use = almost double; coke, meth, and inhalants = all increased >20%

In fact, when you take a look at the lifetime use of illegal drugs (cocaine, crack, meth, heroin, hallucinogens, and inhalants), you find that all those figures have risen over the past twenty years, too.

Annual alcohol consumption = steady; annual cigarette consumption = 38% in 1988 to 28% in 2008

The most interesting figures appear when you look at lifetime, annual, and monthly use of the legal drugs, alcohol and cigarettes.  Alcohol use has remained steady but declining, while cigarette use has plummeted.

What this all tells us is:

• People that want to use substances will;
• Maintaining prohibition over marijuana and drugs hasn’t stopped anyone; in fact use has risen;
• Regulating dangerous and addictive drugs like alcohol and tobacco hasn’t encouraged greater use; in fact use has decreased.

Fact 2: A balanced approach of prevention, enforcement, and treatment is the key in the fight against drugs.

A successful drug policy must apply a balanced approach of prevention, enforcement and treatment. All three aspects are crucial. For those who end up hooked on drugs, there are innovative programs, like Drug Treatment Courts, that offer non-violent users the option of seeking treatment. Drug Treatment Courts provide court supervision, unlike voluntary treatment centers.

Almost twice as much of your tax money goes to trying to arrest you for drugs as trying to help you quit them

That’s a nice sentiment, but it is not how the government actually prosecutes the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs.  49.8% of all drug arrests are for marijuana violations, with 89% of those marijuana arrests made for possession alone.  The “balanced approach” in President Obama’s FY 2011 Budget makes the DEA the fat kid on the see-saw, with $9.9 billion appropriated for law enforcement and interdiction vs. $5.6 billion appropriated for treatment and prevention.

Fact 3: Illegal drugs are illegal because they are harmful.

There is a growing misconception that some illegal drugs can be taken safely. For example, savvy drug dealers have learned how to market drugs like Ecstasy to youth. Some in the Legalization Lobby even claim such drugs have medical value, despite the lack of conclusive scientific evidence.

Once again, I haven’t seen any movement on the West Coast to put legalization of MDMA on the ballot; we’re talking about regulating marijuana.

Remember, this is a graph on a logarithmic scale. Cannabis is actually 2,000 times safer than alcohol.

However there is a way of measuring how safe a particular substance is to ingest; it’s called a “therapeutic index“.  It’s the ratio of “ED-50″, that is, a  minimum dose that will have the desired effect in 50% of test subjects, to the “LD-50″, which is the size of a lethal dose that will kill 50% of test subjects.  For example, half the people who cop a buzz on a “dose” of alcohol – whatever amount that is – will die if they drink ten times that amount.  That’s a “therapeutic index” of 1:10.

When measured by therapeutic index, most “illegal” drugs are technically safer than alcohol and cannabis is the safest of all with a therapeutic index that’s practically immeasurable.  Cannabis is so non-toxic that it’s ratio is estimated to be 1:20,000 to 1:40,000.  The DEA’s Administrative Law Judge Francis L. Young concluded it would take a man smoking 1,500 lbs. of cannabis in 15 minutes to die of an overdose.

Fact 4: Smoked marijuana is not scientifically approved medicine. Marinol, the legal version of medical marijuana, is approved by science.

According to the Institute of Medicine, there is no future in smoked marijuana as medicine. However, the prescription drug Marinol—a legal and safe version of medical marijuana which isolates the active ingredient of THC—has been studied and approved by the Food & Drug Administration as safe medicine. The difference is that you have to get a prescription for Marinol from a licensed physician. You can’t buy it on a street corner, and you don’t smoke it.

"The DEA's doing research like it's 1999..."

Nice of the DEA to reference the 1999 Institute of Medicine report.  That was the report that concluded, as every report on the subject has, that marijuana use “does not appear to be a gateway drug to the extent that it is the cause or even that it is the most significant predictor of serious drug abuse.”

That report also noted that only 9% of marijuana users develop “dependence”, compared to 15% for alcohol, 17% for cocaine, 23% for heroin, and 32% for tobacco.

It also noted that “A distinctive marijuana and THC withdrawal syndrome has been identified, but it is mild and subtle compared with the profound physical syndrome of alcohol or heroin withdrawal,” which can cause seizures, hallucinations, and severe cravings.  According to the report, “the symptoms of marijuana withdrawal include restlessness, irritability, mild agitation, insomnia, sleep EEG disturbance, nausea, and cramping.”

So if sometime later in the Top Ten list the DEA wants you to believe that legalization of marijuana will lead to increased addiction, remember that they were the ones using this report to argue against the medical efficacy of smoked marijuana.

However, it is interesting that the DEA makes no mention of the 2009 statement by the American Medical Association which concluded “Results of short term controlled trials indicate that 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…. To the extent that rescheduling marijuana out of Schedule I will benefit this effort [to develop cannabinoid medicines], such a move can be supported.

It’s also interesting how the DEA never mentions vaporization, tinctures, and edibles, which have been proven to eliminate the major harm of cannabis use – smoking.

And I never tire of the DEA that warns us about the super-potent Schedule I “Pot 2.0: Not Your Father’s Woodstock Weed” that approaches average THC potencies of 10% with maximums in the 30% range, then turns around and tells us how Schedule III 100% potent Marinol is so safe and effective.

Fact 5: Drug control spending is a minor portion of the U.S. budget. Compared to the social costs of drug abuse and addiction, government spending on drug control is minimal.

The Legalization Lobby claims that the United States has wasted billions of dollars in its anti-drug efforts. But for those kids saved from drug addiction, this is hardly wasted dollars. Moreover, our fight against drug abuse and addiction is an ongoing struggle that should be treated like any other social problem. Would we give up on education or poverty simply because we haven’t eliminated all problems? Compared to the social costs of drug abuse and addiction—whether in taxpayer dollars or in pain and suffering—government spending on drug control is minimal.

The "Legalization Lobby's" budget, in green, vs. the DEA's budget, in red. What's that, you don't see much green? Yeah, neither do we!

Finally, something sort or true from the DEA: “Drug control spending is a minor portion of the U.S. budget.”  At $15.5 billion compared to the overall fiscal year budget of $3.7 trillion, they’re right.  The entire drug war budget doesn’t even equal  the single “Military Construction” line ($16.9 B) in the Pentagon’s $548 billion budget.

But then they pivot that fact to the falsehood that saving money on law enforcement and making money in tax revenues by regulating marijuana markets would not match the gross expenses we’d suffer from our kids becoming slaves to drug addiction.  Never mind that they just ignored the previous point from the 1999 IOM Report about the gateway theory – what they are telling you is that legal marijuana users will cost society more than it saves and earns from taxation.

Canadian study of costs per substance user per year

To bolster this point, drug warriors like to point out that “sin” taxes on alcohol and tobacco only bring in a fraction of money compared to the measurable social costs of alcoholism and tobacco cancers.  It’s another example of starting from a fact and pivoting to a falsehood.  Alcohol and tobacco cost society a lot of money because (a) they’re addictive (see 1999 IOM Report above) and (b) they can kill you (see therapeutic index above).  A Canadian study on the annual health costs of one tobacco, alcohol, or cannabis user were $800, $165, and $20, respectively, while the enforcement costs on tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis per user were $0, $153, and $328, respectively.  In essence, Canada is spending $328 per toker to save $20 in health care costs!  Those numbers must be worse in America.

But set aside the numbers for a moment and just use some common sense.  If cannabis users cause such a great social harm that they are a cost burden to society, we are costing society right now.  It’s not as if nobody smokes pot now and suddenly legalization on the West Coast will create a country full of 22 million pot smokers imposing a new burden on society.  I’ve broken down this cost argument before, but basically whatever we cost now (some number far less than alcohol or tobacco, certainly), we’d cost less once you’ve made some tax revenue off of us.  The California Board of Equalization estimates $1.4 billion in revenues from legalization, so there would have to be $1.4 billion-worth of new pot smokers recruited and old tokers puffing more for this theory to make any sense at all.  If California doubled its current 2.3 million tokers after legalization, those 2.3 million new tokers would have to cost the state $608 each to eat up the tax revenues.

For comparison’s sake, according to the UC San Francisco Institute on Health and Aging, alcohol abuse costs California $17.8 billion and kills 13,000 Californians annually.  The NSDUH State Reports tell us that 62.5% of Californians 18 and older use alcohol, which works out to 17.1 million drinkers.  That division works out to a drinker costing California $1,041 each.

So in order to swallow this whopper, we need to believe that a legalized toker will cost California 60% as much as a legal drinker, when the studies show that in Canada a legalized toker would cost about 6% as much as a legal drinker.

Fact 6: Legalization of drugs will lead to increased use and increased levels of addiction. Legalization has been tried before, and failed miserably.

Legalization has been tried before—and failed miserably. Alaska’s experiment with Legalization in the 1970s led to the state’s teens using marijuana at more than twice the rate of other youths nationally. This led Alaska’s residents to vote to re-criminalize marijuana in 1990.

Again, see Allen St. Pierre’s deconstruction of the Alaska story, and remember that the same DEA that cited the 1999 IOM Report above that said marijuana use doesn’t lead to hard drug addiction is now telling you West Coast legalization of cannabis will lead to increased addiction.

When we look at the experience of thirteen states that have decriminalized marijuana and the fourteen states that have legalized medical use of marijuana, we find the DEA’s theory blown to bits.  In fact, that same 1999 IOM Report cited by the DEA above even concluded, “In sum, there is little evidence that decriminalization of marijuana use necessarily leads to a substantial increase in marijuana use.”

Fact 7: Crime, violence, and drug use go hand-in-hand.

Crime, violence and drug use go hand in hand. Six times as many homicides are committed by people under the influence of drugs, as by those who are looking for money to buy drugs. Most drug crimes aren’t committed by people trying to pay for drugs; they’re committed by people on drugs.

60% of the revenue for Mexican murderers comes from marijuana prohibition

Drugs, drugs, drugs… what does this have to do with cannabis?  The notion of a cannabis user deprived of weed and jonesing so bad he commits a crime to get the money for weed is ridiculous and the idea that cannabis users are driven to crime by the effects of cannabis is ludicrous.  Every study (like this one) that looks at violence and marijuana finds that cannabis use tends to inhibit violence by its users.

The only violence commonly attributed to marijuana is directly caused by its prohibition.  Mexican drug syndicates are not murdering 18,000 people over a three year span to protect their breweries, vineyards, beer and wine trucks, and hops and tobacco crops.  The only crime commonly attributed to marijuana use is the plundering of munchies from the fridge.

Fact 8: Alcohol has caused significant health, social, and crime problems in this country, and legalized drugs would only make the situation worse.

The Legalization Lobby claims drugs are no more dangerous than alcohol. But drunk driving is one of the primary killers of Americans. Do we want our bus drivers, nurses, and airline pilots to be able to take drugs one evening, and operate freely at work the next day? Do we want to add to the destruction by making drugged driving another primary killer?

No, I actually claim that cannabis is far safer than alcohol, see the therapeutic index data above.  This is another talking point that pivots from a fact (drunk driving is a serious problem) to a falsehood (the implied threat that legalization of cannabis would lead to more highway fatalities).

Nobody's suggesting you hot-box your ride and see how well you do on the test... but you will out-perform a drinker.

First of all, the US Dept. of Transportation fact sheet on cannabis states, “Effects from smoking cannabis products are felt within minutes and reach their peak in 10-30 minutes. Typical marijuana smokers experience a high that lasts approximately 2 hours.”  So if the bus driver, nurse, and airline pilot want to smoke a joint before bed and drive, nurse, or fly me the next day, I’m not at all worried; no more so than if they decide to have a glass of wine the night before work.

Then we have to remember that if cannabis smokers are driving, they are driving now.  If pot smoking were such a threat on our roadways we’d have seen the bodies pile up by now.  Numerous studies have confirmed what we all know:

• Drivers under the influence of cannabis tend to follow less closely to the vehicle in front of them;
• Drivers tend to decrease speed following cannabis inhalation;
• Drivers with blood alcohol levels of 0.05% were three times as likely to have engaged in unsafe driving activities prior to a fatal crash as compared to individuals who tested positive for marijuana;
• Drivers with low levels of alcohol present in their blood (below 0.05%) experienced a greater elevated risk as compared to drivers who tested positive for high concentrations of cannabis (above 5ng/ml).

In other words, even the highest cannabis-using driver is less dangerous than an alcohol-buzzed driver who is still below the per se impairment limits (0.08%) for alcohol.

Fact 9: Europe’s more liberal drug policies are not the right model for America.

The Legalization Lobby claims that the “European Model” of the drug problem is successful. However, since legalization of marijuana in Holland, heroin addiction levels have tripled. And Needle Park seems like a poor model for America.

Compared to Americans, Dutch teenagers use marijuana at half the rates, even though it is sold openly in coffeehouses

The Dutch began their policy of cannabis tolerance in 1976.  According to the 2008 EMCDDA National Report for The Netherlands, lifetime prevalence of heroin use was 0.3% in 1997 and 0.2% in 2001.  I looked all over the DEA’s website and press releases for 2001 looking for them to claim that Dutch cannabis tolerance has led to a one-third decrease in heroin use, but I never found it.  Prevalence of heroin use in 2005 was reported to be 0.6%, which would be triple the 2001 figure, but only double the 1997 figure.

But once again, the DEA cited the 1999 IOM Report above that tells us smoking pot doesn’t lead to heroin addiction, so I’m not sure what the DEA’s point is.  It also doesn’t help their case that their heroin use rates are less than half of American heroin use rates (1.52% lifetime prevalence).

Fact 10: Most non-violent drug users get treatment, not jail time.

The Legalization Lobby claims that America’s prisons are filling up with users. Truth is, only about 5 percent of inmates in federal prison are there because of simple possession. Most drug criminals are in jail—even on possession charges—because they have plea-bargained down from major trafficking offences or more violent drug crimes.

"The fact is that finding a first-time. non-violent offender in prison for marijuana is like finding a unicorn." -- John Walters, former drug czar, on the 11,200 Marijuana Unicorns in a cage right now.

Oh, only 1 out of 20 of the 2.3 million people we imprison are there for simple possession?  My math tells me that’s 115,000 Americans in a cage for their personal use of drugs.  The Sentencing Project determined that 11,200 of those Americans are in a cage for simple marijuana possession alone.  Of course, this is just federal prison we’re talking about, when most marijuana users are processed through city and county jails and housed in state prisons.

Another bit of falsehood pivoted to from these imprisonment facts is that pronouncement that most “drug criminals” are plea-bargaining down from more serious charges.  Often those are “intent to distribute” charges filed when a cannabis user makes the mistake of keeping separate strains in separate bags (multiple bags in the eyes of the law means you must be selling), “conspiracy” charges filed against cannabis users who “go in” with other cannabis users to split the cost of expensive cannabis, and “manufacture” charges filed when a cannabis user grows his own instead of participating in the black market.

But whether people are serving a day, 29 years, or 93 years for marijuana charges is irrelevant; it is the the arrest for marijuana possession itself that causes the harms to the user irrespective of any stay in a jail cell:

• If you’re convicted or enter a plea, you’ll be on probation and mandatory Urinalysis Tests will be performed.
• A conviction could impact child custody issues in family court.
• An arrest for Possession with Intent to Distribute or an arrest for the Manufacture of plants may result in the State attempting to Forfeit your home, your car, your cash and other assets which they can do even if charges are later dismissed or you are acquitted at trial! This heinous law is know as “Asset Forfeiture”.
• A conviction can impact Federally insured student loans
• A felony conviction deprives you of the right to vote
• A felony conviction deprives you of the right to possess firearms
• A conviction can get you tossed out of government subsidized housing
• A conviction can impair your ability to obtain food stamps and other welfare benefits
• Your ability to ever adopt children will be jeopardized
• You will be denied entry into Canada and possibly other countries
• A misdemeanor conviction remains on your record and available to the public for three years before it can be expunged, which may have an impact on current or future employment
• A felony conviction remains on your record and available to the public for five years before it can be expunged, which may have an impact on current or future employment.

The DEA is terrified because there is a legitimate shot for the voters to legalize marijuana use, manufacture, and sales in one, possibly two, and maybe even three West Coast states this year.  If this bit of reefer madness is the best counter they have to offer, I really like our chances!

When you make pot users walk through the "illegal drugs" gateway, are you surprised they come into contact with illegal drugs?

All together now, and with gusto: “The gateway drug theory is a myth!”

(PubMed, US Nat’l Institutes of Health) BACKGROUND: It is unclear whether the normative sequence of drug use initiation, beginning with tobacco and alcohol, progressing to cannabis and then other illicit drugs, is due to causal effects of specific earlier drug use promoting progression, or to influences of other variables such as drug availability and attitudes. One way to investigate this is to see whether risk of later drug use in the sequence, conditional on use of drugs earlier in the sequence, changes according to time-space variation in use prevalence. We compared patterns and order of initiation of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, and other illicit drug use across 17 countries with a wide range of drug use prevalence.

METHOD: Analyses used data from World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health (WMH) Surveys, a series of parallel community epidemiological surveys using the same instruments and field procedures carried out in 17 countries throughout the world.

RESULTS: Initiation of “gateway” substances (i.e. alcohol, tobacco and cannabis) was differentially associated with subsequent onset of other illicit drug use based on background prevalence of gateway substance use. Cross-country differences in substance use prevalence also corresponded to differences in the likelihood of individuals reporting a non-normative sequence of substance initiation.

CONCLUSION: These results suggest the “gateway” pattern at least partially reflects unmeasured common causes rather than causal effects of specific drugs on subsequent use of others. This implies that successful efforts to prevent use of specific “gateway” drugs may not in themselves lead to major reductions in the use of later drugs.

The only gateway between marijuana and the use of harder drugs is that gateway labeled “illegal drug users go this way” that the government pushes you through if you’re using cannabis.  You know why they don’t call tequila a gateway drug?  Because people who use tequila can’t buy heroin on the same shelf as tequila!  Because people who use tequila aren’t considered “druggies”.  Because when someone tries tequila for the first time, most of what they have been told about it turns out to be true, and they don’t think “well, they lied about tequila, they must have been lying about cocaine, too!”  Because people who use tequila don’t figure “well, I guess I’ve already tried ‘drugs’, I may as well try some others.”

If sugar and caffeine were considered illegal drugs (and I can make a better argument for banning them than cannabis, not that I would), you can damn sure bet that Mountain Dew would be considered a gateway drug.  After all, that’s the first addictive substance I ever got hooked on (and it’s done more health damage to me than cannabis ever will!)

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?

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?