HELENA — The Obama administration adamantly opposes legalizing marijuana and has a dubious view of medical marijuana, a top White House drug policy adviser said here Thursday night.

Kevin Sabet, special adviser for policy at the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, said marijuana is a dangerous drug that causes documented health and social problems, and should not be subject to voter approval for its use.

“Marijuana cannot be the one exception in history of the world that doesn’t go through a scientific process to be approved as medicine,” he told the Montana Supreme Court Administrator’s annual drug court conference in Helena. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

You mean like aspirin?  That drug has been with us since 1899 and never had to go through a scientific process to be approved as medicine.  According to Derek Lowe, a Ph.D. organic chemist who worked for years in pharmaceutical research and development, cannabis would have an easier time clearing FDA scrutiny than aspirin:

If you were somehow able to change history so that aspirin had never been discovered until this year, I can guarantee you that it would have died in the lab. No modern drug development organization would touch it.

Its use more or less doubles the risk of a severe gastrointestinal event, which in most cases means bleeding seriously enough to require hospitalization. Such incidents, along with others brought on by other oral anti-inflammatory drugs, are the most common severe drug side effects seen in medical practice.

It doesn’t take too long to see these effects in a research program. Aspirin causes gastric lesions in rats and dogs, which are the standard small and large animal models for drug toxicity. This side effect occurs at levels which would raise red flags for any new compound.

Yet we use aspirin every day.  It isn’t even on the schedule of controlled substances.  You can overdose and die on aspirin.  Marijuana is less toxic with fewer side effects than aspirin and has been used throughout history as long as aspirin.

Sabet continues:

“How can we imagine that a dangerous, illegal drug like marijuana should be voted on by the people?”

We don’t have to imagine; it’s already happened in nine states and the District of Columbia.  None of those states has proposed initiatives to repeal their medical marijuana programs; in fact, the earliest states to adopt medical marijuana have found it safe enough that they are looking to legalize its use for all adults.  This development hasn’t been lost on Sabet, either:

Sabet said he believes medical marijuana programs are part of a strategy to legalize marijuana, and that the Obama administration is staunchly opposed to legalization.

This is the old “Trojan horse” argument.  We prey upon people’s compassion to legalize for sick people, then the next thing you know, we’re legalizing marijuana.

Does Sabet even realize that by making that argument, he’s tacitly acknowledging that after people are exposed to legalization for medical use, they will approve legalization for personal use?  He’s basically saying the only way the government can hope to keep marijuana prohibited is to arrest cancer patients who smoke a joint to ease the pain and nausea of chemo.

Because even when we legalize for medical use, we still have to get 50%+1 voters to approve of personal use.  Sabet knows that when marijuana is completely forbidden, enough people will be ignorant of marijuana to scare them with reefer madness.  But if some people are allowed to use marijuana as medicine, more people learn about the safe, effective, non-toxic natural herb and are less inclined to believe reefer madness.  Especially after over a decade in the earliest medical marijuana states as time has gone by and psuedo-legal marijuana hasn’t caused the sky to fall.

“Our two legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol, serve as frightening examples of legalization,” he said. “Look at the alcohol industry. It does not make money off the 10 people who drink one drink a week. It makes money off of the one person who drinks 50 drinks a week. Addiction is incentivized in this business.”

Then why isn’t Sabet and the Obama Administration arguing for a repeal of the 21st Amendment?  Or at least severe restrictions on the alcohol industry?  Like, say, no advertising on television?  Nope, apparently when it comes to alcohol and tobacco, we’ve got no urge to lock people up.  We accept a certain amount of mayhem and disease to allow adults the free choice to use those substances.

Sabet also said legalization proponents have created a “false dichotomy” by suggesting the only alternatives are legalization or a harsh, punitive approach that emphasizes incarceration.

Those aren’t the only options, and the Obama administration favors an approach that pairs treatment with law enforcement, to reduce illegal drug usage and addiction without sending people to prison, he said.

In other words, they prefer to label all pot smokers as “addicts”, use the force of criminal proceedings to compel these “addicts” to a treatment they don’t want or need, often with strict conditions requiring the “addict” to complete the treatment, the threat of imprisonment always in the mix.

The Christian Science Monitor’s editorial board is weighing in on the increasingly popular issue of marijuana legalization with an editorial they call “Legalize marijuana? Not so fast.” and a veritable who’s-who parade of reefer mad prohibitionists:

A harmless drug? Supporters of legalization often claim that no one has died of a pot overdose, and that it has beneficial effects in alleviating suffering from certain diseases.

True, marijuana cannot directly kill its user in the way that alcohol or a drug like heroin can. And activists claim that it may ease symptoms for certain patients – though it has not been endorsed by the major medical associations representing those patients, and the Food and Drug Administration disputes its value.

The AMA is in the back pocket of Big Pharma; they’re not going to endorse a product that cuts by at least half the need for opioids, benzodiazepenes, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.  There are plenty of major medical associations that endorse medical marijuana, including the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Student Association, and the American Nurses Association.  Also, the FDA doesn’t dispute marijuana’s value; it merely has never approved marijuana, and the government, through FDA, DEA, and NIDA, have opposed all efforts to actually put marijuana through the approval process, which we all know it would sail through.

Rosalie Pacula, codirector of the Rand Drug Policy Research Center, poses this question: “If pot is relatively harmless, why are we seeing more than 100,000 hospitalizations a year” for marijuana use?

Emergency-room admissions where marijuana is the primary substance involved increased by 164 percent from 1995 to 2002 – faster than for other drugs, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network.

The way Rosalie puts it, you’d think 100,000 people were running into the ER and screaming, “Quick, doctor! I need help! I’ve taken marijuana and I think I’m going to die!” (in four years of doing this, I’ve only heard one such case…)

Click here to view the embedded video.

But the fact is that these DAWN statistics just survey the drugs people admit to using or what is detected in their body when they are admitted to the emergency room.  DAWN doesn’t measure the cause of why someone’s in the hospital. If you smoked a joint, went to a restaurant, sat down for dinner and had the server accidentally drop scalding hot coffee in your lap, and you went to the hospital for the burns, and when asked, admitted you had smoked a joint that day, cha-ching, that’s a “marijuana [as] the primary substance involved” in that admission.  You might as well say iPods are harmful, because the number of people admitted to hospitals that own an iPod has skyrocketed since 1995.

Research results over the past decade link frequent marijuana use to several serious mental health problems, with youth particularly at risk. And the British Lung Foundation finds that smoking three to four joints is the equivalent of 20 tobacco cigarettes.

Worldwide rates of schizophrenia have remained constant for decades, with little variation between countries with greater cannabis use or lesser cannabis use.  Many people with mental health issues are using cannabis to self-medicate; it is not the source of their mental illness.  And the British Lung Foundation hasn’t been following Dr. Donald Tashkin’s and others’ work showing marijuana use, even chronic, long-term use, doesn’t lead to increased incidence of head, neck, or lung cancers, or to emphysema or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (fair warning: we do get more wheezing and bronchitis – so buy a vaporizer!).

While marijuana is not addictive in the way that a drug like crack-cocaine is, heavy use can lead to dependence – defined by the same criteria as for other drugs. About half of those who use pot daily become dependent for some period of time, writes Kevin Sabet, in the 2006 book, “Pot Politics” – and 1 in 10 people in the US who have ever used marijuana become dependent at some time (about the same rate as alcohol). Dr. Sabet was a drug policy adviser in the past two presidential administrations.

You ever watch an alcoholic and speed addict try to kick those two drugs cold turkey?  I have; it was my father and I was twelve.  I’m still waiting to see the sweaty pale marijuana “addict” picking hallucinatory bugs off his skin, vomiting uncontrollably, wracked with pain, unable to sleep, screaming punctuated by sobbing, because he can’t smoke a bowl.  No reefer madness line personally angers me more than the trumped-up scaremongering about “marijuana dependence.”

Can marijuana users become “dependent”?  Sure, just like people can develop an unhealthy dependence on gambling, sex, shopping, hoarding, sugar, fat, and the internet.  However, that dependence rate is 9% (less than 1 in 10) for cannabis and 15% for alcohol (not “about the same rate”) and 32% for tobacco, and, according to the Institute of Medicine: “CONCLUSION: A distinctive marijuana withdrawal syndrome has been identified, but it is mild and short lived. The syndrome includes restlessness, irritability, mild agitation, insomnia, sleep disturbance, nausea, and cramping.”  Where Kevin gets the figure for half of us daily smokers being “dependent” I can’t say.

NORML likes to point out that marijuana accounts for the majority of illicit drug traffic from Mexico. End the illicit trafficking, and you end the violence. But that volume gives a false impression of marijuana’s role in crime and violence, says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a drug-policy adviser in the US and Australia.

It’s the dollars that count, and the big earners – cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin – play a much larger role in crime and violence. In recent years, Mexico has become a major cocaine route to the US. That’s what’s fanning the violence, according to Dr. Caulkins, so legalizing marijuana is unlikely to quiet Mexico’s drug war.

Jonathan wants you to think we’re measuring volume of drugs coming across the border and that the bulkiness of marijuana compared to coke, meth, and heroin is how we’re measuring how legalized marijuana would hurt the traffickers.  However, we know it’s the dollars that count, and that’s how we’ve measured marijuana’s economic impact to the cartels.  But we’re just reporting what former drug czar John “Unicorn” Walters told USA Today: “[marijuana] now earns cartels about $8.5 billion or about 61 percent of their annual estimated income of $13.8 billion. Cocaine sales earn the cartels about $3.9 billion, and methamphetamine about $1 billion.”

You don’t think cutting a business down to 40 cents on every dollar received is going to lead to a lot less of that business?  Yes, there will still be cocaine, meth, and heroin routes to fight over, but there will be fewer cartels fighting over them with less money to do so.

Neither are America’s prisons stuffed with users who happened to get caught with a few joints … Only 0.7 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons are in for marijuana possession (0.3 percent counting first-time offenders only, according to a 2002 US Justice Department survey). In federal prisons, the median amount of marijuana for those convicted of possession is 115 pounds – 156,000 marijuana cigarettes.

Well, since we do imprison about 2.1 million people, the most overall and per-capita in the world, you’re admitting that 0.7%, or about 15,000 people are in prison for possessing marijuana.  When we include jails, our estimates come up to about 40,000.

But this all supposes that the only harm from marijuana prohibition is incarceration.  What of the costs to society for:

• lost productivity due to workers’ time off to deal with marijuana charges involving a joint;
• underemployment due to skilled workers who smoke a joint avoiding urine screens and unemployment compensation for those who fail them;
• social services costs for probation officers, drug testing, child protective services, and other government costs to deal we wouldn’t incur for someone caught drinking a beer in their home;
• wasted potential of college students forced to drop out by losing their student aid for a joint;
• moving costs when a person smoking a joint is kicked out of housing;
• health care costs for treatments and pharmaceuticals that could be replaced by smoking a joint;
• police costs to enforce the prohibition and deal with the ancillary crime and violence issues brought about by prohibition?

The black market can easily undercut a $50 tax and shrink that expected revenue stream. Just look at the huge trade in illegal cigarettes in Canada to see how taxing can spur a black market (about 30 percent of tobacco bought in Canada is illegal).

A government could attempt to eliminate the black market altogether by making marijuana incredibly cheap (Dr. Pacula at the RAND Organization says today’s black market price is about four times what it would be if pot were completely legalized). But then use would skyrocket and teens (though barred) could buy it with their lunch money.

Currently an average price for an ounce of weed is $300.  Rosalie says that pot would be $75 an ounce if it were completely legal.  So if we add the tax to the price, we’re looking at a $125 ounce of legal weed.  To undercut that, the black market would have to sell pot at a 58% discount from its current price.  How many businesses can survive by cutting the price of their product by almost 60%?  Not only does the price drop hurt the dealers, but also most adult consumers will prefer buying legal, pure, potency-labeled cannabis vs. illegal cannabis of questionable quality if the prices are nearly the same.  So the dealers would have to severely undercut the legal price in order to make any sales to a much smaller customer base (only 1 in 8 monthly smokers are minors).

But let’s say they do and sell an ounce for $100.  Does your kid have $100 in “lunch money”?  Suppose the dealer breaks it down to smaller quantities; do you think he adds a bit for every cut, like dealers do now?  I’d bet the $100 ounce becomes two $60 halfs, then four $35 quarters, then eight $20 eightths.  Does your kid have $20 in lunch money?

As America has learned with alcohol, taxes don’t begin to cover the costs to society of destroyed families, lost productivity, and ruined lives – and regulators still have not succeeded in keeping alcohol from underage drinkers.

So why aren’t you calling for a return to alcohol prohibition?  Oh, right, because we realized the costs of making it illegal were far greater.

Why legalize a third substance that produces ill effects, when the US has such a poor record in dealing with the two big “licits” – alcohol and tobacco?

Actually, the US has a great record in dealing with tobacco.  Youth tobacco use has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded, and we didn’t have to arrest a single smoker to make it happen.  And that’s a drug that causes dependence in 32% of its users, causes more deaths than legal and illegal drugs, including alcohol, combined, and generally once addicted to becomes a lifelong habit.  Most marijuana smokers, even if they start as minors, cease smoking pot by age 30.

Do parents really want marijuana to become a normal part of society – and an expectation for their children?

Maybe parents thought they left peer pressure behind when they graduated from high school. But the push to legalize marijuana is like the peer pressure of the schoolyard. The arguments are perhaps timely, but they don’t stand up, and parents must now stand up to them.

Parents must make clear that marijuana is not a harmless drug – even if they personally may have emerged unscathed.

In other words, parents, ignore your own personal experience and the experience of your entire generation, ignore the facts and reason we’re presenting to you from peer-reviewed scientific literature, ignore the lessons of alcohol prohibition and recent tobacco prevention efforts, and regurgitate the Christian Science Monitor’s well-debunked reefer madness parroted from advisors paid by government agencies that would suffer severe funding cuts if marijuana were legal.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Everyone’s talking about marijuana because the public is ready to listen.  Last year around 4/20, we had a special promotion we called the “420 Money Bomb”.  This was a one-day promotion where on April 20, people can join NORML online for only $4.20.  We hyped it quite a bit with a special page and links from High Time and the NORML main page.  Last year, we had over 700 new people join online and raised $5,000 in memberships and donations.

This year, we had the Money Bomb available, but didn’t really hype it much.  This year, we had twice as many people join NORML on 4/20 and we raised almost $13,000.  That’s grassroots interest in action!

Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2009-03-11

Download audio file (NORML_Daily_AudioStash_2009-03-11.mp3)

Hemp Headlines

1. Seattle Police Chief to Be Named Drug Czar Today
2. Decriminalization hearing in Montana
3. Kentucky legislators place Senate drugged driving bill as amendment to House crime bill
4. Minnesota medical marijuana passes 2nd committee vote without dissent

Cannabis Science

• Dr. Mitch Earleywine discusses appearance on CBS Health debate and Dr. Kevin Sabet’s op-ed against legalization

Daily Toker Tunes

• Reggae Wednesday – ‘Nice and Proper’ by Jah Elect

Cannabis Conversation

• John Masterson from Montana NORML on decrim bill hearing

Hey, Stashers, I’m trying out a new format for the Stash blog post.  What do you think?

Kevin Sabet, a former drug policy advisor for presidents Clinton and Bush, penned the following op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle last week about Assemblyman Tom Ammiano’s bill to legalize pot in California:

It’s a tempting idea: Legalize and tax a commodity that a lot of people like, collect the revenues, and reap the budgetary benefits. In economic times like these, that might be just the formula we need to pull us out of the red. In this case, the truth does not live up to the hype.

Now how many examples of Reefer Madness do you think Dr. Sabet can fit within 600 words of newspaper type?  Read on, dear Stasher, for the answer!

Legalizing marijuana will not solve our budget woes, nor will it be good for public health. Introducing marijuana into the open market is very likely to do some other things, however: increase the drug’s consumption, and with it, the enormous social costs associated with marijuana-related accidents, illness and productivity loss.

Legalization will increase the drug’s consumption?

• “In sum, there is little evidence that decriminalization of marijuana use necessarily leads to a substantial increase in marijuana use.” – National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine (IOM). 1999. Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base. National Academy Press: Washington, D.C., 102.

Legalization will increase costs from accidents, illness, and productivity loss?

• Recent research into impairment and traffic accident reports from several countries shows that marijuana taken alone in moderate amounts does not significantly increase a driver’s risk of causing an accident.  (Is there any reason to believe, then, that marijuana taken alone in moderate amounts off-hours away from the work site would increase workplace accidents?  It hasn’t in Oregon, where 1 in 8 people smoke pot annually and we just recorded the lowest workplace accident rates ever in this state.)
• A pair of studies at Utah Power and Light Co. and Georgia Power Co. purporting to show that drug users pose a high risk of accidents and absenteeism only looked at users who had exhibited problem behavior on the job. Not surprisingly, this population had worse than average work records. Nonetheless, Utah Power found that drug users cost $215 less in health insurance benefits, while Georgia Power found lower rates of absenteeism in workers who tested positive only for marijuana!
• Lost productivity studies claiming that drug users cost up to $100 billion each year are based on vague comparisons of household drug use and income, with no analysis of actual productivity data.

The example of legal alcohol and tobacco reveal an unsettling pattern. Legal drugs are by definition easy to obtain, and commercialization glamorizes their use and furthers their social acceptance.

Legalization of alcohol and tobacco show how legalizing cannabis will make it more acceptable?

• The number of U.S. adults who smoke [cigarettes] has dropped below 20 percent for the first time on record.
• Alcohol use among the underaged and those of legal age has declined steadily since 1990.  Conversely, alcohol use rose to record levels during Prohibition.

Their price is low, and high profits make promotion worthwhile for sellers. Addiction is simply the price of doing business. Any revenue gained from taxing these drugs is quickly offset by the heavy costs associated with their increased prevalence.

I’ve debunked this “increased costs” argument in a previous Stash.  Basically, this argument only works if you ignore the fact that any costs attributable to marijuana use are already being absorbed and that just about everyone who wants to use marijuana is already doing so.

Because today’s high-potency marijuana is much more harmful than once thought, a spike in use from legalization would result in a financial burden California cannot afford to bear.

Today’s high potency marijuana is more harmful?

• Claims made in the public domain about a 20- or 30-fold increase in cannabis potency … are not supported currently by the evidence.

It is almost universally accepted in the medical community that marijuana use is linked with mental illness. Since the appearance of the British Medical Journal’s famous 2002 headline, “Marijuana and psychiatric illness: the link grows stronger,” the research showing marijuana’s link with illnesses like psychosis and schizophrenia has become frighteningly commonplace. In fact, researchers from Kings College in London have shown that eliminating marijuana use would decrease the incidence of schizophrenia in the American population by more than 8 percent. That means that marijuana use is responsible for the schizophrenia suffered by more than 19,000 Americans.

Universally accepted that marijuana use is linked with mental illness?

• Investigators reported no statistically significant “differences in syptomatology between schizophrenic patients who were or were not cannabis users” after controlling for patients’ age, sex, and ethnicity. Researchers also failed to find “any evidence that cannabis users with schizophrenia were more likely to have a family member with the disorder.”  These findings “argue against a distinct schizophrenic-like psychosis caused by cannabis,” authors concluded.

Other research has shown the drug’s connection to lung damage, as well as to head, neck and testicular cancers.

Smoking pot will hurt your lungs, head and neck, and testicles?

• Long-term smoking of cannabis is associated with an elevated risk of respiratory complications, including an increase in cough, sputum production, and wheezing, but not a decline in pulmonary function, according to a review published in the February issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
• Smoking cannabis, even long-term, is not associated with an increased risk of developing cancers of the head or neck, according to the results of a case control population-based study published in the March issue of the journal Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery.
• Men who self-reported having “ever used” marijuana had no statistically significant risk of testicular cancer compared to healthy controls who never used pot.  Men who reported currently using marijuana at least once per week, and who had started smoking pot prior to age 18, had an elevated risk compared to controls of contracting a type of testicular cancer known as nonseminoma.  However, nonseminomas account for fewer than one half of one percent of all cancers among American men and since the 1970s, the percentage of American males smoking pot has climbed dramatically. By contrast, incidences of nonseminoma have risen only nominally during this same time period.

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano’s justification for AB390 relies on the myth that marijuana laws are costing taxpayers millions of dollars and wrecking the lives of otherwise law-abiding citizens.

Marijuana laws don’t cost taxpayers millions of dollars?

• State and local justice costs for marijuana arrests are now estimated to be $7.6 billion, approximately $10,400 per arrest. Of this total, annual police costs are $3.7 billion, judicial/legal costs are $853 million, and correctional costs are $3.1 billion.

But a closer examination of the facts reveals a very different reality. Although there are thousands of arrests for marijuana possession every year in our state, most of these arrests result in little or no consequences. Most of those who are charged with possession plead down from more serious charges, such as trafficking. Researchers from Rand report that many marijuana arrests result from drinking and driving violations at alcohol checkpoints. “The police also find joints, and then (the offender) is in jail for both offenses. People’s images of the casual (marijuana) user getting hauled off to jail are not true,” a Rand researcher recently commented.

Marijuana arrests have little or no consequences?

• 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 5 or more 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.

Most marijuana arrests are pleaded down from more serious crimes or concurrent with arrest for other crimes and the casual marijuana users are not hauled off to jail?

• Jack Riley, the Rand study’s lead author, said, “We cannot say, however, whether large numbers of low-level offenders may be in jails, as opposed to prisons.“
• “Although many thousands of offenders receive jail sentences for low-level drug offenses, we examine only prison sentences in this report.“
• Of those imprisoned on low-level drug charges… 68 percent were found to have a previous drug conviction. In addition, 72 percent of those imprisoned on charges of drug use or the possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia had previous drug convictions.  (Read: “three strikes” laws that get you prison time for a joint because you were convicted of two other crimes in your past.)
• Researchers found that more than half of offenders possessed hard drugs, including cocaine and heroin, at the time of their arrests. Just 3 percent of the cases sampled involved marijuana only.  (So, then, there are people in prison for marijuana only, right?  Currently, some 68,500 Americans are either incarcerated or on probation for marijuana violations, the Sentencing Project report determined. Of these, an estimated 11,200 were first time marijuana offenders serving time in state or federal prison.)

Rand-sponsored research reveals that in the Netherlands, where the drug is sold openly at “coffee shops,” marijuana use among young adults increased almost 300 percent after a wave of commercialization. The country has also become a haven for producers of high-potency marijuana, and other drugs like ecstasy and methamphetamine. These unintended consequences have led many Dutch officials to advocate for rolling back the status quo.

Once the Netherlands began tolerating marijuana sales, use increased dramatically?

• Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Liberalizing marijuana laws is not associated with increased cannabis use among the general public, according to a scientific review published this month in the journal Current Opinion in Psychiatry.  (Use of marijuana did increase in Holland… as it did everywhere in Europe around the same time as the coffee shops came into existence.  Still, the Netherlands has half the drug use rates as the United States.)

To be sure, restricting marijuana use by law – especially because some people find it extremely pleasurable – is not without its costs. But legalizing this addictive substance would only exacerbate our problems by increasing the harm that greater levels of use will cause. Given the heavy costs associated with our two legal substances, and the relatively minor costs associated with our current restrictive marijuana policy, the case for a commercial market for marijuana remains weak and unconvincing – even in this uncomfortable economic environment.

It seems like the argument for a commercial California marijuana market is convincing at least six out of ten people who hear it.

By my count that’s seventeen examples of Reefer Madness packed into 598 words, for a score of 2.84 Anslingers (an Anslinger is my newly-coined measurement of Reefer Madness, indicating the average number of reefer mad propositions offered per 100 words.  So far, 2.84 is the upper benchmark… but I’m sure Barbara Kay or Calvina Fay or John Walters will top it sometime soon.

(ABC News) Whether it’s binge drinking or addiction to alcohol, Americans have a real problem with the bottle.

So says new research released Monday, which found that nearly one out of three Americans can expect to have a problem with alcohol at some time during their lives.

“We found that 30.3 percent of the U.S. population at some time in their lives — though maybe not currently — has had an alcohol use disorder,” said study author Bridget Grant of the Division of Biometry and Epidemiology at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Compared to 9% of marijuana smokers who develop some form of clinical dependency.

But perhaps most sobering was the fact that few with alcohol problems ever reached out for help.

“What we found was that very few people who have lifetime disorders ever seek treatment,” Grant says, adding that only 24 percent of those suffering from alcohol dependency seek help. The percentage of those seeking treatment for alcohol abuse is even lower, at 7 percent.

Have you considered arresting people for possession, sales, or home-brewing of alcohol?  Dr. Kevin Sabet tells me that this is an excellent way of getting people into treatment.  ”The activist-phrase ‘treatment over incarceration’ or ‘treatment versus incarceration’ is an accepted term within the drug policy discourse,” Dr. Sabet writes regarding the 1000% increase in marijuana treatment admissions in New York City, coinciding with Mayor Guiliani’s crackdown on marijuana smokers. “Indeed, this paper suggests that law enforcement intensity may be one of many different activities that could increase treatment entry.”

If it works so well with pot smokers why wouldn’t you apply the prohibit-arrest-sentence-to-treatment model to alcohol users, who are getting into domestic abuse problems, impaired driving problems, and aggressiveness problems unlike cannabis users?  Oh, yeah, because we tried that in the 1920s and it didn’t work.

In the mid-late 1990s Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Chief William Bratton focused on arresting and detaining people for crimes that contributed to a lower “quality-of-life” in New York City. This aggressive arrest policy (AAP) resulted in a record growth in marijuana arrests. In 1992, the number of marijuana arrests was around 5,000. By 2000, the arrest rate hit an all-time high of about 60,000 (the large majority of which were for misdemeanor arrests in both years). Through a triangulation of data sources, including the Uniform Crime Reports and the Treatment Episode Data Set from 1992 to 2003, and other published accounts, this paper shows that entries into treatment for marijuana dramatically increased in New York City at the same time as misdemeanor and felony arrests for marijuana also rose. 

via Marijuana Treatment Entries Did Not Decrease After Aggressive Arrest Policies Were Implemented in New York City.

Good so far, right?  Matches up nicely with that graph there showing that 1992-2000, marijuana arrests increased 1000% and so did court referrals for marijuana “treatment”.  After 9/11 as arrests declined, referrals began to decline.  Shows what we’ve been saying for a while now, that few people actually seek professional drug rehab for marijuana alone; most are forced into it after being arrested for marijuana possession.

Well, not to Dr. Kevin Sabet:

While it is unclear if these arrests caused the treatment increase (vis-à-vis criminal justice referral programs), the presence of these two phenomena show that policy regimes of increased treatment and increased law enforcement actions can co-exist. The oft-heard phrase “treatment versus law enforcement” may represent a false dichotomy in drug policy analysis.

Unclear?!?  You think 1000% more pot smokers just up and decided they were marijuana “addicts” and voluntarily sought treatment?  Could this paper get any sillier?  (Yes.  Yes it can.)

The purpose of this paper is to document that increases in law enforcement intensity in New York City were not tantamount to decreases in treatment delivery among marijuana and other drug users. The argument that treatment and incarceration work separately as opposing and competing strategies is one of the most repeated dichotomies used in the drug policy discourse (e.g. Zimmer & Morgan, 1997; Drug Policy Alliance, 2007; Blendon &Young, 1998; Justice Policy Institute, 2006; Real Reform New York, 2005;Schneider Institute for Health Policy, 2001). The activist-phrase “treatment over incarceration” or “treatment versus incarceration” is an accepted term within the drug policy discourse.

Indeed, this paper suggests that law enforcement intensity may be one of many different activities that couldincrease treatment entry.

Dr. Sabet, when we argue “treatment over incarceration”, we are arguing that a criminal justice solution — arresting addicts — is counterproductive because forcing them into treatment doesn’t work.  Yes, if you arrest people and sentence them to treatment, surprise! you’ll get more people into treatment!  But remember the old joke — the light bulb has to want to change.

My father, after 25 years of drug addiction, voluntarily went through treatment.  He’s been sober now as long as he was an addict, 25 years.  Following treatment, he returned to school, got a social work degree, and became a drug addiction counselor.  One of the things he hated most in his program were addicts that were sentenced to be there by a judge.  Those addicts didn’t want to change; they wanted to mark time in the program until they could get out and use again.  He was frustrated that plenty of addicts who wanted treatment couldn’t get bedspace because of all the sentenced addicts in the program who didn’t want to be.  They were combative, belligerent, and not only took the time and space a repentant addict could have used, but made treatment more difficult for the non-sentenced addicts in the program.

On the national policy level, it means that perhaps drug arrests can accompany an atmosphere of increased health services delivery in the form of treatment for drug users. … Indeed, many criminal justice practitioners believe that court mandates can “motivate” otherwise “unwilling” addict offenders into treatment (Wexler, Lipton, & Johnson, 1988). Those mandated to treatment are no less likely to be successful in reducing their drug use and crime rates than those entering treatment voluntarily.

And those mandated to treatment are no more likely to be successful, either, while souring the treatment experience for those around them.  Drug treatment facilities are one of the few places in modern healthcare where your actual results aren’t measured and industry-wide standards are non-existent:

(NY Times) Many clinics across the county have waiting lists, and researchers estimate that some 20 million Americans who could benefit from treatment do not get it.

Yet very few rehabilitation programs have the evidence to show that they are effective. The resort-and-spa private clinics generally do not allow outside researchers to verify their published success rates. The publicly supported programs spend their scarce resources on patient care, not costly studies.

And the field has no standard guidelines. Each program has its own philosophy; so, for that matter, do individual counselors. No one knows which approach is best for which patient, because these programs rarely if ever track clients closely after they graduate. Even Alcoholics Anonymous, the best known of all the substance-abuse programs, does not publish data on its participants’ success rate.

Of course, the real underlying false premise here is that someone arrested for possession of marijuana in New York City is an addict in need of rehabilitation.  I’m all for someone getting treatment for a marijuana dependence if that has caused problems in your life.  If you’re skipping school, doing poorly at work, or messing up your relationships because you can’t put down the bong, by all means, get thee into treatment!  But if you smoke responsibly, work hard, pay taxes, play by the rules (well, except that rule) and a judge declares your personality to be defective and in need of re-education because a cop caught you smoking pot, you’re not the kind of person who needs rehab, you just need tips on how not to get caught.

I see Dr. Sabet’s analysis as a justification for government subsidization of the treatment industry.  According to the US Government’s Dept. of Health & Human Services DASIS, 289,988 tokers were admitted to drug treatment facilities in 2006.  Only 15% of tokers admitted themselves to treatment; 58% of tokers were forced there by the criminal justice system.  What business wouldn’t want government to force 168,193 of its customers through the door?  Compare that to heroin, the next highest non-alcohol drug treatment population with 245,984 admitted users, and you find the numbers reversed: 59% of junkies admitted themselves to treatment; 14% of junkies were forced there by the criminal justice system.  Tokers forced by the criminal justice system into treatment make up 9.3% of ALL drug treatment admissions in the United States and 24.6% of all drug users forced into rehab.  By contrast, tokers only make up 7.4% of all drug users who choose to go into rehab.

I don’t mean this rant to disrespect drug treatment.  As I mentioned above, my father would be dead without inpatient drug rehab… but that’s because he was hooked on alcohol and speed, not weed.  If even one serious alcohol, heroin, cocaine, or speed addict who can afford and desires drug treatment is turned away because his bed is taken by a court-sentenced pot smoker, that’s one too many.