Make it more potent for the taste of it! Yeah, that's it!

When it comes to the popular recreational relaxant that is non-toxic and cannot kill you, its increasing potency is a cause for alarm:

(TIME Magazine) 25% of BC Bud is made of the psychoactive drug tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). In contrast, the pot that the hippie generation smoked in the 1970s had only 2% THC content, and most pot consumed in the U.S. today averages about 7% THC.

(Chicago Tribune) One thing has changed: Pot packs a bigger wallop now than it did in the ’70s. Today’s leaves are up to five times as potent. So, says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, still-developing brains, which are “more plastic, more sensitive to being modified,” are exposed to higher doses of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.

(ABC News) With stronger pot, emergency rooms have reported more associated accidents. Just this week, seven people were killed when the driver — drove the wrong way on a New York highway and collided head on with a pickup truck. Although the drivers family has disputed the results, toxicology tests showed high levels of alcohol and marijuana.

(New York Times) “It’s like drinking beer versus drinking whiskey,” said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a government agency and a strong opponent of legalizing marijuana. “If you only have access to whiskey, your risk is going to be higher for addiction. Now that people have access to very high potency marijuana, the game is different.”

(Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics) The new marijuana in the market place is not the 1 percent to 2 percent THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which is the psychoactive ingredient that produces the “high”. Today’s new cultivation methods are producing a drug with up to 30 percent THC, or 3,000 percent higher than the old 1960’s-1980’s available marijuana.

But if it is a popular recreational intoxicant that is toxic and can kill you, it’s increasing potency is a victory for connoisseurs and retailers:

(USA Today) A growing number of states are moving to allow higher alcohol content in beer, despite concerns from some substance-abuse experts.

Alabama and West Virginia have passed laws increasing the legal alcohol-by-volume cap for beer from 6% to as high as 13.9% this year. Similar efforts are underway in Iowa and Mississippi, two states with very restrictive limits on the sale of high-alcohol beer, said Sean Wilson, former president of Pop the Cap, North Carolina’s successful grass-roots effort that raised the state’s limit in 2005.

Vermont raised the cap to 16% and Montana to 14% last year.

The average alcohol content in beer is 4.65%, and in wine 11.45%, according to a 2002 study by the Alcohol Research Group in Emeryville, Calif.

Twenty states still place some kind of limit on the amount of alcohol in beer, Wilson said.

Paul Gatza, director of the national Brewers Association based in Boulder, Colo., said limiting alcohol content restricts flavors and styles because “you can’t put as much malt or other sugars in your beer as you may want to.”

Gatza said consumers of specialty or microbrewed beers, also known as craft beers, “don’t drink to get drunk. They drink to appreciate the flavors.”

Right… and I smoke pot because I appreciate the scents.  This is a theme that goes back to the days of Nixon: the idea that people don’t drink to get drunk, they do it to socialize, but pot smokers are only smoking weed to get high.  Tell you what, next time there’s a cocktail party, swap out all the beer for O’Doul’s, all the wine with grape juice, and all the cocktails with soft drinks, and let’s see how much the alcohol drinkers can socialize without getting a buzz on.

The reason alcohol drinkers can make this absurd statement is because they differentiate between the “socializing” (getting a buzz on) and the “getting drunk” (alcohol poisoning).  They don’t conceive of a similar state for marijuana consumption.  In their mind there’s “not smoking pot” and there’s “stoned out of your mind”, with no intermediate step.  This is often because marijuana is illegal, so people who may have experimented a time or two did so under conditions that required smoking it all and smoking it quickly.  They’ve never experienced an Amsterdam-like nice mellow joint followed by a productive day.  So an increase in cannabis potency, to them, means the pot that used to get them “stoned out of your mind” will now get their kids “way stoned out of your mind”.

Meanwhile, having worked for fifteen years in bars every weekend, bars with parking lots full of cars that I can guarantee weren’t all driven by designated drivers, I can tell you that consumers of microbrews are doing it to get drunk.  The guy who was pounding 4% beers at $2 a glass will be more than happy to pound 16% beers at $5 a glass, knowing that his $20 in beer money may only get him four microbrews compared to ten tap beers, but he can get drunker quicker and take fewer pee breaks for the effort, and the beer tastes better.

Isn’t it amazing?  Here we have a drug we know kills 35,000 people a year directly from ingestion and another 40,000 due to its effects, a drug that is proven to cause serious harm to every organ in the body, a drug at the heart of a vast majority of domestic abuse cases, crimes, and assaults, and not only are states deciding to allow it to be up to four times more potent, but the marketers of the drug are boasting that it also tastes better and the increased potency doesn’t matter.  But marijuana that kills no one, is non-toxic to cells and organs, and brings people together in peace and communion, when that becomes up to four times more potent it is serious cause for alarm.

I guess we better not tell them that the marijuana tastes better these days.

Via Twitter I received the plea from a reader named “LindseyDiane” that pointed to this newly released article in the Chicago Tribune entitled “What Parents Need to Know About Pot”.  She wrote “This article is full of blatant lies. Please email to set them straight!”

Will do.

What Parents Need to Know About Pot

Marijuana packs a bigger wallop now than it did in the ’70s.

Parents may just want to listen up: The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that among marijuana users over age 12, almost 35 percent used marijuana 20 or more days in the past month.

Ah, statistics.  What stood out to you in that sentence?  Did you get “age 12″, “35%”, and “20 days a month”?  Preceded by a call to parents, right?  Oh my god, one third of our kids are getting stoned two-thirds of the time!

But here’s the thing – that’s all marijuana users over age 12, even the ones age 18 to 100 who are long past needing their parents’ guidance on adult decisions.

Now, indeed, the statistic is true.  Nice thing about the intertubes is you can check their math.  Visit the Substance Abuse Mental Health Data Archive (SAMHDA) and you can run something called Quick Tables.  You can choose four different “Measures of Marijuana Use”, like “Number of Days Used Marijuana in the Past Twelve Months”.  You can choose eight different “Respondent Characteristics”, like “Age Group”.  Then it will build you the table and even a bar graph if you like.

There are about 248 million Americans aged 12 and older.  For the 25 million people age 12 and older who will smoke marijuana this year, it is true that 35.6% will smoke 100 days or more in the past year (so, not exactly “20 or more days a month”, more like “8 or more days a month”).  But for the 12-17 age group, the number is actually 28%.

Now, that still sounds scary, huh?  But this is just the numbers of the kids who do smoke pot.  There are 25 million kids aged 12-17 and 880,000 of them are smoking pot “8 or more times a month”.  That’s 3.5% of all kids.  Think of it as 7 out of 200 getting stoned one-fourth of the time; not 1 out of three getting stoned two-thirds of the time.

I still think that’s not a great number, but then I’d point out that these are the results that have been achieved through forty years of “drug war”.  These are the results achieved when the government spends $1 billion on teen anti-drug ads that actually encouraged marijuana use.  In the same period of time, we have reduced cigarette smoking among 12th graders from three out of four having tried a cigarette in 1977 to  now where less than half have done so.

One thing has changed: Pot packs a bigger wallop now than it did in the ’70s. Today’s leaves are up to five times as potent. So, says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, still-developing brains, which are “more plastic, more sensitive to being modified,” are exposed to higher doses of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.

Uh, who out there is smoking pot leaves anymore?

This old “Pot 2.0 – Not Your Father’s Woodstock Weed!™” just won’t die, will it?  At least Nora only claims it’s 5x more potent, and not the 25x or even 400x I’ve reported on in the past.

But the data just don’t back it up.  Last year I collected data from numerous studies that showed, at best, you could say marijuana’s average potency has doubled.  Other researchers have shown that cannabis potency varies widely from region to region and season to season; the average doesn’t mean much if it’s a dry season in Dubuque and you can’t even get low-grade Mexican schwag.  Plus those potency numbers often include hash and hash oil, which few people ever experience, and much fewer teens.

The lungs can suffer, too, from both pesticides used in the growing process and carcinogens, which some research suggests may be more concentrated in marijuana than in cigarettes. [Igor Grant, director of the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California] points out that “tobacco smoke is used in much higher doses–you couldn’t smoke 20 marijuana cigarettes a day and stay vertical.” While smoking pot isn’t perfectly safe, he maintains, it isn’t as toxic as many other drugs. Still, some research suggests that regular use is associated with chronic cough, bronchitis, and emphysema, and a greater risk of cancer of the head and neck.

If nasty pesticides are being used to grow marijuana, that’s only because there is no agency that regulates the safety and purity of marijuana production in America.  Prohibition creates the need for dealers to produce a profit regardless of the means necessary to do it.  They will add lead shavings or miniscule glass beads to weed, too, in order to make a profit.  When is the last time you heard of lead, glass, or toxic pesticides in cigarettes?

As for the cancer research, must we once again point to the Washington Post headline on Dr. Donald Tashkin’s 30 years of research?  The one where the lede reads “The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.”  Or the recent study showing no difference between chronic cannabis smokers’ lungs and non-smokers?  Or the study that pot smokers actually have a reduced risk of head and neck cancer?  Or the one that showed no link between pot smoking and emphysema?  Don’t these count as “some research”, too?

Heart risks may increase with pot, too. A recent study showed higher levels of a protein that raises triglyceride levels, which are linked to cardiovascular disease, in the blood of chronic smokers. Pot also increases blood pressure and heart rate and causes a reduction in the blood’s ability to carry oxygen. One study found that risk of heart attack increased fourfold in the hour after toking up.

Yes, this would be the study that never bothered to look at whether cannabis smokers actually did have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and based its findings on people who smoke between a half pound to two-and-a-half pounds per month.  Marijuana smoking will increase your blood pressure and heart rate and risk of heart attack… about the same as walking up a flight of stairs will do to you.

Bloomberg.com: U.S.
Cocaine and marijuana have been tried by more Americans than residents of 16 other countries surveyed, researchers said, even though tough U.S. laws seek to discourage the use of the drugs.

In the U.S., 42 percent said they had used marijuana and 16 percent had tried cocaine, according to the study published in the journal of the Public Library of Science. In the Netherlands, where people can go to cafes to smoke marijuana, 20 percent have tried that drug and 1.9 percent sampled cocaine.

The higher incidence of drug use in the U.S. may be linked to the nation’s relative affluence, not its anti-drug laws, said James Anthony, chairman of the epidemiology department at Michigan State University’s medical school in East Lansing, Michigan, and an author of the study.

“Drug use is related to income, but does not appear to be simply related to drug policy, since countries with more stringent policies toward illegal drug use did not have lower levels of such drug use than countries with more liberal policies,” the study’s authors wrote.

“In the Netherlands, despite a less restrictive approach, the population hasn’t taken up cannabis smoking to the extent that’s true in U.S., or New Zealand,” Anthony said.

Trying to find a link between drug use and drug enforcement doesn’t make sense, said Tom Riley, spokesman for the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington.

“The U.S. has high crime rates but we spend a lot on law enforcement and prison,” Riley said yesterday in a telephone interview. “Should we spend less? We’re just a different kind of country. We have higher drug use rates, a higher crime rate, many things that go with a highly free and mobile society.”

Yes, Mr. Riley, we should spend less.  Or, more accurately, we should spend a lot of that prison and drug war money for funding education and drug treatment.

I’m confused by the idea that we have higher crime and drug use rates because we are a “highly free and mobile society”.  I’ve never been outside the United States (a sin I will repent for someday), but aren’t Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Israel, Japan, and New Zealand “highly free and mobile societies”?  (You also have the irony of a spokesman who represents an agency sworn to lock you up if you smoke cannabis saying we are “highly free”.)

And if you do a little more digging, you’ll find that the racist underpinnings of the drug war are really what they are referring to by a “highly free and mobile society”.  I’ve read this line from the Drug Czar before, when confronted with the metrics of their own failures in reducing drug problems in the US: you can’t compare the US and Europe (the Netherlands) because we have different cultures.

“In addition to the factors measured in this study, the role of culture, drug availability and knowledge about drug use are likely to be important in the types and patterns of drug use throughout the world,” said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, NIDA director. “Even within the United States, rates and patterns of substance use differ based on geographical location and ethnicity, among other factors.”

According to your own NIDA report on Drug Use Among Racial / Ethnic Minorities (pg 51), use of marijuana among whites is more prevalent than Hispanic use, but less prevalent than black use.  However, all drug use, legal and illegal, was far less prevalent among Asians/Pacific Islanders.  So, couldn’t you say that the ethnic problem in America regarding drugs includes the white Americans, too?  The white folks in the Netherlands aren’t using as much drugs as the white folks in America.