Marijuana’s addiction potential may be no big deal, but it’s certainly big business.
According to a widely publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of “drug dependence” (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for “drug dependence.”
Nevertheless, it is pot — not booze or cigarettes — that has the federal government seeing red and clinical investigators seeing green. As I reported for AlterNet last year, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which overseas more than 85 percent of the world’s research on controlled substances, recently appropriated some $4 million in taxpayers’ dollars to establish the nation’s first-ever Center for Cannabis Addiction. Its mission: to “develop novel approaches to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of marijuana addiction.”
…[I]t is not marijuana use per se that is driving treatment admission rates; it is cannabis prohibition and the increased emphasis on pot arrests that are primarily responsible. Yet you’d never know this by listening to NIDA. And that’s just the way the agency wants it.
[Read Paul's full analysis over at Alternet.org.]
