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.

Related posts

• Not Your Father’s Woodstock Booze: States push for higher potency beer (5)
• Who Are You? US Government Statistics on Adult Marijuana Users (8)
• Who Are You III: Workin’ like a Dog – Employment Statistics on Marijuana Users (2)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 5:11 pm and is filed under 4:20 NewsHour, Parents and Kids, Reefer Madness, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a trackback from your own site.