Selling Pot

The Pitfalls of Marijuana Reform

Jacob Sullum from the June 1993 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

But the hysterical reaction of what came to be known as the Parent Movement for Drug-Free Youth, which attracted the active support of the federal government, cannot be understood merely as a response to these dangers. After all, the same concerns could be raised about alcohol use, which was also rising markedly among teenagers during this period. These parents focused their wrath on marijuana because it was an illegal, alien presence in their middle-class, suburban lives–a presence that was tolerated, if not condoned, by a large and growing number of Americans.

The police were looking the other way as tens of millions lit up. College professors, doctors, and lawyers were smoking pot. Movies and music glamorized drug use. There were water pipes in the local record store, for heaven’s sake. Morgan, the CUNY pharmacologist, says the reform movement was caught off guard by the parental backlash: "We didn’t know the revulsion and hatred that middle-class parents felt about marijuana and their kids getting high. We didn’t have any idea how strongly they felt." The outraged parents who would eventually form the backbone of the anti- marijuana movement saw the drug as a lurking threat that would turn out to be far more hazardous than everyone seemed to believe.

Those fears were reinforced by a series of articles that appeared in mainstream magazines in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s–articles with titles like "All the Evidence on Pot Isn’t In!" (Seventeen), "How I Got My Daughter to Stop Smoking Pot" (Good Housekeeping), "Marijuana Alert: Enemy of Youth" (Reader’s Digest), "Marijuana: Now the Fears Are Facts" (Good Housekeeping), "Marijuana: The Latest Dope on Its Dangers" (Mademoiselle), and "The Perils of Pot" (Discover). The articles delivered the same message as the Eastland hearings: You have been deceived. Marijuana is a lot more dangerous than you think.

The most influential anti-marijuana writer was probably the late Peggy Mann, a journalist who started writing about pot in 1978. After attending a conference in France on the dangers of marijuana, organized by Nahas and other anti-pot researchers, she wrote "The Case Against Marijuana Smoking," which appeared on the front page of The Washington Post’s Outlook section. During the next few years she wrote many magazine articles on pot, including a four-part series in Reader’s Digest that prompted a record 6.5 million reprint requests. In 1985 Mann published Marijuana Alert, which Nancy Reagan describes in the foreword as "a true story about a drug that is taking America captive."

Marijuana Alert gathers together almost every scrap of research that reflects badly on marijuana, including thoroughly discredited studies, while virtually ignoring anything that would give a different impression, including major surveys of the literature. This is not simply the mirror image of the approach taken by reformers. Scholars such as Grinspoon, John Kaplan, Norman Zinberg, Edward Brecher, and Andrew Weil were forced to deal with speculation about marijuana’s harms and the research supporting it. Indeed, their task was precisely to confront those claims.

Mann, on the other hand, deals with the opposition’s arguments and evidence mainly by omitting them. While she describes Nahas’s studies finding that marijuana impairs cellular immunity, she neglects to mention that other researchers have tried but failed to replicate them. She discusses Harold Kolansky and William T. Moore’s 1971 study suggesting that marijuana use causes a host of psychological problems, but not the storm of criticism it prompted. She cites A. M. G. Campbell’s 1971 study finding that marijuana causes cerebral atrophy but leaves out the methodological flaws that made it worthless: All 10 subjects were psychiatric patients, and there was no nonpsychiatric control group; the study also failed to control for epilepsy, head injuries, mental retardation, and the use of other drugs, including alcohol. When Mann does mention criticism, it’s only to dismiss it.

This approach is quite effective. If you haven’t already heard about the studies and surveys she ignores, Mann’s book may well convince you that marijuana is a very dangerous drug. Largely because of Mann and other anti-pot propagandists, many Americans have a vague sense that recent scientific findings show marijuana to be considerably more hazardous than people thought it was in the ‘70s (a notion reinforced by a similar impression about cocaine). Yet the basic picture remains the same: No one has ever died from a marijuana overdose; based on extrapolations from animal studies, the ratio of the drug’s lethal dose to its effective dose is something like 40,000 to I (compared to between 4 and 10 to 1 for alcohol and between 10 and 20 to 1 for aspirin). Unlike alcohol used to excess, marijuana itself (as opposed to the act of smoking) does not appear to cause organ damage. And virtually all of marijuana’s negative effects are associated with heavy use (the equivalent of several joints a day).

In his 1992 book Against Excess, Kleiman writes: "Aside from the almost self-evident proposition that smoking anything is probably bad for the lungs, the quarter century since large numbers of Americans began to use marijuana has produced remarkably little laboratory or epidemiological evidence of serious health damage done by the drug."

Anti-marijuana activists commonly claim that today’s pot is more dangerous because it is "much more potent" than the pot of the early ‘70s, with an average THC content 10 times greater. This claim, which was influential in the successful drive for recriminalization in Alaska, is doubly wrong. As Morgan has noted, the assertion that pot is 10 times more powerful than it used to be is based on a spurious comparison of low-grade Mexican marijuana from fewer than 20 seizures tested in the early ‘70s with high-grade domestic marijuana from more than 200 seizures tested in the early ‘80s. The average THC content of domestic seizures tested by the federal government has been pretty stable–around 2 percent to 3 percent–since 1979, the first year for which reliable data are available.

But even if average THC content were significantly higher now than in the ‘70s, this is more likely a health benefit than a hazard. Since marijuana users generally smoke until they achieve a desired effect, higher potency means less inhalation–a positive result, since lung damage is the only well-established physical risk associated with marijuana use by otherwise healthy adults.

Although they talk about the physical effects of smoking pot, anti-marijuana activists seem to worry more about its psychological impact. Marijuana Alert, for example, is full of horror stories about sweet, obedient, courteous, hard-working kids transformed by marijuana into rebellious, lazy, moody, insolent, bored, apathetic, sexually promiscuous monsters. The most striking thing about these accounts is the extent to which the symptoms of marijuana use overlap with the symptoms of adolescence. "It was very easy for parents to blame marijuana for all the problems that their children were having, rather than to accept any responsibility," Grinspoon observes. "It became a very convenient way of dealing with and understanding various kinds of problems."

In addition to coni marijuana activists confusing correlation with causation, anti-marijuana activist blur the distinction between short-term and long-term effects. Under the influence of marijuana, for example, users appear listless; their thinking may seem disordered, and their short-term memories are impaired. But to judge by the anecdotes that Mann offers, these are persistent traits of pot smokers, intoxicated or not. She says the problems may not disappear for months after the last joint, if at all.

For anyone who knew a pothead or two in high school or college, this depiction of marijuana’s effects may have the ring of truth. One of my colleagues cites the impact that pot seemed to have on some of his fellow students: They sat around getting stoned all day, skipping classes, accomplishing nothing. But since the vast majority of people who use marijuana don’t end up this way, it’s clearthat heavy pot use is more likely to be the expression of psychological problems or personality traits than the cause of them. Of course, being stoned all the time would exacerbate almost anyone’s problems, but that doesn’t mean pot can magically transform a straight-A student into a burned-out hippie.

Another frequently cited behavioral result of smoking pot is the so-called gateway effect. In 1985 I covered a pot bust in northeastern Pennsylvania, following a long line of state police cars up winding dirt roads through the woods until we arrived at a modest marijuana farm. Watching the troopers uproot the tall, bright-green plants, I asked the officer in charge what all the fuss was about. He gave the standard response: "Marguana may not be so bad, but it leads to harder drugs. I’ve seen it a thousand times."

I’ve been mulling that over, on and off, for the last eight years. My initial reaction was, "That’s not true." I have since arrived at a more sophisticated position: "What’s not true?" The gateway theory is deliberately ambiguous and therefore impossible to disprove. It’s not clear what it means to say that marijuana "leads to" other drugs.

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