Smoke Alarm

This weed will make you stupid, unemployable, and lethargic. Now it's pot. It used to be tobacco.

Jacob Sullum from the May 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

In the 1908 textbook The Human Body and Health, biologist Alvin Davison agreed that tobacco "prevents the brain cells from developing to their full extent and results in a slow and dull mind." He added, "At Harvard University during fifty years no habitual user of tobacco ever graduated at the head of his class."

The dull, listless underachievers described by Blaisdell, Davison, and other tobacco opponents resemble contemporary portrayals of marijuana users. In 1989 William Bennett, then director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, explained how smoking pot affects young people: "It means they don't study. It causes what is called 'amotivational syndrome,' where they are just not motivated to get up and go to work."

In recent years the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, which is supported partly by donations from tobacco companies, has helped reinforce this stereotype. One of the Partnership's television spots shows two young men smoking marijuana, one watching TV, the other ridiculing warnings about the dangers of pot: "We've been smoking for 15 years, and nothing has ever happened to me." Then we hear the voice of his mother, asking him if he's looked for a job today. "Marijuana can make nothing happen to you, too," the announcer says.

Another Partnership commercial shows a stoned teenager turning down invitations from friends to play baseball, go skateboarding, or listen to music. "You always thought marijuana would take you places," the announcer says. "So how come you're going nowhere?" The most notorious anti-pot ad from the Partnership purported to contrast a normal EEG reading with the EEG reading of a marijuana smoker. It was later revealed that the second display actually showed the brain waves of someone asleep or in a coma. Another spot, "No Brainer," compared the effects of smoking marijuana to the effects of being repeatedly hit in the head by a professional boxer.

The tricks of anti-pot propaganda are usually more subtle, however. A common approach is to cite the immediate effects of smoking marijuana without noting that they disappear when the drug wears off. In a joint statement that accompanied the release of a 1995 report called Legalization: Panacea or Pandora's Box (you can guess which side they came down on), Bennett and Joseph Califano, the former Health, Education, and Welfare secretary who heads the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, said that "marijuana use...savages short-term memory, sharply curtails ability to concentrate and diminishes motor functions."

A pamphlet from DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) declares, "Young people who smoke marijuana heavily over long periods of time can become dull, slow-moving, and inattentive. These 'burned-out' users are sometimes so unaware of their surroundings that they do not respond when friends speak to them, and they do not realize they have a problem." In the 1985 book Marijuana Alert, Peggy Mann suggested that diminished mental capacity is a persistent trait of pot smokers, intoxicated or not.

Promoters of this idea will be photocopying a study that appeared in the February 21 Journal of the American Medical Association. The researchers found that, after abstaining for at least 19 hours, heavy pot smokers (who used marijuana daily or almost daily) performed slightly worse on tests of learning and attentiveness than occasional pot smokers did. (The two groups scored about the same on basic memory tests.) Since the heavy users were more likely to have smoked marijuana recently, the results may indicate a "hangover" effect.

The lead researcher, Harvard psychiatrist Harrison G. Pope Jr., told Harvard Magazine that, among the light smokers, "total lifetime consumption did not predict results on the cognitive tests....My bet is that there really is a residual effect caused by drug residue." Another possibility is that people who are inclined to smoke pot heavily are, on average, somewhat less attentive than other people to begin with. A third possibility is that the heavy smokers were used to functioning under the influences of marijuana and were distracted by its absence. Although this study does not demonstrate permanent impairment (or negative effects from occasional use), anti-pot propagandists will probably use it to keep alive the notion that marijuana causes brain damage.

Employers are not eager to hire dim-witted layabouts, whatever they're smoking. "The time is already at hand when smokers will be barred out of positions which demand quick thought and action," wrote Charles B. Towns, operator of a New York drug and alcohol hospital, in 1912. Thomas Edison declared, "I employ no person who smokes cigarettes." With Edison and Henry Ford leading the way, many prominent businessmen adopted the same policy during the first two decades of the century. Hundreds of large companies, including Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck, refused to hire smokers.

Similarly, in the 1980s and '90s employers have become increasingly concerned about the impact of marijuana and other illegal drugs on productivity. Many companies now require job applicants to undergo urine tests, a policy encouraged by hyperbolic claims about the costs of drug use. "Last year alone," asserted a series of Partnership for a Drug-Free America ads in 1991, "America's businesses lost more than $60 billion to drugs. So this year, most of the Fortune 500 will be administering drug tests." The $60 billion figure, which was also cited by President George Bush and widely reported in the news media, included an estimate of "reduced productivity due to daily marijuana use." The estimate came from a 1982 study that found adults who had smoked marijuana for at least 20 out of 30 days (at any point in their lives) had lower household incomes, on average, than adults who hadn't. The researchers simply assumed that the difference was due to the influence of marijuana.

In addition to their alleged effects on motivation, intellectual performance, and productivity, both tobacco and marijuana have been tied to crime. "Recent careful investigations by many persons," Davison reported in his 1908 book, The Human Body and Health, "show that cigarette smoking not only clouds the intellect, but tends to make criminals of boys. Dr. Hutchison, of the Kansas State Reformatory, says: 'Using cigarettes is the cause of the downfall of more of the inmates of this institution than all other vicious habits combined.' Of 4117 boys received into the Illinois State Reformatory, 4000 were in the habit of using tobacco, and over 3000 were cigarette smokers." In 1904 Charles B. Hubbell recalled that during his service as president of New York City's Board of Education, "it was found that nearly all of the incorrigible truants were cigaret fiends." He added that "the Police Magistrates of this and other cities have stated again and again that the majority of juvenile delinquents appearing before them are cigaret fiends whose moral nature has been warped or destroyed through the instrumentality of this vice."

While most of the critics who blamed cigarettes for crime implied that the effect was pharmacological, Henry Ford had a somewhat more sophisticated theory. "If you will study the history of almost any criminal you will find that he is an inveterate cigarette smoker," he said. "Boys, through cigarettes, train with bad company. They go with other smokers to the pool rooms and saloons. The cigarette drags them down."

Although drug warriors nowadays rarely claim that marijuana causes crime, that charge played an important role in building support for state and federal prohibition in the 1920s and '30s. A 1938 book, Marijuana, America's New Drug Problem, quoted an account by New Orleans Public Safety Commissioner Frank Gomila of a "crime wave" in the late '20s: "Youngsters known to be 'muggle-heads' fortified themselves with the narcotic and proceeded to shoot down police, bank clerks and casual bystanders. Mr. Eugene Stanley, at that time District Attorney, declared that many of the crimes in New Orleans and the south were thus committed by criminals who relied on the drug to give them false courage and freedom from restraint. Dr. George Roeling, Coroner, reported that of 450 prisoners investigated, 125 were confirmed users of marihuana. Mr. W.B. Graham, State Narcotic Officer, declared in 1936 that 60 percent of the crimes committed in New Orleans were by mar-ihuana users."

Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1932 to 1970, promoted the notion that marijuana causes violence to generate support for a national ban. During the '30s lurid newspaper and magazine stories about marijuana murders--in one case, a Florida youth was said to have hacked his family to death with an ax while under the influence--helped create a climate of alarm.

Tobacco and marijuana have also been charged with subtler effects on behavior. "The action of any narcotic is to break down the sense of moral responsibility," wrote Towns, the drug treatment entrepreneur, in 1912. "If a father finds that his boy is fibbing to him, is difficult to manage, or does not wish to work, he will generally find that the boy is smoking cigarettes....The action of a narcotic produces a peculiar cunning and resource in concealment." Noting the rudeness of smokers who light up despite the complaints of bystanders, Towns concluded that "callous indifference to the rights of others" was another effect of the drug. In Our Bodies and How We Live, Blaisdell agreed that "the effect of tobacco on the moral nature often shows itself in a selfish disregard for the rights of others."