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

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It seems that pot, too, fosters dishonesty and rudeness. "Among the psychological effects of heavy pot use cited by teachers and parents," The New York Times Magazine reported in 1980, "are a loss of interest in schoolwork, a tendency to lie without feelings of guilt ('She stared me straight in the face,' one mother said of her junior-high-school daughter, 'tears running down her cheeks, swearing she was telling the truth about something, and I knew she was lying') and a change in attitude toward the family. 'I realized,' said a woman of her 12-year-old, 'that right under our noses our happy, lovely little girl had turned into a sullen, alienated, unreasonable creature.'" As these accounts suggest, the symptoms of marijuana use, like the symptoms of tobacco use, are often hard to distinguish from the symptoms of adolescence.

A 1990 booklet produced by the U.S. Department of Education, Growing Up Drug Free: A Parent's Guide to Prevention, offered a list of warning signs: "Does your child seem withdrawn, depressed, tired, and careless about personal grooming? Has your child become hostile and uncooperative? Have your child's relationships with other family members deteriorated? Has your child dropped his old friends? Is your child no longer doing well in school--grades slipping, attendance irregular? Has your child lost interest in hobbies, sports, and other favorite activities? Have your child's eating or sleeping patterns changed? Positive answers to any of these questions can indicate alcohol or other drug use." On the other hand, the booklet conceded, "it is sometimes hard to know the difference between normal teenage behav-ior and behavior caused by drugs."

Tobacco and marijuana have been condemned not only because of their inherent dangers but because they supposedly lead to the use of other drugs. The psychiatric pioneer Benjamin Rush offered an early version of the "gateway" or "stepping-stone" theory in 1798. Rush, who had already described the inexorable slide into habitual drunkenness among those who developed a taste for liquor, said chewing or smoking tobacco contributed to alcoholism by creating a peculiar kind of thirst: "This thirst cannot be allayed by water, for no sedative or even insipid liquor will be relished after the mouth and throat have been exposed to the stimulus of the smoke, or juice of Tobacco. A desire of course is excited for strong drinks, and these when taken between meals soon lead to intemperance and drunkenness." In 1912 Towns took the notion a step further, saying tobacco leads to alcohol, and alcohol leads to morphine.

The gateway theory is also the last resort of drug warriors who are frustrated by the lack of evidence that marijuana is a menace. In the 1984 book Getting Tough on Gateway Drugs, Robert DuPont estimated that "up to 50 percent of regular users of marijuana also use heroin." In its 1995 paper on drug legalization, Califano's Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse reported that "12 to 17 year olds who smoke marijuana are 85 times more likely to use cocaine than those who do not."

Formulations of this kind obscure two crucial points: First, most marijuana users never even try another illegal drug, let alone use it regularly. Second, it is not safe to conclude from the fact that marijuana users are more likely to use heroin or cocaine that marijuana use results in heroin or cocaine use. (It is probably also true that adults who wear jeans more than three days a week and people who ride motorcycles without a helmet are more likely to try heroin or cocaine.) In this case as in so many others, anti-drug polemicists tend to confuse correlation with causation.

Given the hazards thought to be associated with tobacco and marijuana use, the safest course would seem to be early intervention aimed at preventing youthful experimentation. Accordingly, opponents of both drugs have formulated abstinence pledges, a device borrowed from the temperance movement.

George Trask, a Massachusetts minister who founded the American Anti-Tobacco Society in 1850, visited schools around the country and urged young people to take the Band of Hope pledge: "I hereby solemnly promise to abstain from the use of all Intoxicating Liquors as a beverage; I also promise to abstain from the use of Tobacco in all forms, and all Profane Language." In the 1890s Lucy Page Gaston adopted a similar strategy, leading boys and girls in the Clean Life Pledge: "I hereby pledge myself with the help of God to abstain from all intoxicating liquors as a beverage and from the use of tobacco in any form."

In the 1980s First Lady Nancy Reagan, who adopted drug education as her pet cause, famously urged children to "Just Say No." Kids who joined the clubs sponsored by Just Say No International had to sign this statement: "I pledge to lead a drug-free life. I want to be healthy and happy. I will say no to harmful drugs. I will help my friends say no. I pledge to stand up for what I know is right."

These pledges may seem naïve and simplistic, but they reflect a perfectly understandable desire to protect children from danger and make sure they grow up right. Current fears about marijuana and other illegal drugs, like turn-of-the-century fears about cigarettes, express the sort of worries that reappear in every generation. Parents naturally want their children to be smart, to do well in school, to respect authority, and to become productive, responsible adults. The dull, lazy, rebellious, and possibly criminal teenager--the cigarette fiend or pothead--is every parent's nightmare. Adults who have no children of their own worry that other people's kids will become tomorrow's parasites or predators, bringing decline and disorder.

Despite all the alarm that drug scares seem to generate, projecting these fears onto physical objects can be reassuring: Just keep the kids away from tobacco or marijuana (or alcohol or LSD), we are implicitly told, and they will turn out OK. As symbols of all the things that might go wrong on the path from birth to maturity, drugs offer what every adult confronted by a troublesome teenager longs for: the illusion of control.