High Anxiety

Jacob Sullum from the May 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Gray is more persuasive when he talks about marijuana, which he identifies as the "linchpin" of prohibition. "Take reefer out of the equation," he writes, "and the number of illegal drug users instantly drops from thirteen million to three million, and the drug war shrinks from a national crusade to a sideshow." People are often surprised to hear that marijuana is the main target of the war on drugs, accounting for more than two-fifths of drug arrests, but it could hardly be otherwise. Cannabis is by far the most widely used illegal drug: more than four times as popular as cocaine, more than 40 times as popular as heroin. Survey data indicate that about 70 million Americans, one-quarter of the population, have tried it.

The fact that so many of today's voters smoked pot when they were in high school or college creates a serious credibility problem for the government. "When they failed to experience the instant insanity that the authorities had promised," writes Gray, "it was for many an epiphany more powerful than the drug itself--the realization that the government makes stuff up....To bring these skeptics on board the war on drugs, it was necessary to convince them that the basic facts about marijuana had changed dramatically." Hence the ongoing propaganda campaign warning us that marijuana is 1) more dangerous than we used to think, or 2) more dangerous than it used to be.

In Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts, Lynn Zimmer and John P. Morgan carefully refute both of these claims. The book is divided into 20 chapters, each addressing a particular belief about marijuana illustrated by quotations from public officials or other sources sympathetic to prohibition. Zimmer, a sociologist at the City University of New York, and Morgan, a physician and professor of pharmacology at the CUNY Medical School, provide extensive references on topics such as addiction, brain function, pulmonary effects, highway safety, and marijuana use during pregnancy. Their meticulous, dispassionate, and concise summaries of the scientific literature make the book a useful primer and a valuable research guide.

Despite decades of research, Zimmer and Morgan show, there is still little evidence of significant hazards associated with moderate marijuana use. The most serious health risk of heavy marijuana smoking is probably bronchitis. Lung cancer is possible in theory, but you'd have to smoke a hell of a lot to approximate the risk faced by the typical tobacco smoker.

Zimmer and Morgan also demolish claims about marijuana's psychological effects, including "amotivational syndrome." Their critique of the "gateway theory"--the idea that marijuana use leads to the use of more dangerous drugs--is particularly incisive. Prohibitionists are fond of saying that people who smoke pot are 85 times as likely to use cocaine as people who never try marijuana, which sounds like strong evidence for the gateway theory. But as Zimmer and Morgan note, "The `risk factor' is large not because so many marijuana users experiment with cocaine, but because very few people try cocaine without trying marijuana first."

To show why it does not necessarily follow that smoking pot makes you more likely to snort cocaine, they offer an analogy: "Most people who ride a motorcycle (a fairly rare activity) have ridden a bicycle (a fairly common activity). Indeed, the prevalence of motorcycle riding among people who have never ridden a bicycle is probably extremely low. However, bicycle riding does not cause motorcycle riding, and increases in the former will not lead automatically to increases in the latter."

The book likewise makes short work of the argument that pot is more hazardous nowadays because it's much more potent than it was when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were toking up. First, claims of dramatic increases in THC content are based on faulty sampling and invalid comparisons. Second, even if average potency has risen, that would tend to reduce health risks, since people would smoke less to achieve the same effect.

Perhaps it's encouraging that defenders of prohibition are resorting to such easily refuted arguments, which are so clearly aimed at explaining away the hypocrisy of politicians who want to arrest people for doing something those lawmakers once did with impunity. The heated reaction of drug czar Barry McCaffrey and other federal officials to the medical marijuana movement--which threatens to undermine just one of the 20 myths that Zimmer and Morgan dissect--also suggests a certain desperation.

The Clinton administration's official justification for the marijuana status quo, as summed up by Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, goes like this: "Marijuana is illegal, dangerous, unhealthy, and wrong." There's no denying that first part, and Zimmer and Morgan do an admirable job of discussing just how "dangerous" and "unhealthy" marijuana really is. But what does it mean to say that a plant is "wrong"? It seems to mean that no good can possibly come of it. To admit that anyone--even a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy--could smoke pot and be better off as a result would be to admit that the federal government has been lying to the American people about marijuana for more than 60 years.

Like McCaffrey and Shalala, Gray sees medical marijuana as a grave threat to the war on drugs. "Prohibition, as a policy, can only ratchet in one direction," he writes. "Each failure must be met with more repression. Any step backward calls into question the fundamental assumption that repression is the solution....Marijuana is the pawl on the ratchet, the little catch that keeps the drum from unwinding....If somebody jiggles that pawl and the drum slips, support for the current policy will plummet like a loose cage in a mineshaft, because it cannot sustain a serious evaluation." I'm not sure he's right, but I like the metaphor.

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