In a new Heritage Foundation video,
anti-pot activist Kevin Sabet bravely tackles “the
myth that marijuana doesn’t kill.” Although cannabis consumers
(unlike drinkers) do not die from acute overdoses, he says,
“marijuana does kill people” through suicide, chronic obstructive
pulmonary disease, car crashes, and other accidents.
I won’t say Sabet is attacking a straw man, since
overenthusiastic cannabis fans have
been known to say that “marijuana doesn’t kill anyone”
(although the top Google result for that phrase is an article by
Sabet explaining why that’s not true). But I will say that Sabet
manages to obscure the fact that marijuana does not kill people
very often, especially compared to the death tolls from legal drugs
such as tobacco and alcohol, which is the relevant point in
evaluating the scientific basis for pot prohibition. Let’s take a
closer look at the four ways that marijuana kills, according to
Sabet:
Suicide. Some research does find a
correlation between suicide and marijuana use, but that does not
mean the relationship is causal. A longitudinal
study published by The British Journal of Psychiatry
in 2009 reached this conclusion:
Although there was a strong association between cannabis use and
suicide, this was explained by markers of psychological and
behavioural problems. These results suggest that cannabis use is
unlikely to have a strong effect on risk of completed suicide,
either directly or as a consequence of mental health problems
secondary to its use.
Furthermore, there is
some evidence that letting patients use marijuana for symptom
relief reduces the risk of suicide. Still, if reefer has ever
driven anyone to kill himself, that would be enough to prove
Sabet’s point. You can’t say it has never happened!
Chronic obstructive pulmonary
disease. “You can’t say that smoking a crude plant, a
leaf, is good for your lungs,” Sabet says, “and so we know that
COPD and marijuana are inextricably linked.”
Here is how the American Thoracic Society summarizes the
evidence regarding marijuana and COPD:
Heavy marijuana smokers also are likely to develop lung damage
because marijuana smoke contains many of the same harmful chemicals
as tobacco smoke. We do not know if smoking a small amount of
marijuana (for example, light users who smoke an amount equal to
1-2 joints a month) over a long period of time increases your risk
for developing COPD. We do know that in some people (especially
those with lung problems), smoking marijuana can make their
breathing worse.
A 2012 study of
5,000 young adults who were followed for two decades, reported
in The Journal of the American Medical
Association, found that “occasional and low cumulative
marijuana use was not associated with adverse effects on pulmonary
function.” Donald Tashkin, a UCLA researcher who has studied
the health effects of marijuana use for many years, told Web
MD “the main thrust of the paper has confirmed previous
results indicating that marijuana in the amounts in which it is
customarily smoked does not impair lung function.”
Assuming that heavy pot smoking causes lung damage, people can
avoid that risk by using vaporizers or consuming cannabis in the
form of edibles. In that sense it is clearly not true that “COPD
and marijuana are inextricably linked.”
COPD kills more
than 120,000 Americans a year. According to the CDC,
it is “almost always caused by [cigarette] smoking.” Neither the
CDC, the American
Lung Association, nor the National
Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute mentions marijuana
consumption as a risk factor. Yet Sabet is sure at least a few of
those COPD deaths can be blamed on pot, although he does not hazard
an estimate. By contrast, he notes that the CDC attributes
480,000 deaths a year to cigarette smoking, which causes not
just COPD but a laundry list of ailments, including lung cancer and
heart disease.
“Saying marijuana has never contributed to death or never killed
anyone is like saying tobacco hasn’t killed anyone,” Sabet says at
the beginning of the Heritage Foundation video. What he means, he
says, is that tobacco smokers, like marijuana smokers, do not die
from acute overdoses. But given the enormous gap between
tobacco-related fatalities and marijuana-related fatalities, the
comparison is reckless.
Car crashes. “Marijuana is the second most
implicated drug in drunk or drugged driving accidents,” Sabet says.
That is misleading, because “implicated” means a driver killed in a
crash tested positive for traces of marijuana, which does not
necessarily mean he was under the influence at the time of the
crash, let alone that marijuana contributed to the accident.
Marijuana can be detected in blood and urine long after its effects
have worn off.
Marijuana does impair driving ability, but not as dramatically
as alcohol does, which is why legalization might actually
reduce traffic fatalities, assuming that more pot smoking is
accompanied by less drinking. “Researchers have now said that
[marijuana] doubles the risk of a car crash,” Sabet says. By
comparison, research indicates that a blood alcohol concentration
of 0.10 percent
quintuples the risk of a car crash.
According to the National High Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA), drunk driving kills about 10,000 people a
year. How many people does stoned driving kill? “That’s difficult
to say,” said a NHTSA official who
testified at a House hearing on the subject this year. “We
don’t have a precise estimate.” The most he was willing to affirm
was that the number is “probably not” zero.
Other accidents. “There are a number of, you
have to imagine, injuries in other accidents that result from
marijuana that just aren’t tallied,” Sabet says. Well, yes, since
they aren’t tallied, you do have to imagine them. But if stoned
falls from ladders and so forth were a major cause of death in
America, someone probably would be counting them. The CDC,
for example, counts
about 7,500 deaths from alcohol-related falls each year. It
attributes another 8,000 or so deaths to alcohol-related suicide,
about 1,600 to acute alcohol poisoning, and some 38,000 to chronic
diseases caused by excessive alcohol consumption. All told, it puts
alcohol-related deaths (including car crashes) at 88,000
annually.
What is the comparable figure for marijuana? Tellingly, Sabet
does not have one, but he wants you to know it is more than zero.
To recap, these are the annual death tolls from three of our most
popular drugs, the first two of which happen to be legal:
Tobacco: 480,000
Alcohol: 88,000
Marijuana: > 0
“You can’t say marijuana doesn’t kill anybody,” Sabet declares.
No, but you can say that marijuana’s relative hazards have nothing
to do with its legal status.
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