Back in 1998, when
the federal government unveiled a new batch of anti-drug ads, I
noted
that widespread experience with marijuana had made the anti-pot
propagandist’s job more difficult: People tend to be skeptical of
tall tales about psychoactive substances when they themselves have
tried those substances or know others who have and emerged from the
experience unscathed, as pot smokers generally do. That phenomenon,
I suggested, “helps explain why government officials continue to
insist that marijuana is either more dangerous than it used to be
or more dangerous than we used to think.”
Bill Bennett, who when I wrote that column was already a former
drug czar and has now held that position for 24 years, is still
pushing both prongs of this argument, trying to make a familiar
drug seem newly exotic and threatening. In a Wall Street
Journal op-ed piece co-authored by Robert A. White, a
former federal prosecutor, Bennett argues that “legal pot is a
public health menace” because today’s cannabis is stronger than the
stuff that Journal readers smoked in college and
because recent research shows that it damages teenagers’
brains.
There is no denying that marijuana nowadays is typically
stronger—i.e. better—than it used to be, although I am not sure
what Bennett means when he says “it is often at least five times
stronger.” In any case, why does Bennett insist that better
marijuana is worse? “With increased THC levels come increased
health risks,” he says, citing the Colorado man who
killed his wife after eating marijuana-infused candy and the
visiting college student who
jumped off a hotel balcony in Denver after eating a pot cookie.
The fact that prohibitionists endlessly recycle these two
“marijuana-related deaths” suggests that things in Colorado, where
recreational use has been legal since the end of 2012, must be
going pretty well. How many alcohol-related deaths has the state
seen during the same period?
Another problem with Bennett’s evidence: He seems to have
forgotten that he was supposed to be explaining why stronger pot is
more hazardous to your health (a somewhat counterintuitive claim,
since higher potency tends to reduce the amount of smoke inhaled).
Instead he ends up arguing that marijuana edibles are especially
dangerous. But edibles are made with concentrates, so their
strength does not depend on the potency of the original plant
matter. In fact, Colorado concentrates are often made with
low-potency leaves that in the old days would have been
discarded.
Getting even farther from the claim he is trying to
substantiate, Bennett mentions “more intoxicated driving,” which
presumably is a reference to a
recent study finding that the percentage of fatally injured
Colorado drivers who tested positive for marijuana metabolites rose
between 1994 and 2011 (i.e., prior to the policy Bennett is
criticizing). For reasons I explain
here, those drivers were not necessarily intoxicated when they
died, and their crashes may have had nothing to do with
marijuana.
Finally, Bennett makes what sounds like a health-related claim.
“Since Colorado legalized recreational use earlier this year,” he
says, there have been “more emergency hospital admissions due to
marijuana exposure and overdose.” He does not cite a source or
specify any numbers, but let’s assume that’s true. How would that
trend illustrate his contention that “increased THC levels” bring
“increased health risks”? Have THC levels increased since January?
It’s not even clear how many of the “emergency hospital admissions”
to which he refers involved smoked marijuana. In cases involving
edibles, the potency of the plant would be irrelevant.
If Bennett’s argument that increased potency makes cannabis
fundamentally different is less than persuasive, what about his
claim that we need prohibition to save the children and their
delicate brains? I address that marijuana menace at some length in
my most recent
Forbes column, which you can read if you’re
interested. I’ll wait.
For those who do not feel like following the link, here is a
quick summary: Even Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute
on Drug Abuse and no fan of marijuana, concedes that research on
the impact of adolescent pot smoking is inconclusive. “Although
multiple studies have reported detrimental effects,” Volkow and
three co-authors write in
a recent New England Journal of
Medicine article, “others have not, and the question of
whether marijuana is harmful remains the subject of heated debate.”
There are three major reasons for that debate: 1) The evidence is
mainly correlational, meaning it does not establish cause and
effect, 2) observed differences between pot smokers and abstainers
do not necessarily have practical significance, and 3) results
based on studies of heavy users do not necessarily apply to people
who consume cannabis occasionally or moderately.
Bennett and White do not seem to have delved into this research
very deeply. If they had actually read the studies they cite, they
probably would not have written this:
The APA [American Psychological Association] noted that young
people who become addicted to marijuana lose an average of six IQ
points by adulthood. A long line of studies have found similar
results—in 2012, a decades-long study of more than 1,000 New
Zealanders who frequently smoked pot in adolescence pegged the IQ
loss at eight points.
Actually, both of those results come from
the same study, which found that subjects identified as
“cannabis dependent” in three or more follow-up interviews lost an
average of about six IQ points, which rose to eight points for
the subjects in that group who were diagnosed as dependent before
age 18.
Whatever the practical significance of such findings, how do the
potential hazards of marijuana to adolescents justify treating
adults who grow, sell, or use cannabis like criminals? Bennett,
despite his Ph.D. in philosophy and frequent pontificating on moral
issues, has never found that question interesting, and he ignores
it once again in his latest prohibitionist plea.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1pvvlsa
via IFTTT