Legalize It! (seriously)

The current legal approach to marijuana, that is criminalization and prohibition, has proven ineffective in making it unavailable, or reducing its consumption. In fact, the overall rate of marijuana use in the U.S. has risen by roughly 4,000% since marijuana was first outlawed in 1937.* On the other hand, the illegal marijuana market has brought about many other problems. I do not support full legalization, but rather a legal regulation of its production and distribution, and a definite decriminalization of its consumption. “Decriminalization” involves the removal of criminal penalties for possession of marijuana for personal use. Marijuana is presently decriminalized in 11 states: California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oregon. That doesn’t mean it’s legal: small fines (somewhat similarly to speeding tickets) are issued, but there is no arrest, incarceration, or criminal record. I call that a step forward! Just to start with, decriminalization saves a tremendous amount in enforcement costs. It is estimated that California saves $100 million per year since marijuana was decriminalized. (Aldrich, Michael, Ph.D., and Mikuriya, Tod, M.D., “Savings in California Marijuana Law Enforcement Costs Attributable to the Moscone Act of 1976 — A Summary,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 0(1), Jan.–March 1988; pp. 75-81.)

Truth Be Told

A report from the Institute of Science’s Division of Neuroscience and Behavioral Health, titled Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base, helps clear up many of the common misbelieves regarding the use of marijuana. The first of them is the belief that it causes a dangerous addiction. Here’s a table straight from the document:

Drug Category: Proportion of users that ever became addicted
Tobacco/Nicotine: 32%
Alcohol: 15%
Marijuana (including hashish): 9%
Cocaine: 17%
Heroine: 23%

"In summary, although few marijuana users develop dependence, some do. But they appear to be less likely to do so than users of other drugs (including alcohol and nicotine), and marijuana dependence appears to be less severe than dependence on other drugs." [p. 98]

Another common belief is that smoking marihuana can cause cancer or other health problems, such as “amotivational syndrome” (lazyness or slowness in plain English.) Here is what the report states:
"There is no conclusive evidence that marijuana causes cancer in humans, including cancers usually related to tobacco use."[p. 119]
"Epidemiological data indicate that in the general population marijuana use is not associated with increased mortality." [p. 109]
"Earlier studies purporting to show structural changes in the brains of heavy marijuana users have not been replicated with more sophisticated techniques." [p. 106]

Now, take a look a this table and explain to me why is alcohol legal and not marijuana?

The Gateway Theory

Probably the most common misbelieve regarding marihuana is that it leads consumers to use other drugs. Who hasn’t ever heard their parents state truly concerned: You start with marijuana, and in a blink of the eye you will be involved with much harder drugs!

The truth is, in the Netherlands, where adults have been allowed to possess and purchase small amounts of marijuana since 1976, the use of marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines is far lower than in the U.S.* An article titled Two New Studies Show Marijuana Is Not a 'Gateway' to Harder Drugs published in the Chicago Sun-Times on December 24, 2006, explained the results of a study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse in which researchers from the University of Pittsburgh tracked the drug use patterns of 224 boys, starting at age 10 to 12 and ending at age 22. Some of the boys followed the traditional gateway paradigm, starting with tobacco or alcohol and moving on to marijuana, but some reversed the pattern, starting with marijuana first. And some never progressed from one substance to another at all. When they looked at the detailed data on these kids, the researchers found that the gateway theory simply didn't hold; environmental factors such as neighborhood characteristics played a much larger role on which drug the boys happened to use first. Researchers in Brisbane, Australia, and St. Louis reached much the same conclusion in a larger and more complex study. The research involved more than 4,000 Australian twins whose use of marijuana and other drugs was followed in detail from adolescence into adulthood, allowing for both social, genetic predisposition, and gateway theories to be put to the test. The data did not show that marijuana causes use of other drugs, although it indicated that the same factors that make people likely to try marijuana also make them likely to try other substances. The researchers added that any gateway effect that does exist is "more likely to be social than pharmacological," occurring because marijuana "introduces users to an unlawful provider who eventually becomes the source for other illicit drugs.” “In other words”, Bruce Mirken, the author of the article, concludes, “the gateway isn't marijuana; it's laws that put marijuana into the same criminal underground with speed and heroin.”

Teenage Usage

Research data shows that it is a myth that making marijuana illegal for adults will keep teenagers from using it. On the contrary, regulation would reduce teen access to marijuana by taking it off the streets and putting it in the hands of licensed businesses, which would lose their licenses if they sold to kids. The reality is that 85% of U.S. high school seniors qualify marihuana as “easy to get.” (Monitoring the Future, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 2005.) Anybody who’s been a minor in the U.S. knows that cigarettes and alcohol are very difficult to obtain for teenagers, because everyone, from gas stations to bars, will ask you for an I.D. if you look the slightest bit underage. But clandestine sellers of marihuana don’t card their costumers! According to the White House, more than half of U.S. teens try marijuana before graduating from high school. In the Netherlands, where marijuana is sold in indoor establishments to adults who are carded for age, only 28% of teenagers have ever tried it.* Furthermore, in the Netherlands, only 9% of secondary school students actually use marijuana; while in the U.S., recent government estimates have ranged as high as 22% U.S. (Trimbos Institute, National Drug Monitor, Annual Report NDM 2004, p. 13.) (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance — United States, 2003,” Table 28, May 21, 2004.)

Another issue that often concerns parents is that legally regulating marijuana would cause a surge in violence. Nevertheless, the fact is marijuana use does not stimulate violent or aggressive behavior (Peter N.S. Hoaken and Sherry H. Stewart, “Drugs of abuse and the elicitation of human aggressive behavior,” Addictive Behaviors, vol. 28, p. 1533-54, 2003.) But the prohibition of marijuana increases violence by giving criminals and gangs a monopoly on marijuana sales. The liquor trade, for example, was filled with black market violence and irregularities during Prohibition, but that violence ended as soon as alcohol was legalized.

Do It for the Economy

A report released recently by Jon Gettman, a marijuana public policy analyst, contends that the market value of pot produced in the U.S. exceeds $35 billion — far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay, which are the top three legal cash crops.* Additionally, if the marijuana trade was legalized, billions of dollars that now enrich criminals would instead go to legitimate businesses, and marijuana itself would be taxed. Each year, the government spends $7.7 billion to arrest and lock up nonviolent marijuana users. Taxing marijuana would produce combined savings and tax revenues of between $10 billion and $14 billion per year, instead of generating profits for drug dealers. (Miron, Jeffrey A., The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition, December 2004.)

It’s a Waste

Police officers now make more than 771,000 marijuana arrests per year, almost 90% of which are for possession, not production or distribution. In fact, there are more arrests due to marijuana than for all violent crimes combined! (Uniform Crime Reports, U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004.) Honestly, I do not think anybody should have to go to jail for lighting a joint! I also don’t think that cultivating even one marijuana plant should be considered a federal felony, or that the police should be able to give out Driving Under the Influence tickets based on urine tests that could throw positive results even weeks after the consumption of marijuana. It would be like handing out a D.I.U. to someone who is driving Thursdays and had a bottle of wine Saturday night! There are no longer effects on the person’s driving abilities. This policy needs to be rewritten.

Medicines are drugs are medicine – Prescribed Marijuana

Prior to 1937, at least 27 medicines containing marijuana were legally available in the United States. On March 17, 1999, the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that “there are some limited circumstances in which we recommend smoking marijuana for medical uses.” The IOM report, the result of two years of research that was funded by the White House drug policy office, analyzed all existing data on marijuana's therapeutic uses. So much for those who say that there is no real proof that marijuana has medicinal powers! Here’re some of its uses:

• Relief from nausea and appetite loss (which is why doctor’s prescribe it to cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, as well as AIDS patients)
• Reduction of intraocular pressure (which is why it alleviates the pain and slows down the damage caused by glaucoma)
• Reduction of muscle spasms (which is why I use it to magically heal my menstrual cramps, and why it's also a viable treatment for multiple sclerosis and epilepsy)
• Relief from chronic pain.

Each of these applications has been deemed legitimate by at least one court, legislature, and/or government agency in the U.S. But many patients report that marijuana is also useful for treating arthritis, migraine, alcohol and opiate addiction, and depression, anxiety and other mood disorders.*

Cannabis sativa L was classifieds in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act as a Schedule 1 drug, right there with heroin and LSD. This defines it as having a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision. As I hope you are realizing while reading this, if you don’t already know it, this definition simply does not apply to marijuana.

In 1972, a petition was submitted to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — to move marijuana to Schedule II, which would allow doctors to prescribe it to their patients. After 16 years of court battles, the DEA's chief administrative law judge, Francis L. Young, ruled: “Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known… The provisions of the [Controlled Substances] Act permit and require the transfer of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance. (September 6, 1988)” Nevertheless, top DEA bureaucrats rejected Judge Young's ruling and refused to reschedule marijuana.

Since 1996, a majority of voters in 10 states have voted in favor of ballot initiatives to remove criminal penalties for seriously ill people who grow or possess medical marijuana. Polls have shown that public approval of these laws has increased since they went into effect. Nevertheless, patients in these states can and are still being federally prosecuted for consuming marijuana. Nowadays, many people are pushing for Congress to force the DEA to place marihuana in schedule II. Actually, a national poll released November 1, 2005, found that 78% of Americans support “making marijuana legally available for doctors to prescribe in order to reduce pain and suffering.” In fact, for over a decade, polls have consistently shown between 60% and 80% support for legal access to medical marijuana. Some of the organizations that support some form of physician supervised access to medical marijuana include the American Academy of Family Physicians, American Nurses Association, and the American Public Health Association.* Furthermore, a 1990 scientific survey of oncologists found that 54% of those with an opinion favored the controlled medical availability of marijuana and 44% had already suggested at least once that a patient obtain marijuana illegally. (R. Doblin & M. Kleiman, “Marijuana as Antiemetic Medicine,” Journal of Clinical Oncology 9. 1991: 1314-1319.)The fact is, currently doctors can prescribe cocaine but not marijuana, and many patients would choose to be treated with medical marihuana instead of other much more addictive drugs, such as morphine, if given the legal choice.

The “Except 7 People Myth”

Did you ever hear that the federal law allows only 7 people in the U.S. to use medicinal marihuana? It’s not an urban myth. In 1975, Robert Randall, who suffered from glaucoma, was arrested for cultivating his own marijuana. He won his case by using the “medical necessity defense,” forcing the government to find a way to provide him with his medicine. As a result, the Investigational New Drug (IND) compassionate access program was established, enabling some patients to receive marijuana from the government. The program was grossly inadequate at helping the potentially millions of people who need medical marijuana. Many patients would never consider the idea that an illegal drug might be their best medicine, and most who were fortunate enough to discover marijuana's medicinal value did not discover the IND program. Those who did often could not find doctors willing to take on the program's arduous, bureaucratic requirements. In 1992, in response to a flood of new applications from AIDS patients, the George H.W. Bush administration closed the program to new applicants, and pleas to reopen it were ignored by subsequent administrations. The IND program remains in operation only for the seven surviving, previously-approved patients.*

Stand up for your rights

So we have economic, medical, family, and community reasons, besides, of course, freedom of choice and religious liberty, to legally regulate the use of pot, weed, ganja, whatever you want to call it. Furthermore, Marijuana prohibition subjects those of us who choose to use it to added and unnecessary health hazards, such as adulterants, contaminants, and impurities. Marijuana purchased through criminal markets is not subject to the same quality control standards as are legal consumer goods. Illicit marijuana may be adulterated with much more damaging substances; contaminated with pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers; and/or infected with molds, fungi, or bacteria… and we would never know it! By making the laws that illegalized marijuana obsolete, we would be eliminating from the root a whole gigantic chain of social problems: from the illicit farms who employ illegal immigrants under inhuman conditions; to the unlawful import of non-regulated marijuana; including medical conditions affecting innocent people who are forced to, at best, recur to illegal marihuana sources; all the way to common underage consumption, black market violence, and waste of tax-payers money and police resources. Will you take a stand?