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 arely
do trial balloons burst so quickly. During the recent British campaign,
Tory shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe had no sooner proposed
tougher penalties for marijuana possession than a third of her fellow
Tory shadow-cabinet ministers admitted to past marijuana use. Widdecome
immediately had to back off. The controversy reflected a split in
the party, with the confessors attempting to embarrass Widdecombe
politically. But something deeper was at work as well: a nascent
attempt to reckon honestly with a drug that has been widely used
by baby boomers and their generational successors, a tentative step
toward a squaring by the political class of its personal experience
with the drastic government rhetoric and policies regarding marijuana.
The American debate hasn't yet reached such a juncture, even though
last year's presidential campaign featured one candidate who pointedly
refused to answer questions about his past drug use and another
who — according to Gore biographer Bill Turque — spent
much of his young adulthood smoking dope and skipping through fields
of clover (and still managed to become one of the most notoriously
uptight and ambitious politicians in the country). In recent years,
the debate over marijuana policy has centered on the question of
whether the drug should be available for medicinal purposes (Richard
Brookhiser has written eloquently in NR on the topic). Drug warriors
call medical marijuana the camel's nose under the tent for legalization,
and so — for many of its advocates — it is. Both sides
in the medical-marijuana controversy have ulterior motives, which
suggests it may be time to stop debating the nose and move on to
the full camel.
Already, there has been some action. About a dozen states have passed
medical-marijuana laws in recent years, and California voters, last
November, approved Proposition 36, mandating treatment instead of
criminal penalties for all first- and second-time nonviolent drug
offenders. Proponents of the initiative plan to export it to Ohio,
Michigan, and Florida next year. Most such liberalization measures
fare well at the polls — California's passed with 61 percent
of the vote — as long as they aren't perceived as going too
far. Loosen, but don't legalize, seems to be the general public
attitude, even as almost every politician still fears departing
from Bill Bennett orthodoxy on the issue. But listen carefully to
the drug warriors, and you can hear some of them quietly reading
marijuana out of the drug war. James Q. Wilson, for instance, perhaps
the nation's most convincing advocate for drug prohibition, is careful
to set marijuana aside from his arguments about the potentially
ruinous effects of legalizing drugs.
There is good reason for this, since it makes little sense to send
people to jail for using a drug that, in terms of its harmfulness,
should be categorized somewhere between alcohol and tobacco on one
hand and caffeine on the other. According to common estimates, alcohol
and tobacco kill hundreds of thousands of people a year. In contrast,
there is as a practical matter no such thing as a lethal overdose
of marijuana. Yet federal law makes possessing a single joint punishable
by up to a year in prison, and many states have similar penalties.
There are about 700,000 marijuana arrests in the United States every
year, roughly 80 percent for possession. Drug warriors have a strange
relationship with these laws: They dispute the idea that anyone
ever actually goes to prison for mere possession, but at the same
time resist any suggestion that laws providing for exactly that
should be struck from the books. So, in the end, one of the drug
warriors' strongest arguments is that the laws they favor aren't
enforced — we're all liberalizers now.
Gateway to Nowhere
There has, of course, been a barrage of government- sponsored anti-marijuana
propaganda over the last two decades, but the essential facts are
clear: Marijuana is widely used, and for the vast majority of its
users is nearly harmless and represents a temporary experiment or
enthusiasm. A 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine — a
highly credible outfit that is part of the National Academy of Sciences
— found that "in 1996, 68.6 million people — 32% of the
U.S. population over 12 years old — had tried marijuana or
hashish at least once in their lifetime, but only 5% were current
users." The academic literature talks of "maturing out" of marijuana
use the same way college kids grow out of backpacks and Nietzsche.
Most marijuana users are between the ages of 18 and 25, and use
plummets after age 34, by which time children and mortgages have
blunted the appeal of rolling paper and bongs. Authors Robert J.
MacCoun and Peter Reuter — drug-war skeptics, but cautious
ones — point out in their new book Drug
War Heresies that "among 26 to 34 year olds who had used
the drug daily sometime in their life in 1994, only 22 percent reported
that they had used it in the past year."
Marijuana prohibitionists have for a long time had trouble maintaining
that marijuana itself is dangerous, so they instead have relied
on a bank shot--marijuana's danger is that it leads to the use of
drugs that are actually dangerous. This is a way to shovel all the
effects of heroin and cocaine onto marijuana, a kind of drug-war
McCarthyism. It is called the "gateway theory," and has been so
thoroughly discredited that it is still dusted off only by the most
tendentious of drug warriors. The theory's difficulty begins with
a simple fact: Most people who use marijuana, even those who use
it with moderate frequency, don't go on to use any other illegal
drug. According the Institute of Medicine report, "Of 34 to 35 year
old men who had used marijuana 10–99 times by the age 24–25, 75%
never used any other illicit drug." As Lynn Zimmer and John Morgan
point out in their exhaustive book Marijuana
Myths/Marijuana Facts, the rates of use of hard drugs have
more to do with their fashionability than their connection to marijuana.
In 1986, near the peak of the cocaine epidemic, 33 percent of high-school
seniors who had used marijuana also had tried cocaine, but by 1994
only 14 percent of marijuana users had gone on to use cocaine.
Then, there is the basic faulty reasoning behind the gateway theory.
Since marijuana is the most widely available and least dangerous
illegal drug, it makes sense that people inclined to use other harder-to-find
drugs will start with it first — but this tells us little or
nothing about marijuana itself or about most of its users. It confuses
temporality with causality. Because a cocaine addict used marijuana
first doesn't mean he is on cocaine because he smoked marijuana
(again, as a factual matter this hypothetical is extremely rare
— about one in 100 marijuana users becomes a regular user of
cocaine). Drug warriors recently have tried to argue that research
showing that marijuana acts on the brain in a way vaguely similar
to cocaine and heroin — plugging into the same receptors —
proves that it somehow "primes" the brain for harder drugs. But
alcohol has roughly the same action, and no one argues that Budweiser
creates heroin addicts. "There is no evidence," says the Institute
of Medicine study, "that marijuana serves as a stepping stone on
the basis of its particular physiological effect."
The relationship between drugs and troubled teens appears to be
the opposite of that posited by drug warriors — the trouble
comes first, then the drugs (or, in other words, it's the kid, not
the substance, who is the problem). The Institute of Medicine reports
that "it is more likely that conduct disorders generally lead to
substance abuse than the reverse." The British medical journal Lancet
— in a long, careful consideration of the marijuana literature
— explains that heavy marijuana use is associated with leaving
high school and having trouble getting a job, but that this association
wanes "when statistical adjustments are made for the fact that,
compared with their peers, heavy cannabis users have poor high-school
performance before using cannabis." (And, remember, this is heavy
use: "adolescents who casually experiment with cannabis," according
to MacCoun and Reuter, "appear to function quite well with respect
to schooling and mental health.") In the same way problem kids are
attracted to illegal drugs, they are drawn to alcohol and tobacco.
One study found that teenage boys who smoke cigarettes daily are
about ten times likelier to be diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder
than non-smoking teenage boys. By the drug warrior's logic, this
means that tobacco causes mental illness.
Another arrow in the drug warriors' quiver is the number of people
being treated for marijuana: If the drug is so innocuous, why do
they seek, or need, treatment? Drug warriors cite figures that say
that roughly 100,000 people enter drug-treatment programs every
year primarily for marijuana use. But often, the punishment for
getting busted for marijuana possession is treatment. According
to one government study, in 1998 54 percent of people in state-run
treatment programs for marijuana were sent there by the criminal-justice
system. So, there is a circularity here: The drug war mandates marijuana
treatment, then its advocates point to the fact of that treatment
to justify the drug war. Also, people who test positive in employment
urine tests often have to get treatment to keep their jobs, and
panicked parents will often deliver their marijuana-smoking sons
and daughters to treatment programs. This is not to deny that there
is such a thing as marijuana dependence. According to The Lancet,
"About one in ten of those who ever use cannabis become dependent
on it at some time during their 4 or 5 years of heaviest use."
But it is important to realize that dependence on marijuana —
apparently a relatively mild psychological phenomenon — is
entirely different from dependence on cocaine and heroin. Marijuana
isn't particularly addictive. One key indicator of the addictiveness
of other drugs is that lab rats will self-administer them. Rats
simply won't self-administer THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
Two researchers in 1991 studied the addictiveness of caffeine, nicotine,
alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. Both ranked caffeine and
marijuana as the least addictive. One gave the two drugs identical
scores and another ranked marijuana as slightly less addicting than
caffeine. A 1991 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report
to Congress states: "Given the large population of marijuana users
and the infrequent reports of medical problems from stopping use,
tolerance and dependence are not major issues at present." Indeed,
no one is quite sure what marijuana treatment exactly is. As MacCoun
and Reuter write, "Severity of addiction is modest enough that there
is scarcely any research on treatment of marijuana dependence."
None of this is to say that marijuana is totally harmless. There
is at least a little truth to the stereotype of the Cheech & Chong
"stoner." Long-term heavy marijuana use doesn't, in the words of
The Lancet, "produce the severe or grossly debilitating impairment
of memory, attention, and cognitive function that is found with
chronic heavy alcohol use," but it can impair cognitive functioning
nonetheless: "These impairments are subtle, so it remains unclear
how important they are for everyday functioning, and whether they
are reversed after an extended period of abstinence." This, then,
is the bottom-line harm of marijuana to its users: A small minority
of people who smoke it may — by choice, as much as any addictive
compulsion — eventually smoke enough of it for a long enough
period of time to suffer impairments so subtle that they may not
affect everyday functioning or be permanent. Arresting, let alone
jailing, people for using such a drug seems outrageously disproportionate,
which is why drug warriors are always so eager to deny that anyone
ever goes to prison for it.
Fighting the Brezhnev Doctrine
In this contention, the drug warriors are largely right. The fact
is that the current regime is really only a half-step away from
decriminalization. And despite all the heated rhetoric of the drug
war, on marijuana there is a quasi-consensus: Legalizers think that
marijuana laws shouldn't be on the books; prohibitionists think,
in effect, that they shouldn't be enforced. A reasonable compromise
would be a version of the Dutch model of decriminalization, removing
criminal penalties for personal use of marijuana, but keeping the
prohibition on street-trafficking and mass cultivation. Under such
a scenario, laws for tobacco — an unhealthy drug that is quite
addictive — and for marijuana would be heading toward a sort
of middle ground, a regulatory regime that controls and discourages
use but doesn't enlist law enforcement in that cause. MacCoun and
Reuter have concluded from the experience of decriminalizing the
possession of small amounts of marijuana in the Netherlands, twelve
American states in the 1970s, and parts of Australia that "the available
evidence suggests that simply removing the prohibition against possession
does not increase cannabis use."
Drug warriors, of course, will have none of it. They support a drug-war
Brezhnev doctrine under which no drug-war excess can ever be turned
back — once a harsh law is on the books for marijuana possession,
there it must remain lest the wrong "signal" be sent. "Drug use,"
as Bill Bennett has said, "is dangerous and immoral." But for the
overwhelming majority of its users marijuana is not the least bit
dangerous. (Marijuana's chief potential danger to others —
its users driving while high — should, needless to say, continue
to be treated as harshly as drunk driving.) As for the immorality
of marijuana's use, it generally is immoral to break the law. But
this is just another drug-war circularity: The marijuana laws create
the occasion for this particular immorality. If it is on the basis
of its effect — namely, intoxication — that Bennett considers
marijuana immoral, then he has to explain why it's different from
drunkenness, and why this particular sense of well-being should
be banned in an America that is now the great mood-altering nation,
with millions of people on Prozac and other drugs meant primarily
to make them feel good.
In the end, marijuana prohibition basically relies on cultural prejudice.
This is no small thing. Cultural prejudices are important. Alcohol
and tobacco are woven into the very fabric of America. Marijuana
doesn't have the equivalent of, say, the "brewer-patriot" Samuel
Adams (its enthusiasts try to enlist George Washington, but he grew
hemp instead of smoking it). Marijuana is an Eastern drug, and importantly
for conservatives, many of its advocates over the years have looked
and thought like Allen Ginsberg. But that isn't much of an argument
for keeping it illegal, and if marijuana started out culturally
alien, it certainly isn't anymore. No wonder drug warriors have
to strain for medical and scientific reasons to justify its prohibition.
But once all the misrepresentations and exaggerations are stripped
away, the main pharmacological effect of marijuana is that it gets
people high. Or as The Lancet puts it, "When used in a social
setting, it may produce infectious laughter and talkativeness."
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