Bad Dope
Slippery arguments.

September 6, 2001 5:30 p.m.

n a column a couple of weeks ago (right before I left for vacation), Don Feder accused me of trying to appear cool by advocating the decriminalization of marijuana. Feder doesn't give me much credit — I at least have enough of a notion of what constitutes "cool" to know that writing about marijuana decriminalization isn't it. But there are a couple of points in Feder's op-ed that are worth addressing, and are symptomatic of the slippery arguments often employed by overzealous drug warriors.

Feder argues that marijuana must be harmful because the drug "accounted for 79,088 emergency-room visits" in 1999. Emergency-room visits are one of the favorite stats of drug warriors, but they are easily misrepresented. A government outfit called SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, keeps track of emergency-room "mentions" of various drugs.

But the criteria used in this report mean, for instance, that if you smoked some marijuana and then proceeded to overdose on cocaine, your emergency-room visit would be counted as a marijuana "mention." If you smoked some marijuana, drank 18 margaritas, then proceeded to cut your finger with a knife while slicing up more limes, that too would constitute a marijuana "mention."

Feder is right to suggest that there are about 80,000 marijuana emergency-room "mentions" for marijuana per year, but it is misleading to imply that marijuana causes each and every one of these visits. In fact, according to SAMSHA, "marijuana/hashish is likely to be mentioned with other substances, particularly alcohol and cocaine." This, Feder neglects to mention.

That leaves probably a couple of tens of thousands of marijuana-only mentions (for things like panic attacks). By comparison, as Richard Cowan points out on his exhaustive Marijuananews.com, there are about 50,000 "mentions" of aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen a year. In short, the emergency-room figures hardly paint a picture of marijuana as the dangerous drug that Feder suggests.

Feder trots out the gateway theory, arguing that using marijuana disposes kids to using harder drugs, and also that marijuana helps make kids into juvenile delinquents. There's no doubt that kids who smoke a lot of dope are likelier to use other drugs and get into trouble. Nothing Feder writes, however, shows any causal connection between marijuana and harder drug use or misbehavior. In fact, most of the serious literature on drugs reports that such a connection simply doesn't exist.

Here, for instance, is the federally funded, highly credible Institute of Medicine on the gateway idea: "Because underage smoking and alcohol use typically precede marijuana use, marijuana is not the most common, and is rarely the first, 'gateway' to illicit drug use. There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs."

As for marijuana making kids go bad, Feder cites as evidence the fact that "parent after parent" tells him marijuana caused their kids' problems. But the Institute of Medicine report cites research suggesting exactly the opposite. "Although parents often state that marijuana caused the children to become rebellious, the troubled adolescents [in one study — you can look it up on Institute for Medicine site if you're interested] developed conduct disorders before marijuana abuse." And another study "recently concluded that it is more likely that conduct disorders generally lead to substance abuse than the reverse."

Finally, Feder paints a picture of a devastated Netherlands, which has more or less legalized marijuana use, as evidence for the folly of liberalizing drug laws. He makes an amusing gaffe by first dismissing Peter Reuter and Robert MacCoun (two authors I quote as reporting that decriminalization doesn't increase marijuana use) as a "drug lobby source" — and then relying on a Reuter-MacCoun number to show that adolescent marijuana use has increased recently in the Netherlands.

So what gives? Reuter and MacCoun — two well-respected drug-war skeptics, who aren't outright legalizers — report that mere decriminalization (i.e., stopping arresting people for possession of small amounts of marijuana) has not increased use in the Netherlands, the U.S. (in the 1970s), or Australia. But as the Netherlands further loosened their regime in the 1980s, use did increase (there are arguments over the figures, but we'll let that go for the moment).

Feder also claims that violent crime increased in the Netherlands from 1991 to 1996. But this is a meaningless fact — unless Feder can adduce some causation between marijuana and violent crime, and he can't. In the U.S., marijuana use increased in the '90s, but violent crime dramatically declined — by Feder's reasoning, this would mean marijuana use must diminish crime. But the fact is the two numbers have nothing to do with each other, and there is no evidence that marijuana causes violence.

In any case, I'll avoid questioning Feder's motives. I don't know whether he wants to appear cool or uncool, but I do know that his figures are misleading and his arguments make no sense.