A Drug War Fought on Ideology Alone

Darn, the facts do get in the way. What are the drug warriors to do now that the most thorough scientific survey ever of the medical consequences of marijuana use concluded this: Marijuana eases pain and quells nausea in cancer and AIDS patients and isn’t addictive or a gateway to harder drugs.

“Withdrawal symptoms are relatively mild and short-lived,” according to the report of the federal Institute of Medicine, and “there is no conclusive evidence that marijuana acts as a ‘gateway’ drug.”

But if the effects of marijuana smoking are no more threatening than smoking cigarettes, as the panel of 35 experts announced last week after an 18-month study commissioned by federal drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey, then why is the cultivation, trade and use of pot regarded as a crime?

Each year, more than half a million Americans are arrested on marijuana-related charges even though, as this report confirms, their use of the drug poses no substantial risk to themselves or society. That also has been the conclusion of every other serious study of the effect of marijuana.

Eighty million Americans have used marijuana and most have shown no inclination to move on to harder drugs or to act in anti-social ways. But the huge and highly profitable anti-drug war industry is hooked on marijuana as justification for its enormously expensive and disruptive crusade. That’s how they get the alarming numbers of “drug users,” which masks the fact that harder drug use has declined and effects a much smaller percentage of the population.

This explains why McCaffrey, who heads the White House Office of Drug Enforcement, now dissembles instead of facing up to the policy implications of a report he commissioned. When he announced this study two years ago, it was in an effort to counter claims of those who had successfully rallied voters in seven states to pass referendums legalizing the medical use of marijuana.

At the time, McCaffrey, calling for “science not ideology” to settle the medical marijuana debate, predicted the therapeutic claims made for the drug would prove bogus and confirm his oft-repeated statement that marijuana is the major gateway drug. But McCaffrey was proved wrong on both counts. Marijuana, as has been widely acknowledged throughout the world for thousands of years, is a relatively benign euphoric. It was grown and used by our founding fathers and was legal throughout most of this great nation’s history. It is certainly less harmful than alcohol, which kills 100,000 people a year, or cigarettes, which account for four times that number of deaths.

McCaffrey should now concede that marijuana is not a gateway drug and that its use should be decriminalized. Instead, he acknowledged only the report’s warning that smoking harms the respiratory system. Which argues that if marijuana is ingested through a vaporizer or in a baked brownie, it is safe. Anyway, we don’t arrest people for smoking tobacco, preferring education over imprisonment as a means of persuasion.

Our drug war is based on lies that confuse rather than educate the public, particularly the young. Better to tell them the truth: Any drug can be abused, be it marijuana, cigarettes or beer.

But truth is abhorrent to the drug war hawks in Congress. Rep. Bill McCullum (R-Fla.), who chairs the House subcommittee on crime, condemned the current report, saying, “When smoking a dangerous and highly addictive drug is labeled ‘therapeutic,’ we are sending the wrong message to our youth.” He obviously had not bothered to read even the summary of the report that clearly concludes that marijuana is not “highly addictive.”

For drug war veteran Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), this is just the problem: The scientists wasted our money because they came to the wrong conclusions. Barr, who has led the fight to spend $11 billion a year on the drug war, condemned this scientific study as an egregious waste of funds: “You cannot consistently send a message to our young people that the use of mind-altering drugs is wrong and at the same time spend nearly $1 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned money to fund studies looking for ways to justify the legalization of marijuana.”

No, much better to spend many times that amount locking up those same taxpayers for preferring marijuana to bourbon. Madness can properly be defined as a state of mind in which facts and logic are of no consequence. What better way to describe our failed drug policy?