Pubdate: Sun, 08 Sep 2002
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2002 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact:  http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/82
Author: Clarence Page
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/walters.htm (Walters, John)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

THE MYTH OF `SUPERWEED'

WASHINGTON -- The nation's drug czar is annoyed again. This time it is with me.

Without mentioning me by name, a guest column by John P. Walters, director 
of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in the Sept. 1 San Francisco 
Chronicle held up one of my columns as an example of how journalists can be 
"fed misleading advocacy information that they swallow whole."

The result is "a lack of accurate information" that plagues the public 
debate over marijuana. He recounts how a columnist described his claims of 
increased potency in today's marijuana as wildly overstated "whoppers."

I knew he was talking about me. A database search turned up nobody else's 
essay that has used the words "drug czar" and "whoppers" in the same 
column. I found this amusing, since my own efforts to get "accurate 
information" out of the drug czar's office while writing my column in May 
were unsuccessful.

I was writing, ironically enough, in response to an earlier Walters column 
that opposed an effort to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes in the 
District of Columbia.

In that piece, printed in The Washington Post and reprinted in other 
newspapers, Walters tries to frighten us Baby-Boomer parents by warning us 
that "today's marijuana is different from that of a generation ago, with 
potency levels 10 to 20 times stronger than the marijuana with which they 
were familiar."

As a Woodstock-generation parent of a wise 13-year-old boy, I took great 
interest in that statement. Unfortunately, as I noted, Walters didn't say 
where he got that "whopper" of a statistic.

I had cited a federally funded study published in the January 2000 Journal 
of Forensic Science, which found the average THC (that's the active 
ingredient that makes people high) content in confiscated marijuana had 
only doubled to 4.2 percent from about 2 percent from 1980 to 1997.

That brought a response from Walters claiming that I didn't cover a long 
enough period. THC content averaged less than 1 percent in 1974, he said. 
But "by 1999, potency averaged 7 percent."

"The THC of today's sinsemilla (high-grade marijuana) averages 14 percent 
and ranges as high as 30 percent," he said.

"Wow," as my "deadhead" friends might say. "That must be some killer weed, 
dude."

I tried once again and actually reached Walters this time. After 
conversations with him and some of his expert advisers, we agreed to 
disagree on the key question: What are the chances that your little Johnny 
or Jane will latch onto some of that knockout grass?

That depends on how you interpret the available data. The latest quarterly 
report by the University of Mississippi's Potency Monitoring Project (which 
examined 46,000 samples of seized marijuana nationwide) found an average 
potency of 6.68 percent. Actual potencies ranged as high as 33.12 percent 
THC content for some extraordinarily potent sinsemilla confiscated by the 
Oregon state police to as low as 1 percent THC or no THC at all (Somebody 
apparently got burned) for grass confiscated elsewhere in the country.

But it is hard to estimate based on available data how common or how rare 
the high-octane dope happens to be. Purchasing weed is an art in itself. 
Everyone seeks the "preemo" stuff. Every dealer promises it. Fewer actually 
deliver.

Nor is it at all clear that the marijuana commonly available in the 1960s 
and 1970s really was all that weak. Potency studies at the time were 
plagued by such problems as small samples and poor storage in police lockers.

In his book called "Understanding Marijuana," Mitchell Earleywine, a 
University of Southern California associate professor of psychology, 
observes that it "makes little sense" that marijuana with less than 1 
percent THC would have enough potency to have increased in popularity as 
dramatically as it did in the 1960s and 1970s.

Either way, the "killer-weed" scare tactic avoids the serious issue of the 
medical marijuana debate. Higher potency actually is quite desirable for 
those seeking relief from pain, nausea and other symptomatic miseries 
associated with HIV, glaucoma, chemotherapy, migraines and multiple sclerosis.

I did not use the word "whoppers" to mean lies, just exaggerations. 
Warnings that exaggerate the dangers of marijuana undermine one's 
credibility in the way "Reefer Madness," the hyperventilating 1936 anti-pot 
movie, found new audiences after the 1960s as a laugh-riot, cult-comedy hit.

That's what the Bush administration risks with its multimillion-dollar 
effort to link street marijuana to international terrorism. Last week the 
Drug Enforcement Administration raided a legitimate medical marijuana 
health cooperative that was treating more than 200 patients, some of them 
terminally ill, in Santa Cruz, Calif ., one of eight states where voters or 
legislators have legalized medical marijuana.

Snatching medicine out of the hands of seriously ill patients sounds like 
terrorism to me. In this case it was federally sponsored and 
taxpayer-financed. Put that in your bong and smoke it.