Pubdate: Tue, 10 Sep 2002
Source: Buffalo News (NY)
Copyright: 2002 The Buffalo News
Contact:  http://www.buffalonews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/61
Author: Clarence Page

MIXED MESSAGE ON MARIJUANA

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

Without mentioning me by name, John P. Walters, director of the Office of 
National Drug Control Policy, writing in the 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.

Walters 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 essays that have used 
the words drug czar and "whoppers" in the same column. I found this 
amusing, since my efforts to get "accurate information" out of the drug 
czar's office while writing the column back 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, 
Walters tries to frighten us baby boomer parents by warning "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 worldly 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 had not covered a long 
enough period. THC content averaged less than 1 percent in 1974, he says, 
but, "by 1999, potency averaged 7 percent."

"The THC of today's sinsemilla (a high grade of marijuana) averages 14 
percent and ranges as high as 30 percent," he says. Wow, as my Deadhead 
friends might say, that must be some killer weed, dude.

I tried once again and happily reached Walters this time. After 
conversations with him and some of his 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 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 rare the 
high-octane dope is. Everyone seeks the potent "primo" 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.

Either way, the killer-weed scare tactic avoids the serious issue of the 
medical marijuana debate. Higher potency actually is desirable for those 
who are seeking relief from pain, nausea and other symptomatic misery 
associated with HIV, glaucoma, chemotherapy, migraines and multiple 
sclerosis, just to name a few conditions for which marijuana has been found 
to be effective.

I did not use "whoppers" to mean lies, just exaggerations. Warnings that 
exaggerate the dangers of marijuana undermine one's credibility. And 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 co-operative 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.
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MAP posted-by: Beth