Pubdate: Wed, 20 Sep 2006
Source: Daytona Beach News-Journal (FL)
Copyright: 2006 News-Journal Corporation
Contact:  http://www.news-journalonline.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/700
Note: Gives priority to local writers

DRUG WAR'S DOGMAS ARE BANKRUPT

Stetson University is experimenting with reefer reasoning. Good thing 
somebody is, because reefer madness -- official federal, state and 
local policy across the United States -- isn't working.

A university-sponsored debate tonight is squaring off the editor of 
High Times magazine (the current issue is featuring "The First World 
Marijuana Film Festival" and the "Beginner's Guide to a Closet 
Garden") against a retired Drug Enforcement Agency agent. Don't 
expect surprises. Bub Stutman, the ex-DEA agent, argues against 
anything like legalization of marijuana. Editor Steven Hager argues 
for it. The debate is noteworthy for being held at all: For all the 
drug war's staggering costs (it was estimated to have exceeded the 
half-trillion dollar mark in the late 1990s), its four-decade 
longevity and its history of futility, the war generates little 
debate, the legalization of drugs even less so. The federal 
government forbids most research on the matter, yet doesn't hesitate 
to pronounce, year after year, that marijuana is a scourge and that 
legalization would send the nation to pot.

No wonder the government's dogmas are mostly myth, beginning with the 
sensational one it pushes on students and parents whenever one of 
those "drug awareness" programs makes its appearances in schools -- 
that marijuana is a lethal drug and a "gateway" to worse drugs. Both 
claims are flat-out wrong.

As a drug, marijuana is not known to have killed anyone by 
"overdose." Ever. That's because -- as a Time magazine report 
described it in 2002 -- a person of average weight would have to 
smoke 900 joints in a single sitting to reach a lethal dose of 
poisoning from marijuana's main "psychoactive" chemical. In 
comparison, and by Stutman's estimate, alcohol kills 300,000 people a 
year. That's not to say that alcohol prohibition doesn't have its 
advocates to this day. But not enough to out-argue history's judgment 
on Prohibition in the United States, a period dismal for its rampant 
crime, black marketeers and false virtues.

Government begs for disaster when it imposes temperance by law. Drug 
prohibition is replaying the failures of alcohol prohibition with 
similar results. Prisons and jails are filled with drug users whose 
"infractions" ought to be treated either as personal matters in most 
cases, or, as with alcoholics, as medical matters. Treating drug 
users like criminals only damages them personally for having to 
contend with a generally abysmal incarceration system. It damages 
society for subtracting otherwise productive individuals from the 
work force. It damages families and communities for taking away 
fathers and mothers, and in some cases children, from their support 
system. And it drains government coffers to no end. More than half of 
all federal inmates and almost a quarter of all state prison inmates 
are being held on drug convictions among a total prison and jail 
population exceeding 2 million.

Yet the drug war goes on, sustained by such falsehoods as the gateway 
myth. That marijuana is a gateway drug is demonstrably false -- as 
false as suggesting that because an individual will have a beer, 
he'll eventually turn to whiskey. About 6.5 percent of Americans use 
illegal drugs in one form or another (according to the latest 
National Survey on Drug Use and Health) -- from the "hardest" kind 
like heroin to marijuana. More than half of those, or about 10 
million, only use marijuana, and most of those do so on a 
recreational basis: Only 9 percent of marijuana users develop an 
addiction (compared with 15 percent of drinkers). If the gateway 
argument held any truth, 10 million marijuana users would eventually 
become 10 million users of crack, meth, heroin and other drugs. Of 
course, they don't, except in the imagination and propaganda of 
government agents more addicted to the war on drugs than the average 
user is to marijuana.

The government isn't willing to debate or research the matter. At 
least in places like Stetson, the smoke and mirrors can give way to a 
necessary debate -- for an evening.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine