Pubdate: Tue, 01 Apr 2014
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (GA)
Section: Truth-O-Meter Politifact Georgia
Copyright: 2014 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Contact:  http://www.ajc.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/28
Authors: C. Eugene Emery Jr., PolitiFact and Nancy Badertscher

MARIJUANA ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE

"Today's marijuana is 300 percent to 800 percent more potent than the
pot of yesteryear." Heidi Heilman in an op-ed piece March 13 in The
Providence (R.I.) Journal

In the debate over whether marijuana should be legalized, one issue is
the question of potency. Critics of legalization say the street drug
now available for sale is not the marijuana that a lot of baby boomers
and Generation Xers have used.

One of them, Heidi Heilman, the director of New England field
development for Smart Approaches to Marijuana and president of the
Massachusetts Prevention Alliance, raised the issue March 13 in an
op-ed in The Providence Journal in Rhode Island.

"Today's marijuana is 300 percent to 800 percent more potent than the
pot of yesteryear," she wrote. "Such dangerous levels of THC heighten
mental illness and addiction risks for those who smoke marijuana -
especially for kids with developing brains."

The push to legalize pot, at least for medical use, has become an
issue in many states, including Georgia.

One of the most emotionally charged debates in the just finished 2014
Georgia General Assembly session involved a push to allow marijuana
use for limited medical purposes. The bill Georgia legislators
considered would have allowed for use of a cannabis oil derived from
the marijuana plant. It would have been taken orally by seizure
disorder patients and would have been low in THC or
tetrahydracannabinol, the key active ingredient in marijuana.

The bill's sponsor, state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, said his proposal
would allow for medical marijuana that is "limited in scope, highly
restricted, well regulated."

Powerful members of the Georgia House backed the bill. But some Senate
leaders tied its passage to a measure requiring insurance plans to
cover autism treatment. Both proposals failed amid claims that the
autism piece was an unfunded mandate.

The Georgia marijuana bill's sponsor and its supporters said medical
marijuana has proved hugely beneficial to children who suffer seizures.

Gov. Nathan Deal said last week that he is researching administrative
alternatives for medical pot. Since then, he's been quoted as saying
he may create a state project, in conjunction with a college, to
provide a scientific environment to start clinic trials that could
pave the way for future legislation.

It's well established that the potency of marijuana has increased over
time. On Jan. 24, PolitiFact ruled that when former Rhode Island
Congressman Patrick Kennedy said that marijuana today is "genetically
modified," with THC levels that "far surpass the marijuana" of the
1970s, his statement was rated Mostly True.

Heilman was being more specific. She was saying that the potency is
now three to eight times greater than "yesteryear," a rather vague
starting point. Nonetheless, we wanted to see whether her statement
was on target or her statistic was a bit high.

Heilman was quick to send us several pieces of information.

The first was a graph showing a rapid increase in potency from 1960 to
2011, a 52-year span. It shows the ratio of THC in marijuana going
from 0.2 percent to 11.4 percent. That's an increase of 5,700 percent,
well outside the range cited by Heilman. But are those numbers reliable?

The graph says the information came from a study in the Journal of
Forensic Science. But that study was published in 2010, and it only
covered a 16-year period that ends in 2008.

Its authors, researchers at the National Center for Natural Products
Research at the University of Mississippi, examined 46,000 samples of
marijuana seized during law enforcement raids. They found that the THC
concentrations of marijuana had risen by about 171 percent in that
time period, well below the 300 percent to 800 percent cited by Heilman.

We also contacted the Drug Enforcement Administration and the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy. They referred us back to
the research center at Ole Miss, which has been monitoring THC content
since the early 1970s.

The researchers there sent us copies of their reports, all published
in the journal, along with test results that included the most recent
data. We also secured some quarterly reports.

We found that even though the report Heilman cited didn't back up her
claim, the Ole Miss data did. In 2012, the most recent year in which
testing has been completed, the average THC concentration was 12.3
percent.

That would be 300 percent higher than 1996 levels, when the average
was 4.09 percent. And it would be 800 percent higher than the average
level of 1.53 percent found in 1979.

How high could the THC content potentially go? One specimen, seized on
Sept. 11, 2007, was found to have a THC content of 37.2 percent.

Heidi Heilman said, "Today's marijuana is 300 percent to 800 percent
more potent than the pot of yesteryear."

Long-term testing shows that, on average, today's marijuana is three
times more potent than pre-1997 marijuana and eight times more potent
than 1979 and earlier. We rate her claim as True.  
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D