Pubdate: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 Source: Penticton Herald (CN BC) Copyright: 2016 The Okanagan Valley Group of Newspapers Contact: http://www.pentictonherald.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/664 Author: Devon Scott-Leslie Page: A7 Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v16/n487/a06.html THE TRUE FACTS ON MARIJUANA Dear Editor: I'm sure that D.M John of Vernon meant well with his letter to the editor on Tuesday regarding the dangers of legalized marijuana (otherwise known as 'Reefer Madness'). But what the letter shows is how dangerously misleading statistics are in the hands of the under-informed and over-opinionated. I think we can safely ignore the arguments about whether pot is bad for children. Is anyone suggesting otherwise? All kinds of things are bad for children, that's why they have parents. That's why ibuprofen bottles are so hard to open. The question isn't whether kids should smoke pot, it's whether the state has any business prohibiting adults from doing so. We can also ignore the "gateway drug" nonsense. I mean, come on. Is milk a 'gateway' to alcoholism? The part of the letter which might actually mislead people is the seemingly compelling evidence of increased emergency visits and vehicle fatalities in Colorado as a result of legalization. This is statistics at its worse. If you actually look it up (I did, you should) you'll find that Colorado has in fact been experiencing a steady decline in traffic fatalities. This trend began before legalization and has continued since. Contrary to the prohibitionist fear mongering, fewer people are dying in car accidents now than they were when smoking a joint could land them in prison! Go figure. So where do the numbers come from? Let's think about it! First of all, the numbers come from drug tests after the fact. Those tests do not determine whether the person was actually high. They test for the presence of cannabis metabolites. Those metabolites remain detectable for days after one has used pot. For regular users, it can be detected weeks afterwards. Unlike booze, testing methods for cannabis intoxication are highly unreliable, expensive, and time-consuming. Look up "Cannabis drug testing" on Wikipedia if you don't believe me! So what do those numbers tell us? It tells us that more people in Colorado are smoking pot now. And so they should be, it's legal. If you tested any significant group of people, you would expect to find higher levels of cannabis metabolites now because that's the point of legalizing it. If I were to speculate, cops are probably also testing drivers now more for pot than they used to. Which makes sense, because it's legal now. And because, after an entire career spent harassing pot smokers, they probably feel they have something to prove. Alcohol is actually a dangerous drug. Prohibition, though, was a nightmare. Gang violence and the criminalization of non-violent citizens was the result then, and it it is the result now. Adults have every right to enjoy booze. It is still illegal to drive drunk. It is still illegal to sell booze to a kid. Is pot harmless? Who cares! It is irrational and impractical to simply prohibit anything that someone might hurt themselves with. That's why we allow adults to drink booze, and that's why we should let them get stoned. We're doing it anyways. Devon Scott-Leslie Penticton - --- MAP posted-by: Matt