Source: New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/ Contact: "Dope on dope" Kurt Kleiner quotes American bureaucrats who must have smoked too much of what they think others shouldn't touch ("Turn on, tune in, get well", 15 March, p 14). Health secretary Donna Shalala's statement that "our teenage drug problem is for the most part a marijuana problem" is an outright distortion. Some figures are illustrative. The Monitoring the Future study, done annually by the University of Michigan, is the government's "bible" for drug use among adolescents. The study for 1996 shows that 49 per cent of 12th graders have smoked marijuana within the last 30 days, 22 2 per cent of 12th graders smoke cigarettes daily, and 30 2 per cent have engaged in binge drinking of alcohol, at least once, within the past 14 days. Binge drinking is defined as five or more drinks or beers in succession, at one sitting. Shalala is well aware of the facts on alcohol and nicotine, yet continues to insist that marijuana is the problem. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA, is no less dishonest. The claims of memory impairment, brain damage, lung cancer and immune system damage have all been debunked by research within the past year in the US and Australia. NIDA's policy of providing marijuana only to studies aimed at finding negative effects of marijuana has not been successful. Arthur Sobey Corpus Christi Texas The conclusions of the panel of experts convened at the request of the National Institutes of Health were amazingly frank and accurate, given the political dynamite with which they were dealing. The opinion that whatever evaluation of safety and efficacy marijuana is subjected to, it will have the added burden of proving it is the best agent available would be regarded as facetious if made about any other class of therapeutic agents. In the case of marijuana, for a scientist to allow that such an outcome is even possible is regarded as dangerous heresy and its utterance a mark of defiance. This is the sad state of affairs American drug policy has brought us to. The most realistic hope at this point is that if enough rational people are motivated to think about these problems, they may gain enough insight into the ridiculous and destructive nature of the paradigm of doctrinaire global drug prohibition to want to change it. Thomas O'Connell San Mateo, California