Pubdate: Sat, 03 Jul 1999 Date: 07/03/1999 Source: Washington Post (DC) Author: Shane Ham Related: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n680.a05.html Note: Czar McCaffrey's OPED was the target of the DrugSense FOCUS alert at: http://www.mapinc.org/alert/0113.html Barry McCaffrey's plea to maintain his little bureaucratic fiefdom lumps together heroin, cocaine, LSD, methamphetamine and marijuana as "psychoactive drugs" and then speaks of their "harms" as if all of those drugs are equally harmful. While use of "hard" drugs can lead to devastating consequences, listing marijuana among those drugs is absurd. By any conceivable objective measure, marijuana is less harmful than alcohol: It is not physically addictive, it carries zero risk of overdose, it impairs users less than alcohol, and it doesn't tend to bring out the violent side of users. The greatest testament to marijuana's harmlessness is the huge number of people (more than 70 million in the United States alone) who have used it with no ill effects. Shane Ham