Let's Not Kid
Ourselves About Marijuana
By Mitchell S.
Rosenthal in the Wall Street Journal
Pot is always good for
a giggle, and that makes it hard to take marijuana seriously. The news and
entertainment media couldn't resist puns on "Rocky Mountain high"
when Colorado started the year with legal sales of marijuana for recreational
purposes. TV stations across the country featured chuckling coverage of long
lines outside Denver's new state-licensed pot shops.
Legalizing marijuana
isn't just amusing. It's increasingly popular with legislators and the public.
And why not? No matter how high stoners get, they're nowhere near as scary as
out-of-control boozers, right? Stoners don't brawl in bars. They're not into
domestic violence.
A Gallup poll last
year found 58% of Americans favoring legalization (although other surveys
report more slender majorities). Decriminalization of pot possession is
widespread: 20 states sanction marijuana use for medical or quasi-medical
reasons, and, following Colorado's and Washington's lead, proponents of
legalization are targeting Alaska and Oregon for ballot initiatives in the near
future, and six other states after that.
Yet marijuana is far
from safe, despite the widespread effort to make it seem benign. Pot damages
the heart and lungs, increases the incidence of anxiety, depression and
schizophrenia, and it can trigger acute psychotic episodes. Many adults appear
to be able to use marijuana with relatively little harm, but the same cannot be
said of adolescents, who are about twice as likely as adults to become addicted
to marijuana. The new Colorado law limits pot sales to people 21 or older, but
making marijuana available for recreational use normalizes it in society. The
drug will be made more easily available to those under 21, and how long until
the age limit is dropped to 18?
Adolescents are
vulnerable—and not just to pot. That's how they are programmed. They make rash
and risky choices because their brains aren't fully developed. The part of the
brain that censors dumb or dangerous behavior is last to come on line
(generally not before the mid-20s). Meanwhile, the brain's pleasure-seeking
structures are up and running strong by puberty. When you link adolescent
pleasure-seeking and risk-taking to marijuana's impairment of perception and
judgment, it isn't surprising that a 2004 study of seriously injured drivers in
Maryland found half the teens tested positive for pot.
Marijuana impairs
learning, judgment and memory—no small matters during the adolescent years—and
it can do lasting harm to the brain. Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, has found that marijuana can damage cognitive function
in adolescents by disrupting the normal development of the white-matter that
brain cells need to communicate with each other.
Most disturbing is a
discovery about marijuana last month at Northwestern University's Feinberg
School of Medicine. Researchers there have found lasting changes in
"working memory," brain structures critical to memory and reasoning.
A source of ready recall for basic information, like telephone numbers, and
solutions to everyday problems, working memory is also a strong predictor of
academic achievement.
Dr. Volkow and most
other experts are troubled by changing teen attitudes about marijuana. Barely
40% of adolescents now believe regular use is harmful—down from 80% two decades
ago. Teen drinking and cigarette smoking have declined, and their abuse of
prescription painkillers has fallen off sharply, but teen marijuana use
continues to increase. The University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future
survey last year found that more than 45% of high-school seniors have smoked
pot and 6.5% now smoke it daily (a rate that has tripled over the past two
decades). At the substance-abuse programs of Phoenix House, and at similar
programs across the country, marijuana is the primary drug of abuse for close
to 70% of teens in treatment.
No one can say how
marijuana legalization will play out. A perception of legal marijuana as safe,
combined with sophisticated marketing, may well double or triple pot use. Warning
of aggressive promotion, drug-policy expert Mark Kleiman, who studied potential
issues of a legal marijuana market for the Seattle City Council, pointed out
last year: "The only way to sell a lot of pot is to create a lot of
potheads."
As we learn more about
the realities of legalizing recreational marijuana, I suspect pot won't seem so
funny anymore. Remember, drunks used to be good for a laugh too. A hiccupping,
stumbling tosspot was a staple of Hollywood's screwball comedies in the 1930s
and '40s. Smoking cigarettes was considered cool. The reality of wrecked lives
and ruined health eventually changed public perceptions of these addictions. Now marijuana is becoming more widely
regarded as a harmless amusement. That's not funny, it's tragic.
Dr. Rosenthal is a
child psychiatrist and the founder of the nonprofit substance-abuse treatment
and prevention organization Phoenix House.
Poster's comments:
1) We've already had one
grand social experiment in the last century called Prohibition, and that was
repealed after a while.
2) It so convenient to just let happen at this point in time.
3) Here we go again.
4) Our society had a cocaine problem back in the 1920's and handled that another way.
4) Our society had a cocaine problem back in the 1920's and handled that another way.
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