Cannabis Chronicles

On more than one occasion we’ve expressed our love of smaller alternative media, so this posting should come as little surprise to folks who read the 3Lb’s Cannabis Chronicles. It’s just another in a long line of posts documenting coverage of marijuana issues by non-mainstream media.

Feds Cry Wolf (Again)
by Daniel McQuade
The pot potency myth.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) trumpeted its most recent report on increased marijuana potency in the starkest language possible.

”Marijuana potency has grown steeply over the past decade, with serious implications in particular for young people,” ONDCP director John Walters told the Associated Press. ”Baby boomer parents who still think marijuana is a harmless substance need to look at the facts,” he told Agence France–Presse.

Increased marijuana potency—a higher concentration of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana—makes sense: Drug traffickers will always look for smaller, more potent drugs in order to maximize smuggling profits and make them cheaper for the buyer (opium vs. heroin, greenies vs. crystal meth).

And indeed, the National Institute for Drug Abuse’s survey shows an increased potency in late 2007 and early 2008, though the sample was limited to what law enforcement intercepted. Taking the data at face value, recent marijuana potency hovers just under 10 percent, compared to just under 4 percent in 1983.

There’s no evidence, though, that more potent marijuana is any more dangerous for users. There’s no possibility of overdose. THC doesn’t cause organ damage. Increased potency doesn’t lead to increased intoxication.

The journal Addiction recently reported that although increased potency is reported in some parts of the world, samples vary widely. ”Cannabis users may be exposed to greater variation in a single year than over years or decades,” Addiction stated.

In an unregulated market, buyers don’t know whether they’re getting ditchweed or high–potency weed, which means smokers usually learn to titrate their doses. Higher–potency pot is actually safer for heavy users, since they inhale less smoke to achieve a buzz.

That higher–potency pot isn’t a great national menace hasn’t stopped the government from treating it like one.

Walters not only attacks the ”harmless” strawman, but told the AP higher–potency pot can lead to more respiratory problems ”and the potential for users to become dependent on drugs such as heroin and cocaine”—offering up the discredited gateway myth.

Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, says increases in marijuana potency are a concern ”since they increase the likelihood of acute toxicity, including mental impairment.”

Smoking a joint doesn’t cause mental disorders, as Volkow seems to claim.

Higher–potency–pot fearmongering has been going on since the 1970s. In Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts, Lynn Zimmer and John Morgan write that estimates typically range from increased potency of five– to 25–fold; in 2002 Walters wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that marijuana potency had increased nearly 30 times since 1974.

This pattern of exaggeration of the increased potency of pot is directed mainly at parents, who may be concerned about their children becoming interested in weed. The message is: This pot is much more dangerous than the kind smoked in the 1960s. And it attempts to support the arrests of more than 800,000 people in the U.S. in 2006 for marijuana law violations—most of them simple possession.

And yes, a moral panic over marijuana is possible, even today. The U.K. is in the midst of one. The drug was downgraded to Class C status in 2004; since then the British media have played up the threat of ”skunk cannabis”—essentially more–potent pot—claiming it could lead to schizophrenia. Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared skunk cannabis ”more lethal.”

The drug will soon be reclassified as Class B.

Exaggerating (or outright lying) about the effects of marijuana has its perils. ”When kids figure out that the messages are false—and they do—they won’t believe warnings against harder drugs (or other warnings from the government),” Mark Kleiman wrote in The American Interest last year.

The federal government long ago eroded any credibility it had in warning its citizens about the dangers of drugs. If the ONDCP does have a legitimagtely dire warning to tell us, who will believe them?

Daniel McQuade blogs at Philadelphia Will Do and Drug Roar.

As should be obvious from the included logo, that piece was excerpted from a fine little publication, Philadelphia Weekly. We’d also like to point out that Daniel McQuade’s Drug Roar blog is worth a peek for interested readers too.  As it’s clever name implies, the blog has more than a little information and coverage of the drug war.