By Richard Guillatt
May 19, 1998

MARIJUANA: THE REAL DOPE

First, there is an interview with a proponent of the most extreme reefer madness. Marijuana is said to be 50 to 60 times as carcinogenic as tobacco, in contrast to the DEA’s claim of only 5 to 6 times. This is quickly topped by the most irresponsible claims -- "Marijuana may one day be shown to be more dangerous than speed, heroin, alcohol and tobacco because of its unique chemical properties." This really will encourage children to try hard drugs.

One of the most annoying things about this article is the suggestion that heavy smoking by children as young as eight or nine is in any way relevant to the debate about decriminalizing adult use. Prohibition is obviously failing to protect the children, but no marijuana policy is going to eliminate parental neglect.)

Richard Guilliatt reports:

Even as marijuana use among teenagers rises again and pressure for decriminalisation continues, fears are growing among parents that the dope smoked today is considerably more powerful than they were used to.

John Anderson is up at the podium of the Eastern Sydney Rugby Union Club, scaring the pants off a crowd of parents who sit hunched forward on their chairs, brows knotted. He has already told them how marijuana has 50-60 times more carcinogens in it than tobacco, how it has been linked with asthma, angina, lowered testosterone levels, lowered IQ, irregular menstrual cycles and genetic damage. Now he is peering over his spectacles, giving them his penetrating psychologists’s stare and putting a mocking tone into his voice.

And then he’s off, vacating the stage to make way for a local drug education worker who warns that the "marijuana epidemic" is creating a population of adolescent semi-zombies with irreversible brain damage.

This is just another night in the anti-marijuana crusade that John Anderson started five years ago when he was working as a psycho-physiologist at Westmead Hospital and began noticing how many kids with ADD and schizophrenia had sizable marijuana habits. Now in private practice in Sydney’s western suburbs, Anderson goes out night after night - sometimes three times a week - to deliver this same speech, in which all the scariest research on pot smoking is packaged into one 60-minute blitzkrieg of bad vibes. "I don’t give a brass razoo whether people smoke pot or not," Anderson insists. "I’m not some sort of wowser." Notwithstanding that, he argues that marijuana may one day be shown to be more dangerous than speed, heroin, alcohol and tobacco because of its unique chemical properties.

Anderson is far from alone in this alarmist view because - as even the doziest dopehead must have noticed by now - marijuana has been suffering awfully bad publicity lately.

Meanwhile, the Clinton Administration has been pursuing a strenuous anti-pot campaign, even threatening sanctions against doctors who prescribe it for pain relief. What’s going on here? Is this just a return of the Reefer Madness scare tactics of the 1950s, when movies depicted teenagers turning into drooling psychopaths after just one puff of the evil weed? Or is recent research indicating that marijuana is really not the benign substance all those High Times editorials told us about?

The answer to that question might be: a bit of both. Professor Wayne Hall, executive director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC), notes that marijuana research tends to come in "feast or famine" waves, depending on how popular the drug is and how hotly people are debating decriminalisation.

Current events seem to support his thesis: marijuana use among teenagers is rising for the first time since the early 1980s, just as evidence of the drug’s harmful effects has become more solid.

The result is deep parental anxiety at a time when, paradoxically, government leaders such as Bob Carr and Jeff Kennett are pushing for less punitive marijuana laws. "A lot of adults of my generation who went to university in the 1970s had a fair amount of exposure to marijuana and it would have been fairly benign, fairly low-potency stuff," Professor Hall says. "The contrast between that experience and what we were told about the perils of dope-smoking made people very sceptical."

That scepticism may have created an unrealistically benign view of pot, Hall says: today many parents see a glaring contradiction between the problems their teenage children are experiencing and the reassuring platitudes of some drug-law reformers.

Pot’s resurgent popularity among teenagers is certainly evident in pop culture, from the fashion for hemp clothing to the woozy, slowed-down beats of trip-hop and other electronic music. Superficially, one might have expected baby-boomer parents to be fairly sanguine about this - after all, their generation championed dope as a safer drug than alcohol or tobacco. But it appears that many boomers have changed their views on pot now that they have kids of their own, a phenomenon best exemplified by US President Bill Clinton, the world’s most famous non-inhaler.

"There’s been a perception among the public and some reseachers that marijuana is not a drug of dependence but the evidence has been increasing over the past few years that it is."

Fuelling this parental reappraisal of marijuana are growing concerns about the habits of 1990s teenagers, who are smoking much stronger pot and smoking it earlier than their parents did. Jem Masters, a clinical nurse at Sydney Children’s Hospital who has 12 years’ experience in adolescent counselling, says he is seeing an increasing number of teenagers who have been smoking dope since the age of eight or nine. But what concerns him even more is the growing number of short-term users who have become psychotic after smoking high-potency "hydroponic" pot, which can be five times stronger than the home-grown their parents may have smoked in the ‘60s.
(Ed. note: There is no data on marijuana potency from the '60s. None.)

"This is the thing that’s quite scary for mental health professionals - people with a one-off use presenting with hallucinations, paranoia and delusions," Masters says. "These kids are very, very scared because they have lost touch with reality - I’m talking days and sometimes weeks of this condition continuing." Masters’ concerns are shared by many people who work in adolescent psychiatry, who say pot-related psychosis has increased markedly over the past five to eight years.

One mental health professional - who campaigned for pot decriminalisation as a student in the 1960s - said he had completely changed his attitude after seeing the number of teenagers entering his hospital with psychotic episodes after smoking the drug.

The research into links between marijuana and psychosis - like most of the scientific evidence about marijuana - is somewhat confusing. Studies indicate that cannabis users are twice as likely to experience psychotic symptoms as non-users, but Wayne Hall points out that it is still relatively rare for marijuana to trigger psychosis.

"In terms of capacity to produce psychotic symptoms, alcohol is far more noxious," he says.

Similarly, Hall finds it impossible to say whether smoking actually causes schizophrenia, which often follows a psychotic episode.

But Dr Iain McGregor, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Sydney, points out that rats (unlike humans) dislike marijuana intensely. Any comparison between the two species is therefore fraught with problems.

"One of these studies showed that dopamine levels in rats’ brains increased after they were given marijuana," McGregor says. "But to the best of my knowledge, all that an increase in dopamine shows is that something important has happened to the animal which makes it pay attention to its immediate environment. It’s quite erroneous to use that chemical change to find that cannabis is a dangerous drug in the same way that heroin is. But on the basis of that dubious finding you got this huge fanfare and accompanying comment."

McGregor points out that one of the studies was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the United States, an organisation that steadfastly pursues the US Government’s opposition to decriminalising marijuana. According to the February 21 issue of New Scientist, NIDA successfully lobbied the World Health Organisation last year not to release a report which showed that marijuana is safer than alcohol and tobacco in most respects. NIDA argued that the report would "play into the hands" of groups lobbying for decriminilisation.

In an accompanying nine-page report, New Scientist debunked many of the claims circulated by NIDA about the dangers of marijuana. It pointed out, for instance, that a 25-year study of heavy cannabis users in Costa Rica had failed to show any significant memory or learning impairment among them, even though some had been smoking up to 10 joints a day for 30 years. And in the Netherlands, where marijuana has been sold legally in cafes for more than 20 years, the number of hard drug addicts has remained stable and there is no evidence of significant effects on the mental health of the country’s young.
See Go Dutch!

Some of the anti-marijuana campaigning in Australia also has a political flavour. When John Anderson lectured in Rose Bay, for instance, he was accompanied by two Liberal Party politicians and by Angela Wood, mother of Anna Wood, the NSW teenager who died after ingesting ecstacy two years ago. Angela Wood is pursuing a crusade to have drug education in NSW schools - which is based on the philosophy of "harm minimisation" - replaced with "zero tolerance" teaching. The two politicians obligingly gave speeches promising just such a policy should they be elected.

"I don’t have any problem with saying that heavy use of marijuana among teenagers is a bad thing," Wayne Hall says. "But I think the concern has got to be realistic.

"It can be counter-productive to make exaggerated statements that are contrary to the experience of a lot of adolescents. I think the mistake the Woods and other people make is in saying that these are risks that everybody who takes the drug runs." John Anderson insists he doesn’t have a political axe to grind and leaves others to talk about policies and government.

It’s not too surprising, though, to hear that he is vehemently opposed to the present drug-education programs in schools and thinks the calls for decriminalisation are nuts. "We know tobacco is dangerous to kids, we know alcohol is dangerous to kids," he says. "Trying to mount an argument that says, "OK, we might as well legalise because it’s no more dangerous than the other’ is like saying, "Well, you might as well kill yourself by throwing yourself under a truck as throwing yourself off a building’.