How To Create A Problem Where None Exists.
How do you create a problem where none exists? Not a commonly asked question, true, but our government has been touting the dangers of marijuana for decades and that is getting harder and harder in the face of growing mountains of evidence to the contrary. Here’s one tact they’ve taken recently.
AllTranz, Inc. is a specialty pharmaceutical company based in Lexington, KY. The National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Institute on Drug Addiction (NIDA) just have given AllTranz a $4 million grant to develop a way to administer marijuana through the skin, something akin to a nicotine patch to aid the growing number of marijuana addicts trying to get off the stuff. “What growing number of marijuana addicts?” you ask. If you are the federal government trying desperately to perpetuate their ill-conceived prohibition of marijuana you can point to the rapidly-growing number of marijuana users seeking treatment for their problem.
NIDA director Nora Volkow says the agency “is interested in exploring the role of transdermal THC delivery as an innovative way to treat marijuana withdrawal symptoms and dependence… This is especially relevant to our efforts to fill a critical gap in available treatments for the many Americans struggling with marijuana-related disorders and their detrimental medical and social consequences.” So how many marijuana addicted Americans are there? According the NIH there are about a million of them! According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of Applied Studies, Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), there are actually 287,933. A considerably smaller number but still not insignificant… were it true.
The standard definition of addiction in the DSM IV is “the state of being psychologically and physiologically dependent on a drug”). Well according to SAMHSA of that 287,933 who listed marijuana dependence as the primary reason for admission to treatment 37% hadn’t used marijuana in the 30 days prior to their admission. Another 16 percent of those admitted said they’d only used three times or less in the month prior to their admission. Doesn’t really sound like these folks were particularly psychologically and physiologically dependent on marijuana.
So once again we ask “where are these marijuana addicts coming from?” SAMHSA statistics show 6 out of 10 people admitted to treatment for marijuana are refered to through the criminal justice system. They are given a choice … go to treatment or go to jail. SAMHSA’s report says “In 2007, the criminal justice system was the largest single source of referrals to the substance abuse treatment system. [T]he majority of these referrals were from parole and probation offices.”
So your tax dollars were spent, elected officials from Kentucky can get credit for creating jobs at AllTranz, (and probably contributions from AllTranz’s executives), NIDA gets credit for working to solve a growing problem which is, after all, what the National Institute of Health is supposed to do, so where is the harm?
For starters several thousand people have been forced to waste a substantial part of their lives going through “treatment” for a non-existent addiction. Most will also get criminal drug possession charges on their records following them for life, impeding their chances of finding jobs or money to go to school. The myth of marijuana addiction is reinforced as these inflated numbers go unquestioned by the media… so much for the President’s promise… “I’ll change the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.” The lies being propagated to preserve marijuana prohibition now rival those told to introduce it.
Another Inconvenient Truth
Politicians in democracies cannot make arbitrary decisions like dictators; they must appear to be responsive to their constituencies. Decisions must appear to be based on honored principles and sound economic and scientific rules. That is why, back in 1971 Great Britain put together something called the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. The function of this body was to give science-based advice to those in government who are responsible for regulating those drugs likely to be “misused.” This seemed to work pretty well until recently when the Council’s chairman, Professor David Nutt, was fired by the Home Secretary .
What did Professor Nutt say that caused his dismissal? In response to his firing the Professor wrote the following brief explanation of the Council’s function:
“All drugs are potentially harmful and many of the harms can be measured. We can use scientific methods to estimate these and produce a ranking,and compare our scores with their location in the Misuse of Drugs Act. Heroin and cocaine appear to be in the correct place (Class A), whereas Ecstasy (Class A) and cannabis do not (Class B).
The reason for making drugs illegal is to let society reduce harms by
punishing their sale and use. The purpose of having the ABC classes
is to scale penalties according to relative harms. Possession of a
class A drug for personal use can lead to seven years in prison, for
class B, it is five years and for class C, two years.
The classes are also important in educating the public about the
relative harms of drugs. So it is imperative that the classification
of drugs truly reflects their harms, otherwise injustices may occur
and the educational message be undermined. Scientific inquiry into
drug harms must also be honest and accurate so that the best quality
evidence is available to the experts and government. Legal drugs
such as alcohol and tobacco are as harmful as many illegal drugs and
currently score highly on our ranking list.”
So it is clear the Professor is not some sort of radical with regard to drugs. He does not favor legalization nor does he tout the miraculous benefits of one illegal drug or another. He simply is an advocate of truth in the process of assessing the relative dangers of different drugs. So exactly why was he fired?
The professor said smoking cannabis created only a “relatively small risk” of psychotic illness and said that taking ecstasy is no more dangerous than riding a horse. He also said that he disagreed with the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. “Gordon Brown makes completely irrational statements about cannabis being ‘lethal’, which it is not. I’m not prepared to mislead the public about the harmfulness of drugs like cannabis and ecstasy. I think most scientists will see this as an example of the Luddite attitude of governments towards science.”
He repeated his view that cannabis was “not that harmful” and that parents should be more worried about alcohol.
“The greatest concern to parents should be that their children do not
get completely off their heads with alcohol because it can kill
them … and it leads them to do things which are very dangerous,
such as to kill themselves or others in cars, get into fights, get
raped, and engage in other activities which they regret subsequently.
My view is that, if you want to reduce the harm to society from
drugs, alcohol is the drug to target at present.”
The future of the Drugs Advisory Council is now in question. Two members resigned over the weekend and statements from the members make it clear that a majority of the council have serious concerns about Professor Nutt’s dismissal and the future of the council.
I think it’s interesting how politicians pay lip-service to scientific opinion when asked to vote on something they feel may be unpopular with their constituency or may cause them to be criticized in an upcoming election. Unfortunately it seems referring a problem to a “Blue Ribbon Panel” or other outside board of experts is simply a stalling tactic. Nixon circular-filed the Schafer Commission Report when he didn’t like what it recommended. The Canadian Senate Committee on Illegal Drugs was ignored when it recommended legalizing and regulating them. Now the UK fires the head of its scientific advisory board because the science differed from the politics. If he’s around up there somewhere I’m sure Galileo is shaking his head lamenting just how little man has progressed over the centuries.
