Smoked Out

In a November 2002 letter to the nation's prosecutors, the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) didn't bother beating around the proverbial bush. "No drug matches the threat posed by marijuana," began the letter from Scott Burns, deputy director for state and local affairs.

The truth of the matter, as reiterated throughout that letter in terse language, was that marijuana was an addictive and dangerous drug linked to violent behavior on the part of users. To make matters worse, a subtle but powerful threat was identified as exacerbating the problem: well-financed and deceptive campaigns to normalize and ultimately legalize the use of marijuana.

Prosecutors were instructed to keep in mind the crucial importance of their role in fighting this threat of normalization in going after traffickers and dealers, and to tell the truth about marijuana to their communities: "The truth is that marijuana legalization would be a nightmare in America."

Yet these truths about marijuana hearken back to the absurdity of the Reefer Madness era of the 1930s, when marijuana use was linked to sexual promiscuity and violence, to say nothing of the imagined hordes of Mexicans and Blacks waiting to lure white women into pot-induced sinful acts.

Marijuana has been classified as a Schedule I drug since 1970, which means that for 35 long years, pot has been viewed by the federal government as a substance with no medicinal value and a high potential for abuse, more so than cocaine, for instance, which is a Schedule II drug. In many ways, modern-day government hysteria about the dangers of marijuana is far more distorted and far-fetched than the scare tactics that were employed under Harry J. Anslinger's reign at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

That's because we know a great deal more about marijuana today than we did in the '30s, particularly in the form of medical studies about the very real existence of cannabinoid receptors in human brains and the benefits of THC to chronic pain sufferers, as well as the fact that urban decriminalization results in neither more common nor more chronic use of marijuana.*

As far as we've been able to trace it back, cannabis has been used by humans for at least 4,500 years. There has never been a single documented overdose from any form of consumption of the plant. (It's actually not technically possible for a human being to die from smoking marijuana, as Eric Schlosser points out in his book, Reefer Madness: a user would have to smoke 100 pounds a minute for 15 minutes to take a fatal dose.) On the other hand, people can and do die from drinking too much, smoking too much crack, shooting up unexpectedly pure heroin, and snorting or popping too much OxyContin.

With all of this knowledge available to the federal government, the extremist position of the ONDCP isn't just nonsensical, it actually sounds more and more like the product of truly paranoid, delusional thinking.

Whatever the reasons behind this kind of thinking, we do know that the ONDCP and successive presidential administrations since Nixon's reign have been deadly serious about supporting this agenda, leaving no room for debate, much less any form of dissent. The extreme extent to which pot (and pot smokers) have been criminalized over the last few decades has had the effect of skewing what marijuana really is and isn't capable of doing to a person.

That's something that any of the roughly 30,000 prisoners doing time for marijuana-related charges can surely attest to, as documented by the report, Efficacy and Impact: The Criminal Justice Response to Marijuana Policy in the U.S., released last month from the Justice Policy Institute. Thirty thousand may not seem like a hell of a lot when we've got 2.1 million folks behind bars from coast to coast, but that's 10,000 more people than the far more pot-friendly Netherlands has in its entire prison system.

According to that report, the U.S. drug control budget grew from $65 million in 1969 to nearly $19.2 billion in 2003, and we are now spending nearly 300 times more on drug control than just 35 years ago. Much of that money has been poured into law enforcement and incarceration, but a significant chunk of the ONDCP's funding has also gone toward media advertising, to the tune of $4.2 billion since 1997. According to research cited in the JPI report, most of those advertising dollars went toward anti-marijuana advertisements.