The Changing Rationale of Marijuana Prohibition

At first, in the 1920s and 1930s, the idea that smoking marijuana caused people to become violent and insane supplied the rationale for the drug’s legal proscription. The 1928 book Dope: the Story of the Living Dead by William Randolph Hearst employee Winifred Black contained typical arguments concerning marijuana. On page 42 she wrote “the man under the influence of Hasheesh catches up the knife and runs through the streets hacking and killing everyone he meets.” Black went on to say “you can grow enough Marihuana in a window box to drive the whole population of the United States stark, staring, raving mad” and she was believed.

This line of argument favoring cannabis prohibition ran into serious trouble when New York City Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia decided to form a committee of experts to study the effects of marijuana use. The body issued a report in 1944 which authoritatively disavowed the notion that cannabis use caused violent behavior or insanity. The government then began to argue that though marijuana use itself might not be so bad the real problem lay in the fact that the drug caused its users to crave more powerful and dangerous drugs, such as cocaine or heroin. Thus the “stepping stone” or “gateway” theory became the primary pillar of support for the illegality of marijuana. They made this case despite the fact that Harry Anslinger, long time head of the Bureau of Narcotics and the nation’s leading authority on drug use, specifically denied the validity of the theory in 1937 during testimony before Congress.

The “stepping stone” or “gateway” theory lost much of its power in the 1960s when a dramatic rise in the number of cannabis users failed to engender a similar rise in the users of the drugs it was supposed to lead to. However, supporters of continuing the ban on marijuana quickly came up with a new reason, amotivational syndrome. They asserted that marijuana crippled its consumers by causing them to become apathetic and uninterested in anything other than getting high. Pot smokers, like the Irish, Blacks, Italians, and Mexicans had been before them, were labeled as being lazy and worthless. Yet, when the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse released their first report Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding in 1972 they maintained that "The most notable statement that can be made about the vast majority of marihuana users - experimenters and intermittent users - is that they are essentially indistinguishable from their non-marihuana using peers by any fundamental criterion other than their marihuana use."

At the present time the principle arguments for marijuana prohibition consist of the residue of the previously discredited reasons as well as a frantic search for some kind of medical justification. This quest to prove cannabis harmful to health has reached a new level of absurdity with a study highlighted on the website World Science. Referring to researchers at Tel Aviv University studying marijuana the article reports that “In hefty doses, they argue, its active ingredient may protect the brain against various types of damage, whereas in tiny doses, harmful effects would come through.” Yosef Sarne and his colleagues reached their conclusion, published in the November 6th issue of the research journal Neuroscience Letters, the World Science piece states, by injecting ”mice with THC doses that they said were some 1,000 times lower than what humans would get from smoking a joint, taking into account body weight. The treatment significantly worsened the rodents’ performance on maze tests three weeks later, compared to untreated mice, they wrote.”

This study has three major problems that are often found in research claiming to prove that marijuana consumption is harmful to human beings. First they did not test the effects of marijuana instead they studied the effects of THC and the two are not the same thing. There are hundreds of little understood active ingredients in smoked cannabis and the Israeli scientists ignored this fact and therefore failed to take into account any influence these might have had on the outcome. Secondly, they tested rodents not people and again there is no real equivalency with this method. Lastly, consumption of marijuana that is the same as a thousandth of a normal joint simply is not going to happen in real life. Even one hit would be in the neighborhood of a tenth to a twentieth of a dose.

These researchers have told us absolutely nothing about cannabis use here and they revealed their bias in a previous work featured in Medical Hypotheses (2004) 63, 187-192 when they contended that ”Cannabinoids are the most widely used drugs of abuse” thereby equating use with abuse. Studies touting the negative effects of marijuana hardly ever are about real people using real marijuana in real situations and this one is no exception.

Hat Tip Ian Goddard

Cross Posted on the Trebach Report