Chronicle Online 3/29: Fire it Up

Fire it Up
The war on drugs is bloodier than ever, but researchers are taking common misconceptions to the task. And so the debate begins.

By Billy O'Keefe
Viewpoints/New Media Editor

Hey parents, guess what!? It looks like your kid is going to need a couple more years to complete his education. That graphic design student you call your son? He, like thousands of other college students, is changing his major to botany, folks. You see, now that a group of researchers told the entire world to smoke lots of pot (and how!), everybody wants to be a scientist, because they get ALL the girls now. As of now, researchers and scientists are the new rock stars.

Actually, you probably shouldn't worry. Despite what your crazy kid may be sayi (or wishfully thinking, anyway), scientists don't want everybody to go out and get stoned. That may seem obvious, but don't be so sure. A subject as gray as drugs, medicine and recreation could never wrap up so neatly.

As everybody and their dealer knows, a panel of experts from the the Institute of Medicine announced to the press their finding that marijuana possesses medical benefits for purpose of treatment, specifically among AIDS and cancer patients. In their call for further study on the drug's benefits, the panel announced conclusive results that marijuana effectively reduced nausea and vomiting and stimulated patients' appetite. And while it has yet to prove worthy in the treatment of migraines and movement diseases such as Parkinson's, marijuana has gained widespread approval as an effective remedy for pain.

In other words? Let's take these results, combine them with the fact that six states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon and Kansas) have approved either complete or medical legality of marijuana, and let's actually find out if the drug is indeed a boon to society instead of its worst enemy (as Bill Clinton and friends would like you to believe).

If someone ever had the intuition to find a correlation between couch potatoes and anti-drug advocates, their results would be staggering. As the tube portrays it, marijuana (or pot, for you dirty-mouthed turkeys out there) is nothing but the devil's own, an evil drug that turns nice, smart little Timmys into mean, stupid, ugly Jakes. Do you smoke pot? Well kiss school GOODBYE! You can also say "ta" to your perky, clean-living friends, because they'll stop hanging around once they see what a evil, violent rat you've become, thanks to your murderous drug habit. A job, eh? Fuggedaboutit! Jobs are for chumps; you've got gardening to do.

The downfall of these miniature lectures, which usually showcase good-looking teens acting psuedo-tough (as if their lame personalities are going to scare potential users off the drug), is that they leave no room for the opposition. Drugs are bad, bad, bad, and so ends the commercial, which occasionally precedes a beer ad featuring drunk beerbellies and their hot, possibly nearsighted girlfriends on the cleanest beach this side of Tiajuana. Anti-drug advocates dare not say anything in favor of the herb, for that might incite all those crazy viewers to (gasp!) come to their own conclusion.

Clinton and his drug hunters would have it no other way; unfortunately for them, however, science isn't playing along. Panelist John A. Benson cast the first stone when he stated that while marijuana does cause a loss of control over movement and while its use can cause disorientation, unpleasant feelings and dependency, this is hardly uncommon when it comes to patients and medicine. Said Benson: "Except for the harmful effects from smoking, the range of problems associated with marijuana is not out of line with those of substances used in approved medicines.

"From a medical standpoint, marijuana's effects are limited to symptom relief, not cures of disease, and are generally modest. For most symptoms, there are more effective drugs already on the market."

Who's got the score?

Calling the recent announcement a victory for pot advocates would be simplistic. On one hand, that's the understatement of the year; on the other hand... well, in case you were thinking of firing one up on the corner of State and Congress, don't get your hopes up just yet.

True, the Institute of Medicine's report probably gave the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and similar institutions a big push; perhaps down the road, the recent events will prove instrumental in the execution of some landmark reversal of fortune. But if the report has any ties to your friend getting stoned on his own terms, the researchers didn't mean it that way.

"Although the issue of whether or not to permit patients to smoke marijuana is an important one, we believe it is really only a short-term consideration," panelist Stanley Watson explained. "Marijuana's future as a medicine does not involve smoking. It involves exploiting the potential in cannabinoids such as THC, the key psychoactive ingredient of marijuana."

Cannabinoids? Psychoactive!? Cool words, sure, but they all amount to one thing: Scientists may want you to have your medicine, but you're a far cry from smoking anything legally besides those Camels in your back pocket. The plan here is to extract the drug's most potent and beneficial ingredients and release them to patients in pill form. For those who need immediate relief that a pill cannot always provide, an inhaler is also in the works. Thus, marijuana may find its place on society's good side, but pot has a much steeper hill to climb. And, in stressing the fruits of its use through methods other than smoking up, scientists may have actually made the path that much rockier for advocates of casual drug use. Of course, compensation could come if interest in the drug rises due to the story's airing, but this could produce either a listening ear or increased resistance from the government.

Confused? Good, you should be! Everyone is beating around the bush in some way or another, while outlets like MTV are on the story like cold on snow. Nobody knows exactly where to go with or what to make of the developments, simple as they are.

The mess of the excitement, however, is justifiable. Because while it's true that smoking pot can turn your life upside down, the television commercials that prey only on the ignorant miss an important step. The fact that big bad Jake from the commercial lost his job and got kicked out of school had nothing to do with the fact that he smoked pot, as implied. Jake's downfall was that he got caught.

According to NORML, one of a handful of pro-legal advocates who branded the "discovery" as anything but, American law enforcement racked up a mindblowing 695,200 arrests in 1997 (approximately one arrest for every 45 seconds that pass) for possession of marijuana; 87% of these arrests were for mere possession of the drug. The number of arrests of people over 21 for simple possession of alcohol (probation violations and like circumstances notwithstanding)? Zero, obviously. That amounts to approximately ZERO for every 45 seconds that pass.

In both cases, the drugs are recreational tools that ordinary Joes use and enjoy (as much as some would love to think that only dropouts and hippies fire up, they couldn't be more wrong). Both drugs — the term "drug" defined here as a substance other than food intended to affect the structure or function of the body — are likely to be addictive depending on an individual's use and genetics (among other factors). Both have the potential to be mixed with other, more threatening substances (pot with opium or any other smokable drug, alcohol with just about any dissolvable substance you can imagine) without the user's knowledge. Both can affect your ability to function, and either can kill you or someone else if you drive while under influence. Last but not least, both smell bloody awful on your breath. Anyone who's been to a concert can attest to that.

Still, while alcohol's hawked on television in every imaginable way, and while hard liquor ads dominate billboards, magazines and El trains everywhere, they share real estate with spots screaming bloody murder over the absolutely terrible things pot can do to your child. And while the news reports day in and day out on some drunk driving accident or another on every highway in America (before cutting to a Budweiser ad, of course), anchors counter such dreary news with victorious accounts of pot busts and the decline of drug use in high schools (yeah, right). The moral of the story is, as long as big business rules and national breweries can make the media say "cha-ching," casual pot smokers and distributors stand no chance.

It doesn't matter whether you like marijuana or not, and whether or not you want you, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your parents or your child smoking up is your choice (think cigarettes, and you get the idea). Regardless of your views, imagine if everyone caught with a 12-pack in hand was labeled a criminal. Imagine how many people you know would have to go to jail if alcohol was as taboo as pot.

You might be saying to yourself, "Well, stupid, if alcohol was illegal, I wouldn't drink it and neither would my friends and loved ones." Fine. Now turn that one around. If pot WAS legal, would you then smoke it? Would your friends and loved ones smoke it? Would the act of smoking up be any different if the law allowed it (which could happen someday)? How much of your moral code is based not on the law as provided for you, but on conclusions you yourself have reached?

Confused again? Good! That's the idea, so go with it. If it appears to you that this story has no ending, that's because it's only getting started. There's a lot of questions to answer and clues to uncover in the fight for or against the legalization of marijuana, and there's a whole lot that's wrong with the current method of practice. Now that science has temporarily contained the madness that is the "Drug War", it's time to educate ourselves and prevent such a farce from taking place in this country again.